‘Grizzly Night’ Trailer Released for Fact-Based Bear Attack Movie Coming in January
“Grizzly Night,” which is slated for release on January 30, will be an animal-attack horror thriller centered around a truly terrifying carnivoran. Grizzly bears are very rarely in the habit of attacking humans (and most of those that do attack are just trying to protect their cubs), but any human who is attacked by such a huge predator is in a lot of trouble indeed. Moreover, as its trailer ostentatiously highlights, the horrifying, grisly events of this movie have the backing (if not the heft) of historical fact.
An Ursine Spin on Any Old Horror Trailer
“Grizzly Night”‘s trailer, which dropped on December 15, is crafted in a way that would best be described as efficient but uninspired. A generically tense score (dramatic beats, a sudden cessation just before a jump-scare, etc.) plays over clips set almost exclusively at night (or in the late evening).
Somebody limps out of the woods as fast as he can while an unseen growling bear charges after him; another victim is dragged screaming away in her sleeping bag; park rangers arrive at a campsite to find the wreckage and carnage and radio in news of the attack. Then, we see a separate campsite beset by a roaring grizzly, followed by a ranger’s announcement that “We got a missing girl. We think it was a second bear attack.” This is a “grizzly night” indeed.
Naturally, every bear seen in these clips appears singularly monstrous, but the trailer also goes out of its way to highlight the strangeness of such aggression in a way that underscores what a horrible shock these attacks are to the park rangers. “Grizzlies never kill,” says one ranger as he and his companions watch a sheet-wrapped body being carried to a helicopter, “so I guess we thought they never would.”
While it’s not clear what kind of special effects the $3 million (per IMDb) movie was working with, the grizzly bears look extremely convincing. One peculiar aspect of “Grizzly Night”‘s trailer is how each bear, when it appears, is always the only creature occupying a given shot. This brings to mind the making of the 1976 “Jaws” rip-off “Grizzly,” for which the filmmakers used a real live Kodiak bear that for obvious safety reasons could not be made to interact with the human actors. This limitation had a clunky effect on the chasing and mauling scenes; we may hope that the makers of “Grizzly Night” have found a way to showcase graceful shot composition as well as an authentic-looking animal.
A True, 1960s Story of Two Bear Attacks in One Night
In any case, “Grizzly Night” carries a different kind of authenticity, one that should make it an uncommonly disturbing animal-attack flick. It is based on the true story of one terrible August night that was deemed the “Night of the Grizzlies” (the title of a 1969 non-fiction novel). On August 13 of 1967, there were two bear attacks in two separate camping regions of Montana’s Glacier National Park.
As is brought up in the trailer, these were the first fatal bear attacks in the park’s then-57-year history (though not the last; since then, there’ve been nine such tragedies, the most recent of which was in 1998). The two seemingly unrelated incidents possessed a kind of stranger-than-fiction symmetry: while one involved a lone couple and the other a larger group of campers, each attack claimed the life of just one 19-year-old woman – Julie Helgeson and Michele Koons, respectively.
Conclusion – Impactful or Tasteless?
The status of the “Night of the Grizzlies” as a particularly brutal wakeup call to Glacier National Park’s management makes it rife with potential for thematic potency. Will the real-life basis of “Grizzly Night” make it a particularly effective entry in the grand tradition of animal-attack stories that remind us how mercilessly nature punishes human arrogance? Or will it succumb to cheap horror tropes and go down as a reproachably exploitative “Based on a True Story” thriller? Judging from its trailer, it could go either way.
