Tue., Dec. 4, 2012

Tuesday Video: Trailer for “The Bay,” an eco-horror film that opens in Spokane this Friday

True story: In the summer of 1997, fish in the Chesapeake Bay were discovered with bleeding lesions. They had fallen victim to a toxic microbe called Pfiesteria piscicida. It apparently grew in warm, polluted waterways. It also infected humans.

Director Barry Levinson is not known for horror films but the Baltimore native often uses the area as a backdrop for his stories. He sat down with Take Part to explain his decision to make the genre leap with "The Bay", a scary thriller based on the decay of Chesapeake Bay. Note: The film will begin a run in Spokane at the Magic Lantern on Friday, December 7th.

TakePart: It’s probably fair to say that the Maryland Tourism Board is not going to be promoting the film, given that your mutating parasites essentially kill off a small community on a sunny holiday weekend.

Barry Levinson: What is the option, to not talk about the fact that the Chesapeake is 40 percent dead, to put it under the rug, let it continue to decline? A lot of this stuff has been hidden for a long time and at some point you have to say we’re going to deal with this, not ignore it. It won’t just go away.

There is nothing that’s going on the Chesapeake Bay that can’t be corrected. It’s not an unknown disease, we know all of the contributing factors, so how do we aggressively try and fix it?

It’s 40 percent dead now. We don’t want it to become 55 or 60 percent dead because then the economics will turn against you. The chicken industry of course says that cleaning it up will cost jobs, but even with that we still have time to find answers.

As a filmmaker, I have the obligation to entertain an audience. But I can also pose questions. The facts are what make this movie more captivating at a certain level.

TakePart: In real life similar isopods have grown to two-and-a-half feet long and tried to chew through a submarine, thinking it was a whale carcass.

Barry Levinson: That’s the thing, 85 percent of the stuff in the film is factual. That isopods have moved from the Pacific to the Atlantic is true, though they haven’t moved into the Chesapeake...yet. That we are throwing the whole male/female relationship in the marine world out of whack by polluting it, is true. The water filtration system in this country is broken, that is true. There are all kinds of things happening in the bay due to chemicals dumped into it so that we are playing with a toxic soup.

Read the full story HERE.

Posted Dec. 4, 2012, 7 a.m.