When the producers first brought Mike P. Nelson a giant snake movie, he turned it down. “There is a lot of stigma behind giant snake movies,” he told us. So they asked him what he would do instead, and his answer started with a list of movies.
I kind of gave him my comps for movies that I’d like to try to live up to.
He said.
We sat down with Mike P. Nelson to talk about Beware Boiúna, and those comps came up again and again. Some are creature features. One isn’t even close.
Beware Boiúna (2026)
Directed by Mike P. Nelson · 104 min · R
Beware Boiúna drops a group of doctors into the Amazon, right where an ancient giant snake has decided she's done sharing her home. Mike P. Nelson directs Kiana Madeira, Jessica Rothe, and Logan Marshall-Green in a creature feature rooted in local folklore and shot on location in Colombia, with real explosions, real stunts, and nobody guaranteed to make it out.
If you’re looking for movies like Beware Boiúna to watch before or after it hits theatres on October 2, this is where Mike himself would point you.
No spoilers here, just the films and why they mattered to him.
1. Sorcerer (1977)
This is the big one. William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is one of Mike’s favourite movies, and it isn’t a creature feature at all. He took the structure from it.
It’s one movie at the beginning and one movie at the end.
He explained.
He walked us through it. You meet a bunch of characters and learn what they’re dealing with. You see their environment, “which is not pleasant,” set against a backdrop of civil unrest and oil, where the locals are fighting against the man. Then, suddenly, the rest of the movie is those guys transporting nitroglycerin through the jungle, and one wrong move means they’re dead.
“And I was like, that’s the movie,” Mike said.
Except for explosives, it’s a giant snake. And except for people on the lam, it’s a bunch of really good doctors.
You can feel it in Beware Boiúna. The film opens with illegal gold mining taking over the jungle, a different kind of civil unrest, before turning into something else. Halfway through our screening, Arthur caught himself thinking;
Wait a minute. This is a different movie now.
That’s the Sorcerer effect, and honestly, we were pleasantly surprised by it.
Sorcerer also came up when we talked about shooting on location. Mike mentioned the horror stories from productions like Sorcerer (and anything Werner Herzog went through) shooting in the jungle. He went in knowing things would go wrong and planned to adapt when they did. They did, too: a flood forced him to reshoot the opening siege from a completely different angle.
2. King Kong (1933)
If Sorcerer is the blueprint, the original King Kong is the heart. Mike grew up with it.
It’s honestly one of the reasons why I did this movie.
He told us. “I love the original King Kong, the ’33 version.”
The reason is one specific scene. Kong fights what Mike called “an almost Titanoboa-like snake” in a cave, and Kong takes it out by strangling it. That scene clearly stuck with him, because when we asked which movie monster Boiúna could take on, he went straight back to it.
“I also feel like our snake is bigger,” he said.
And I have a feeling queen snake might give King Kong a run for his money.
Meaghan pointed out that if Boiúna got wrapped around Kong’s neck, things would get tricky fast. Arthur’s response:
Let’s bring those IPs together.
The connection to Titanoboa matters here too. Mike’s version of Boiúna ties the Amazon folklore to that real prehistoric snake found in Colombia, which makes the Kong cave fight feel a lot less like fantasy and a lot more like a rematch.
3. Jaws (1975)
Jaws is the first name that comes up when you ask how to make a monster scary, and Mike went there too. He grouped it with the films he called “the masters,” and what he studied was “how they built up the suspense of eventually showing the creature.”
He was just as interested in the opposite:
The creativity of when they didn’t show the creature.
That’s the whole lesson of Jaws (which spent a lot of its runtime keeping its shark out of sight). A monster you’re waiting for is scarier than one you’re staring at.
It also lines up with Mike’s main goal for Beware Boiúna.
Could I make a giant snake movie that actually feels scary and has some level of dread to it?
He asked himself. “Because I can’t say that I’ve seen one before that does that.” Dread is the Jaws playbook, and he wanted to bring it into the jungle.
Not Sure What to Watch?
Answer 4 questions, get curated horror movies to watch.
4. Alien (1979)
Alien was the first title Mike named when he listed the masters, and you can see why. It’s a story about a group of professionals stuck somewhere hostile with a creature picking them off, and it never tells you who’s going to make it.
That’s exactly the feeling Meaghan described after our screening. “You never quite know who’s safe,” she said.
There’s no specific instance in which you’re like, oh, I’m sure this person will be fine.
Swap a spaceship crew for a team of doctors on a medical mission, and you’re not far off.
Mike even put it into words during our fill-in-the-blank game. When Meaghan asked him to finish “Every creature feature needs at least one…,” he answered:
A character who doesn’t deserve to die.
Alien built a legacy on that idea, and Beware Boiúna follows it.
5. Jurassic Park (1993)
Jurassic Park made Mike’s list of masters for the same reason as the others: suspense, and knowing when to hold the creature back. But it also connects to the way he actually built his snake on screen.
Jurassic Park mixed practical effects with digital ones, and Mike follows a similar rule.
If I’m gonna have a VFX snake in my movie, there has to be something real that goes along with that VFX snake.
He told us. So when a stuntman gets yanked 40 feet into the air, that’s a real stunt team with real foliage blasting out. When the lumber camp collapses, that’s real TNT going off while the actors run down the ramp. When someone gets chomped, they blew up the floor with explosives.
Anything that we could do physically to make it feel real and reactive to everybody on set, we did it.
Mike said. “Did it safely, but we did it.” Meaghan pointed out how much that helps the actors, and you can see it in their reactions.
6. Tremors (1990)
Mike tossed Tremors in “for that matter,” almost as an afterthought, but we think it might be the most fitting comparison on the list. It’s a giant-creature movie that knows how to have fun without forgetting to be scary.
That balance is something Mike talked about when we brought up the Beware Boiúna marketing, which showed the snake swallowing viral internet animals. He called it a misdirect.
Yes, you are going to have some fun, but what kind of fun? Is it also gonna be a little mean?
(Spoiler-free answer: yes. “We’re not gonna spare cute little animals.“)
Meaghan summed it up at the end of our chat. Beware Boiúna is a fun creature feature that also delivers a relevant message, and a lot of people will walk in expecting a giant snake movie.
They’ll get one; there’s plenty of snake. If you like your monster movies with a sense of humour and a mean streak, Tremors is the warm-up, and Beware Boiúna is the main event.