“Chiller wanted some Glass Eye productions,” Fessenden tells Fango, “and I went in and I pitched them a couple of movies. They said, ‘Those sound great, and we love your production model’—which is low-budget but classy—and they said, ‘We do have this script that we’d like you to consider for your company.’ It was a very spare story about six kids who end up in a rowboat on a lake with a giant fish attacking them. And I said, ‘You know what? I’d like to do this one,’ just because I’m a huge JAWS fan, and I love the challenge of working on the water and trying to create something very contained, like Hitchcock’s LIFEBOAT or any number of other classic examples of a single-location scary movie. So we just went down the rabbit hole and started to put it together, and [Glass Eye’s] Peter Phok came on as a producer.”

BENEATH stars Danny Zovatto, Bonnie Dennison (from Glass Eye’s STAKE LAND), Chris Conroy, Jonny Orsini, Griffin Newman and Mackenzie Rosman, along with veteran actor Mark Margolis (whose credits range from Stuart Gordon’s THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM to Darren Aronofsky’s BLACK SWAN). The original screenplay was written by Tony Daniel and Brian D. Smith, and Fessenden explains, “I made some slight revisions; there was a whole backstory involved that would cut away from the lake, and I felt the important thing was to be contained and just stay on that boat—that’s the entire dilemma. I made it an even simpler story, and I hope that’ll pay off. My model is to make a movie like DUEL, which is one of my favorite made-for-TV movies—Spielberg working with a quick shoot. I just love that kind of filmmaking.”

more at Fangoria