PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Don’t mess with the “Mother of the Waters.”
In Beware Boiúna, the latest directorial release from Mike P. Nelson (our interview for Silent Night, Deadly Night), horror fuses with indigenous folklore when a medical mission team in the Amazon unwittingly encounters Boiúna — a colossal ancient snake that isn’t so mythological anymore. Instead of caring for locals like they intended, the team must fight for their own survival. Unfortunately for some of them, Boiúna decides who lives…and who dies.
Ahead of the film’s theatrical release on Oct. 2, PopHorror spoke with Nelson, as well as its stars Kiana Madeira (Fear Street trilogy, 2021) and Jessica Rothe (Happy Death Day 2017), about the creativity behind Boiúna and her slithering attacks and the incredible — yet challenging — experience of shooting on-site in the Amazonian jungle.
Mike P. Nelson
PopHorror: You’ve spent a lot of time in horror at this point, from Wrong Turn to Silent Night, Deadly Night. But this film gives you a completely different playground with the Amazon, the indigenous folklore, this enormous creature at the center of it. What did Beware Boiúna let you do as a horror filmmaker that you didn’t get to explore in those past films?
Mike P. Nelson: We got to go to the Amazon! We got to shoot on this incredible boat while it was moving in the middle of the Amazon River with amazing actors. That’s the bucket list right there — just being able to traverse in the jungle, and to shoot there and to be present in the environment that is actually in the story. What you feel, what you see in the movie was what we all sort of went through to make it. It was a treat, a real pleasure. And I’ll tell you this — I know that in our film, the Amazon becomes a pretty scary place, but I would go back in a second. It was just such an incredible experience.
PopHorror: That’s amazing! Going off of that, there’s one sequence where Kiana’s character is trapped in this muddy kind of swamp, struggling to pull herself out while this giant snake is moving right past her, dragging a dead body along with it. It feels super claustrophobic despite being in this huge outdoor environment. What was that day like on set and what went into bringing that whole scene together?
Mike P. Nelson: Not easy. But the team that we had, our Columbian production team and the crew, they worked nonstop and were just all in to make this happen. That pit was something that we found, this tributary in the jungle. Water would come down from the hills and fill this area and we happened to find it in dry season when there wasn’t any water going through it. And so we dug this hole and filled it full of soil and collagen, and really made this mucky mixture. Kiana, her skin was glowing after because literally she just got to sit in collagen all day. We put our camera man in the mud with her, just right down next to her, inches away from her face so we could be right there with her and what she was experiencing. Then we created a pretty terrifying experience for her. We dragged this large piece of tube behind her so that she could feel the presence of this thing and the muck moving. It created such an amazing kind of classic experience in that moment. It was a whole day in that mud pit, non-stop. It was crazy. But it was a really good day.
PopHorror: Boiúna comes from existing folklore rather than being invented from scratch for this horror movie. What was most important to you about honoring that mythology while still creating your own version for the film?
Mike P. Nelson: A lot of it was talking to locals, doing research on where the stories come from. It was so interesting to me hearing how many different variations of this story there are from there. For us, we had this tribe that we actually made for the movie that Kiana’s character had lived with when she was younger. It was really trying to take bits and pieces from all these different stories from the indigenous that are out there right now and put together something for our own tribe and the way that they see Boiúna, or the “Mother of the Waters.” That’s where we came up with the mythology of “she who decides who lives and dies.” And also it was blending that mystery of this mythical creature with real science. This is a snake that’s based on something that actually existed 50 million years ago. This is Titanoboa, which they actually found in 2009. It’s insane. It’s like, where does myth and storytelling and reality merge and which is which? That mystery, to me, was one of the most fun aspects of creating this creature.
Kiana Madeira and Jessica Rothe
PopHorror: Kiana, your character is incredibly capable in this environment. She can hold her own against pretty much everything from the men pursuing her to Boiúna herself. But so much of what drives her is really emotional — her connection to her brother, her roots. What was important to you in building her beyond just making her this physical, badass character?
Kiana Madeira: Just what you said, yes, she’s badass and she was raised in the jungle, but she is carrying so much trauma. Her parents were killed in the jungle in the very place that then welcomed her after her parents were killed. And it was really important to Mike to make her very culturally specific. I am a mixed race woman and I wanted to make Lena that as well. Culturally, we made it so that one parent was Columbian and one parent was Brazilian as they both intersect in the jungle, and this feeling that she doesn’t belong and no one understands her except her brother. It’s them against the world. Because they have the same background and the same experiences, she was convinced that no one else would understand. I think just seeing her kind of shed that belief throughout the story and allow herself to be embraced by the environment that embraced her, it was so beautiful on paper. This is the heart, to me, of the character. She’s super badass, super cool, super capable, but also very vulnerable and very scared inside. I love characters that have that complexity and they’re not just one thing.
Jessica Rothe: Hard outer shell, gooey inside.
Kiana Madeira: Yeah!
PopHorror: Jessica, without getting into spoilers, your character has a particularly terrifying encounter with Boiúna that gets very physical. What was that sequence like to shoot and how much of what you were reacting to in the movie was physically there with you on set?
Jessica Rothe: It was incredible to shoot it. Those scenes in that sequence, everything was shot at night. We were in night shoots and there’s a particular madness that comes with those that kind of fuels horror films. I think because you go a little kooky. But it also opens, in me at least, a deeper and darker emotional pit that you really go wild. We were lucky that on this one, even though the physical snake was not there, our director and the special effects team had a lot of tricks up their sleeves. They were rustling the trees, they were pulling a giant HVAC black tube through the undergrowth so that we could watch something move. When she’s charging the boat, they have a piece of wood that’s being dragged so that there’s a trail and we know exactly what we are supposed to focus on. All of those things made it really easy. Plus, just being in the Amazon and the terror of being there at night and all of the noises, there was some imagination at work. But it really wasn’t that hard to do because it was pretty terrifying. And we just had an incredible crew, everything from special effects to stunts to hair and makeup, all of them really lifted us up and made all of those scenes possible.
PopHorror: The environment of the Amazon in itself almost feels like another character. You’re dealing with the jungle, the water, the mud and everything that comes with shooting in those conditions. Was there a particular day or moment where either of you thought, “Okay, this is one of the wildest sets I’ve ever been on”?
Jessica Rothe: I think day one.
Kiana Madeira: Yeah! Day one for sure. There was a day on set where it started to rain and we were like, “We can wait out the rain.” And then the thunder and lightning was getting closer and closer and they were like, “Okay, I think we’re just going to call it. We’re just going to end early today.” Before we knew it, by the time we made it back to base camp where the trailers were, they were like, “We actually cannot leave. The bridge that we took to get to set is under water.” The water rose so fast in the jungle from the rain that we had to sleep in our trailers for hours. People were huddling under any shelter they possibly could and waiting in cars. Then I remember getting a knock on the trailer door, it was sunrise, and they were like, “Alright, the lows are low enough, we gotta go, we gotta go!” We piled into pickup trucks and the beds of pickup trucks and went over the bridge, and the water was just slightly below it. It was wild. That was the day where we were like, “This is so crazy.”
Jessica Rothe: It was so crazy. But it was also really exhilarating and fun. I think it fed the story, fed the performances, fed just the way that this film was shot. So, we’re really lucky.
Thanks for speaking with us, Mike, Kiana and Jessica! Beware Boiúna is in theaters nationwide Oct. 2.
