“I’ve got this saying, ‘If you don’t care, you don’t scare,’” says Dangerous Animals director Sean Byrne, whose new horror film aims to shift the fear away from sharks and toward the real monster in the water: men. Sharks outlived dinosaurs, but will they outlive us? This year marks the 50th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and the last time anyone felt safe in the ocean, despite shark fatalities averaging in the single digits worldwide. Yet here I am, frequently afraid of a shark emerging from the drain in an Austin public pool.
“There’s a natural terror that comes from us more than them,” Byrne tells me. “But it doesn’t stop it being terrifying.” That tension is at the heart of shark horror in cinema, and raises the question: Do horror directors have a responsibility when it comes to the myths they create or sustain? A group of marine scientists thought so, prompting them to pen an open letter to Columbia Pictures voicing their concern over the potential impact of the depiction of sharks in The Shallows, marketed as “Jaws for a new generation.”
After the initial wave of Jaws rip-offs, the subgenre went quiet for a bit until 1999’s Deep Blue Sea brought sharks back to the mainstream, kicking off a new era of CGI-fueled Sharksploitation. “I’m not saying this is better than Jaws, but I am saying Jaws didn’t have LL Cool J and his song ‘Deepest Bluest (Shark’s Fin),” says Todd. No matter the era, shark movies aren’t here to win Oscars (although Jaws did bring home three), they’re here to deliver a thrilling and often bloody hilarious movie-watching experience.
With hundreds of shark movies out there today, we’ve narrowed it down to eighteen blood-in-the-water essentials, plus two documentaries to remind us that sharks aren’t villains, they just have really great smiles.
