Alexandre Aja

Aja made High Tension in France, then took his survival horror, and its blood, to Hollywood. A family is stranded in the desert on the way to an anniversary in his remake of The Hills Have Eyes. A swimmer drives into a Category 5 hurricane to find her father in Crawl, and a woman wakes in a sealed cryogenic pod with her oxygen running out in Oxygen. Each premise fits in a sentence, and you spend the whole film inside it.

Signature

• One place and one threat: a farmhouse, a house in a hurricane, a coffin-sized pod.
• New French Extremity violence carried into American studio films.
• Creature features played for fun (Piranha 3D, Crawl).
• Practical gore effects over digital ones.