Some of the best horror movies combine feelings like claustrophobia with a story about monstrous creatures to create a terrifying final product. After all, the horror of being trapped or not knowing who to trust is just as scary as being chased by a monster. Ridley Scott’s Alien did this well, with its characters trapped on a small spaceship with a monster who has just burst from a man’s chest. John Carpenter’s The Thing arguably did it even better, trading in the confines of space for a research station in the Antarctic. And this time, rather than having to face a xenomorph, anyone could be carrying the monster inside them. 2020’s Irish horror film, Sea Fever, operates similarly to both these horror classics; but it’s the reality of the year it was released that helped make it such an uncomfortable watch.

‘Sea Fever’ Is Confined to a Trawler in the Ocean

Sea Fever was written and directed by Irish filmmaker Neasa Hardiman in her feature film debut. The entire film is set on a fishing trawler with just a handful of people on board. The ship is led by Freya (Connie Nielsen) and her husband Gerard (Dougray Scott), but Siobhan (Hermoine Corfield) is our protagonist. She’s a college student going after her PhD and is brought on board to study the fauna in the ocean. Wanting to catch more fish, Gerard steers the trawler into a zone they’re not allowed in (doesn’t he know he’s in a horror movie?!) and everything starts to go wrong. The problems begin when a barnacle is found attached to a wall in the ship, but this is no ordinary barnacle — it’s the end of a tentacle. When Siobhan dives into the water to investigate, she finds a multi-armed creature holding onto the ship and refusing to let go. That’s bad enough, but inside the slime it releases are a plethora of microscopic parasites; get them inside you and you’re a goner.

‘Sea Fever’ Thrives on Our Fear of the Unknown

The best horror movies unsettle us by showing little and tapping into the fear of the unknown. We might know what a xenomorph looks like now, but in that original Alien, it’s barely seen. It’s the silence of dark corners that terrifies us more than any scenes of blood and guts. In The Thing, the alien could be in anyone, and with it taking so many wild shapes, we don’t know exactly how it operates or what its true form is. Sea Fever works in the same way. This isn’t Jaws, with the trawler under attack by a monster. There’s no rampaging, sharp-toothed underwater creature trying to pull the boat down and eat everyone. Honestly, it doesn’t even look that scary when you see the creature. It feels like something that could exist in the depths and be seen as beautiful if not for what it’s capable of. It’s the parasites that the creature releases, of not being able to see them or to know who might be infected, that are the real source of fear.

Related ‘The Thing’ Prequel Was Originally Much More Terrifying The often overlooked prequel to John Carpenter’s classic film almost looked very different.

‘Sea Fever’ Came Out During the Early Days of the COVID Pandemic
Image via Signature Entertainment

Sea Fever was released on digital on April 24, 2020, during a time of very high anxiety, as these were the very early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stuck in our homes with nowhere to go, many of us turned to movies as a way to detach and take our minds off of the global crisis. If you watched Sea Fever, however, your fear only increased. The movie is about a fast-moving parasitic illness moving through a boat. The only way to test for it is to shine a light in someone’s eye and look for a parasite moving within. That’s reminiscent of COVID, an illness that spread so fast across the world, and where so much anxiety came from not knowing who had it.

Selfishness in Sea Fever also takes over, with several of the characters not wanting to quarantine. They don’t care if they are infected or if they can spread it; they just want to get the hell off of this claustrophobic ship. That’s, sadly, how COVID went for many too, with some not wanting to stay at home and follow the rules, no matter the consequences, because being confined to our homes was so unbearable. Without meaning to be, Sea Fever was the ideal horror film for the time it was created.

Sea Fever is available to watch on Shudder in the U.S.

Watch on Shudder

Release Date September 5, 2019 Director Neasa Hardiman Runtime 94 minutes Main Genre Sci-Fi Horror Thriller Writers Neasa Hardiman Expand