We sat down with Mike P. Nelson a few months back for a Silent Night, Deadly Night interview episode and spoke a bit about his upcoming creature feature movie. The thing that stuck with us was how Beware Boiuna was shot.
Most giant creature features get made somewhere comfortable. A controlled set, a green screen, a lunch truck twenty feet away. Nelson did not do that, and the way he described it, the location did not just show up in the movie. It changed what the movie is.
The first trailer is finally here, and the October 2 release is locked. So here is what he told us.
Here is the interview episode in question, fast-forwarded to the part where Mike P. Nelson talks about Beware Boiúna, if you want to listen to the full conversation.
Mike P. Nelson Shot Beware Boiúna on the Actual Amazon River
We actually went down to Colombia, stayed in Leticia, got on a boat, shot on the actual Amazon River, shot in the jungle with all the snakes and the spiders in the, like, 98-degree weather with 100% humidity. Like, everybody’s just sweating. Everybody’s dirty.
No soundstage jungle. No Georgia standing in for South America. Nelson and his crew went to Leticia, got on boats, and filmed in the place the movie is about. He kept circling back to Sorcerer, which he called one of his favorite movies, and to producer Jeremy Bolt (Resident Evil, Event Horizon), who apparently loves it just as much.
I don’t wanna, like, speak out of turn here, but it kinda feels like we’re in it, man. You’re kinda cut off, and you’re out in this jungle area, and you’re running around.
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Naturally, that comes with problems.
There was plenty of infrastructure that you had to figure out and how you were gonna do it.
He said.
And if there were sometimes things that you just, well, we can’t do that. Okay. Yeah. Well, how do we do this? And then it’s like figuring it out. It’s always a puzzle. And yeah, a lot of safety things.
The location bled into the movie itself. Nelson told us they worked with local non-actors in real villages, and that the film leans hard into where it was made:
Half the film is subtitled. Like, we are there, and it is a very, very Spanish-speaking movie.
His pitch for what the film actually is?
It’s a fun survival film, and it’s got a lot of heart, and it’s, yeah, it’s dirty. It’s sweaty. It’s raw.
And if you are wondering how it sits next to the other giant snake movie in the room, he answered that one directly.
It’s a good answer to what, like, you know, we just got Anaconda (2025), and it’s a good [movie], [Boiuna is] very much the opposite answer to that movie. So whereas Anaconda (2025) was a lot of fun and kind of a ride, ours is, we’ll just say it’s a little bit more grim. But but in a really great way. We still carry the heart through.
He also called it “a heavy movie,” and said flat out: “Never in a million years did I think I’d do a giant snake movie.”
When Does Beware Boiúna Come Out?
When we spoke, Nelson could only tell us Lionsgate was targeting “late quarter three, early quarter four” for a wide domestic release. That is now locked: Beware Boiúna hits US theaters October 2, 2026, and Lionsgate dropped the first trailer and poster today. He also confirmed to us that he teamed back up with Wrong Turn writer Alan McElroy, with Robert Kulzer producing.
It stars Logan Marshall-Green, Jessica Rothe, and Kiana Madeira as medical workers heading down the Amazon.