Amid a historic year for scary movies, we have a surprise last-minute contender in the mix for 2026’s best horror villain: a giant squid.
The main antagonist of the survival thriller “Whalefall” (in theaters now) is a dastardly sort, with a penchant for surprise attacks, a weapon gnarlier than Jason Voorhees’ machete, and unnerving tentacles akin to a Lovecraftian menace. But what makes a harrowing scene between this giant squid and the film’s star Austin Abrams that much freakier is that this thing exists in real life.
“The squid is like a perfect horror creation,” says “Whalefall” director Brian Duffield.
In the movie, Jay Gardiner (Abrams) returns home after the death of his estranged seafaring father Mitt (Josh Brolin). Jay grabs some scuba
gear and goes looking for his dad’s remains in the deep water but gets caught in the middle of a sperm whale hunting a giant squid for his next meal. Jay and the squid both get swallowed and end up in the whale’s belly.
The film cuts to a flashback of an intense fight between Jay and his dad, so as a viewer, “you kind of forget about the squid for a moment,” Duffield says. When the action returns to the whale’s stomach, Jay looks up, sees the squid perched above him and it attacks. “This awful thing where it's there the whole time and he's oblivious to it.”
Duffield worked with scientists to accurately portray the insides of the whale, but the giant squid was a different kind of challenge since there’s been “really limited video footage,” the director says. “A lot of our research into them were corpses, and it was fun to work backward from an animal that we predominantly know because it’s dead and give it life. Not dissimilar from a dinosaur.”
One thing he noticed about the giant squid corpses was the creature's parrot-like beak, “this terrific scythe kind of thing” that’s just one aspect of the cephalopod’s “alien” nature. And in the scene, Duffield puts the audience close up in the action, with the beak snapping wildly at Jay’s face while large tentacles flail around him in the claustrophobic chaos.
It’s a white-knuckle moment that gets an audience's adrenaline level up but “just an absolute nightmare" to make, Duffield acknowledges.
Because “Whalefall” filmed in chronological order, the squid scene was one of Abrams' earliest (and hairiest) challenges. “It was the hardest stuff that we ever did, really,” the actor says. “You're getting thrown up and down in this tiny space. That ended up taking us a little bit of extra time just because we were figuring out how the hell to do it.”
Sometimes the 15-foot-tall squid model was forcefully tossed at Abrams. Other times he was covered in tentacles – some practical, others added later as computer-generated limbs. Mortars were also set off in the water to simulate tentacles thrashing in the water. “Austin could barely hear us when he’s in the stomach without explosions, let alone when things are exploding around him,” Duffield recalls.
As for the squid’s fearsome beak, one crew member worked it like the business end of an arcade claw machine in Abrams’ face, while the actor would factor his air tank into the fight. “Austin has an oxygen tube that he has to protect over himself, because if the beak severs an oxygen tube, he’s dead,” Duffield says. “Having these moments where Austin would have to choose, like ‘Bite me here but don't bite my tube,’ was always fun.”
The physicality of “Whalefall” concluded Abrams’ extremely distressing movie year, filming this and the recent horror flick “Resident Evil” back to back. “You just keep going,” Abrams says of the two shoots. “It needs to be done, and anything that is tough, thankfully, with these parts, you can just put that into it.”
He and everyone else were definitely glad to be rid of the giant squid. “I remember when it wrapped, it was like the most obnoxious actor left the set,” Duffield says. “All of the crew was like, ‘We're free!’ It made the whole rest of the shoot lovely.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: You're really not ready for the 'Whalefall' giant squid scene
