Actor Austin Abrams will soon grace the screen in a new live-action Resident Evil movie, but what could be worse than dealing with Weapons director Zach Cregger’s take on zombies? A hungry whale, as Abrams will also star in Whalefall, a new film out in October. Packaging several phobias into one terrifying ordeal, Whalefall sees Abram’s character of Jay Gardiner swallowed up whole by a sperm whale, and you can see the trailer for it below–again, it’s really unsettling stuff.
“Following the death of his father (Josh Brolin), Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) goes diving off the central Coast of California in search of his remains, but is swallowed by a massive sperm whale,” the plot synopsis for Whalefall reads. “While trapped inside its belly with only one hour of oxygen left, Jay comes to realize that the hard-earned lessons his father imparted may be the key to his escape.”
As if being stuck in a sperm whale’s stomach wasn’t bad enough, Abram’s character also has to contend with a giant squid that the oceanic mammal swallowed for lunch, sticky tentacles and all. While the plot sounds like it was designed to appeal to vore fetishists, there is a layer of authenticity to it. Sperm whales are the only members of the species with throats big enough to potentially swallow a human being, and between powerful muscular contractions and their stomach acid, the chances of survival would be extremely slim.
While it’s highly unlikely that it would happen in real life, it’s not entirely impossible, either. As for other whale species, their throats are much smaller in comparison and incapable of sucking down an unlucky diver. There have been reports in the past of people being engulfed by whales before being spat out of their mouths, with recent examples being South African dive tour operator Rainer Schimpf in 2019–who was scooped up headfirst into a Bryde’s whale for a few seconds–and Michael Packard, who was caught inside the mouth of a feeding humpback whale in 2021.
While Whalefall won’t be out until October 28, you can see Abrams really is in way over his head when he makes a stop in Raccoon City next month. Resident Evil stars the Euphoria actor as a medical courier who wanders into the middle of the Raccoon City Incident, and he was almost killed by a 150-pound blood bag while filming an intense scene in the movie. You can see it for yourself when Resident Evil hits theaters on September 18.
