After having made his mark as one of the most versatile and dedicated genre filmmakers around with his reboot of fan favorite Wrong Turn and his recent remake of the slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night, director and screenwriter Mike P. Nelson returns with BEWARE BOIÚNA, his most intense undertaking yet, crafting the screenplay with Alan B. McElroy and Tony Giglio.
If you set out on an endeavor to make a big adventure spectacle about a mythic giant snake in the middle of the South American rain forest, you couldn’t find a better suited producer as the driving force than Jeremy Bolt. With a career spanning more than 30 years of taking audiences into zombie infested habitats, on monster hunts and death races and into the lost lands, you’d be hard pressed to find a film producer who is more invested in the thrills and pleasures of pure genre filmmaking than the 60-year-old Brit. In fact, BEWARE BOIÚNA is a project that started with him.
“I became involved because I read an article in about 2017 about the remains of this giant snake that had been found in a mine in Colombia,“ remembers Bolt who was filming in South Africa at the time, which, as he says with a wink, “is a country full of snakes,” and continues, “And I thought, how wonderful to make a real adventure in Colombia about a giant snake. And that was the beginning.”
Bolt partnered up with his longtime collaborator Robert Kulzer who runs the Los Angeles office of German powerhouse Constantin Film. He was intrigued by the prospect of doing this giant snake movie.
“I knew it was going to be a challenge. I wanted to make it grounded and make it feel very real and set it amongst current events,” says director Mike P. Nelson. He wanted to put the story upon a backdrop of heightened tension. The Amazon with all the illegal gold mining wasn’t only the perfect backdrop, but a lead character in the film. The more I researched the more I realized how important it was to tell this story. When our main characters get put into that environment, there’s already strife, there’s already this conflict that’s going on. The stakes are high.”
The director had a clear vision what he wanted his film to look and feel like. “I wanted to go in with this shot-from-the-hip, almost docu kind of style. We’re shooting in this really harsh environment. And I wanted that to come across. You can feel the environment on everybody. As beautiful as it is, it wasn’t always comfortable.” It all came down to setting the story in a grounded world that exists now with a creature that did technically exist 40, 50 million years ago. It was the apex predator on the planet in this area of the world. “The question was ‘what if something like that still existed‘”, Nelson says. “Is there truth to the lore of Boiúna? And then you tell a human, grounded story in which our characters come face to face with this gigantic protector of the jungle. It becomes very clear, not all of them belong there…”
The jungle is a harsh and extreme environment, it will somehow find that weak spot and it will exploit it. “You have to have all of your wits about you and your instincts, 100% focused on survival in the jungle,” says producer Jeremy Bolt. And director Nelson elaborates, “The jungle was amazing because of its harshness, but also its beauty. There’s nothing like being on Amazon River on a boat, in the jungle, shooting a film. It was an incredible experience. It’s an amazing place, but it can also be very dangerous. It deserves respect. I feel that the experience we had there translates directly into the movie we made.”
Shooting on location in the jungle, Director Mike P. Nelson wanted his characters to be dirty, sweaty, he didn’t want anything to feel too clean. The biggest challenge was the snake, of course. “We had to make sure it’s integrated into the environments that it’s believable”, Bolt opines. “It’s a 100 foot long, 3.5ft wide reptile. It is a giant anaconda. We used the green anaconda, which can grow up to 30ft as a base for the
design, so it is essentially a 100-foot anaconda.”
The production was working with a Colombian visual effects company called Folks based in Bogota, working closely with their designers. “I don’t think a snake has ever been done really well. So that was our main directive. It was our plan to do the best visual effects snake ever, and we did it with a Colombian company. Sometimes working in Britain or America or Canada, where there’s a lot of production, crews
do not always bring that level of passion.”
A team of young doctors embarks on a humanitarian mission to the Amazon rainforest, full of enthusiasm to help those in need, but each of them with their own agenda. However, not everyone reacts kindly to their arrival, and their visit awakens an ancient predator: the Boiúna. This mythical creature, which hunts both on land and in water, returns to defend its territory. In the midst of the dense jungle, a merciless struggle for survival ensues, in which the boundaries between hunter and prey, hero and villain become increasingly blurred.
Mike P. Nelson (Director, Screenplay, Executive Producer)
MIKE P. NELSON has made a name for himself as one of the most inventive and distinctive genre filmmakers right now. Ever since his debut feature, THE DOMESTICS in 2018, his take on all things horror has brought him a long way. Whether it’s writing or directing, Mike’s focus remains creating stylized, character driven work. Sure he may like the dark, weird, and gritty nature of storytelling, but underneath all that cool midnight madness is something warm we call heart. In 2021 Nelson underlined his unique take on telling scary stories with his astonishingly effective reboot of the WRONG TURN series, followed by episodes in the anthology movie V/HS/85 in 2023. Most recently his 2025 remake of SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT found fans in cinemas all around the world.
Alan B. McElroy (Screenplay)
ALAN B. McELROY was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Hawken School in Gates Mills, Ohio. McElroy studied psychology at Boston University, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and its European campus in Luxembourg with the aim of becoming a writer. Shortly after graduating and getting married, he wrote his first screenplay based on instructions in Writer’s Digest magazine. McElroy moved to Los Angeles with his wife Kymm and a screenplay in tow and was selected as one of 30 applicants for the Columbia Pictures
screenwriting program. After this experience, he found an agent and began working full-time as a screenwriter. Alan B. McElroy made his directorial debut with “Under the Car” as part of the Chanticleer
Discovery Program. His filmography as a screenwriter includes SPAWN, HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS, RAPID FIRE, as well as the comic series Curse of the Spawn, the HBO animated series Spawn, Layover as writer/director, The Marine, Tekken, The Perfect Guy, Fractured, and both the original WRONG TURN from 2003 and its reboot from 2021, directed by Mike P. Nelson. McElroy has also written series pilots for networks such as NBC, Fox Television Studios and Syfy Channel. He has recently worked on various series projects including The Vampire Diaries, The Night Shift, Sacred Lies and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. He was part of the writing team and co-executive producer of Star Trek: Discovery, and a writer and executive producer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
Tony Giglio (Screenplay)
Tony Giglio’s career began with a letter to his hero, director Sam Raimi. Raimi responded—and hired Tony as a production assistant on THE QUICK & THE DEAD. From there, Tony learned filmmaking on the sets of major productions including HEAT, THE ROCK, LIAR LIAR and DANTE’S PEAK. In 2026, Tony adds two new chapters to his career: CIPHER, a psychological thriller he wrote and directed, and BEWARE BOIÚNA, an action-adventure he scripted for Constantin Film and Lionsgate. Tony wrote and directed Universal’s reboot DOOM: ANNIHILATION, helmed S.W.A.T.: UNDER SIEGE for Original Film, and directed EXTRACTION, Sony Crackle’s first original feature. His screenwriting credits include DEATH RACE 2,
DEATH RACE: INFERNO, and DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY. His directing work ranges from the cult horror film TIMBER FALLS to the action-thriller CHAOS. Tony has also served as 2nd Unit Director on iconic genre productions including “The Walking Dead“ and RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE. Tony is a member of the Directors Guild of America and Writers Guild of America and holds a B.A. from Seton Hall University. A U.S., Italian, and Canadian citizen.
