Barry Levinson on his environmental horror movie ‘The Bay’ – 80 percent of this is true

Barry Levinson had a streak of critically praised, wildly popular movies in the ’80s and ’90s, from “Diner” to “Wag the Dog” to “Rain Man,” for which he won an Oscar for best director. For his latest movie, the Baltimore native has taken a decidedly different tack.

“The Bay” is a horror flick about an ecological plague that devastates a sleepy berg on the Chesapeake Bay and is then covered up. Using footage from various videos, iPhone FaceTime conversations, and security cameras, one of the town’s few survivors tries to piece together how the town’s Fourth of July celebration turned into a gory mass panic when one person after another developed horrific skin rashes that prove fatal. The culprit, it turns out, is a fish parasite called an isopod that, thanks to all the toxins dumped into the bay — piles of chicken poo, nuclear waste, etc. — has started snacking on humans. Think “Cloverfield” meets “Contagion.”