Jeff Wadlow On Shark Horror ‘The Devil’s Mouth’: “It’s the Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done” [Interview]

Filmmaker Jeff Wadlow first caught the attention of horror fans everywhere with his game-of-lies slasher, Cry Wolf (2005). Since then, he’s helmed multiple Blumhouse projects like Truth or Dare, Fantasy Island, and Imaginary. Other notable works include Kick-Ass 2, Never Back Down, and Are You Afraid of the Dark?. This July, Wadlow turns his attention to the sharksploitation genre with The Devil’s Mouth.

A bit of a blend between The Descent and 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, the film follows “five friends who explore The Devil’s Mouth cave system in Thailand for one last adventure before life in the real world begins. But they soon discover that something is hunting them under the water…fast, silent, and deadly. In the suffocating darkness, trust erodes, panic spreads, and every wrong turn becomes a fight for survival.”

Horror maven Kathryn Newton (Abigail, Ready or Not 2, Freaky, Lisa Frankenstein) and Lana Condor (Pretty Lethal) star in the film.

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Wadlow to discuss what made him want to dive into a sharksploitation genre that boomed after Jaws and never stopped swimming.

“It’s so primal,” said the filmmaker. “When you have a shot like in our movie, where in one frame, you see these characters clinging to a slippery rock wall, and you see a shark circling below them. The people are in the frame, and the fin is in the frame. The shark is obscured by the water, but you understand that that fin means there’s something under there that wants to end them. You have this primal survival instinct. It’s real. You can feel it. It stresses you out. And I think that’s why the subgenre continues.”