It’s no understatement to say that Jaws (1975) is one of the greatest movies of all time. After a notoriously troubled production and a giant shark that wouldn’t work, a young Steven Spielberg made the best of a bad situation by shooting the majority of his aquatic horror film from the as-yet-unseen creature’s point of view. In a directorial choice still studied to this day, it’s not until the final act that we see the notorious great white shark tormenting a trio of New England men. The result is a singular filmgoing experience that continues to scare swimmers out of the water.
In the wake of unprecedented box office success, a slew of copycats were released. Films like Mako: The Jaws Of Death (1976), Piranha (1978), and Blood Beach (1981), not to mention three outright Jaws sequels, attempted to cash in on the film’s surprising appeal. Some iterations, like Grizzly (1976) and Claws (1977), even made their way onto dry land.
For twenty years, we saw retreads and spoofs of Peter Benchley’s original source material: a killer shark or similar beast terrorizes scientists, fishermen, and ignorant bathers, leading to an explosive showdown on the stormy seas. By the mid-90s, this formula had begun to run dry as audiences tired of the same basic story. Until, that is, a surprising contender brought the shark horror subgenre splashing back to life.
Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea opens with a familiar scene. Two couples on a catamaran are attacked by a massive shark that seems intent on destroying their boat and eating them once they fall in the water. But this massacre is stopped by a rugged stranger who manages to subdue the fish at the last possible moment. Carter (Thomas Jane) is a stoic shark wrangler aboard a deep-sea research facility studying sharks to eradicate Alzheimer’s Disease.
But their test subjects are no ordinary fish. In order to harvest usable sample sizes, Dr. McAlester (Saffron Burrows) has genetically modified three gigantic Mako sharks to drastically increase the size of their brains. This results in a team of super intelligent predators who will do anything to escape their enclosures and kill their captors one by one.
This admittedly ridiculous premise shouldn’t work as well as it does, but the veteran director fully commits with a series of spectacular action set pieces. The maniacal Makos use a life flight helicopter to destroy the facility’s radio tower, feign sleep to sabotage an underwater lab, and stalk their human prey through corridors and kitchens by systematically flooding the station.
In one of the film’s most shocking moments, wealthy financier Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson) is snatched off dry land by one of the fish that launches itself out of the water, bites the proselytizing man in half, then drags his mangled body back into its tank. This stunning death — which takes out one of the film’s marquee stars — set a new bar for shark attack sequences and action horror films in general.
While the science of Deep Blue Sea is flimsy at best — sharks do, in fact, get cancer — the idea of genetically mutated killer fish would push the floundering subgenre in a new direction while transitioning away from the Man vs. Nature model. After all, these animals aren’t innocent fish simply trying to eat and make baby sharks. They are scheming killers who work together to execute their sinister plan. But they were created by a scientist who uses her altruistic intentions to dramatically change the natural order.
Most shark horror of the 21st century would veer away from rogue anomalies targeting unsuspecting swimmers in favor of punishing humans who corrupt their environments.
Shark Horror’s B-Movie Monster Mash Era
After the surprise success of Harlin’s splashy blockbuster, other creators jumped on the genetic shark train. With Jaws rip-offs having run their course, attention turned toward more schlocky creature features, most stemming from one particular source. The Sci-Fi Channel (later Syfy) debuted in 1992 as an arm of the USA Network. The fledgling outlet was originally conceived as a haven for long-running genre series and classic monster movies, but a 2001 initiative increased the focus on original films. Usually made for under $2 million dollars, these B-movies were often reverse-engineered by title, tossing around audacious creature matchups then piecing together a shoestring plot.
Though early titles ran the gamut of sci-fi topics, we can see the influence of Deep Blue Sea in releases throughout the aughts and teens. Python (2000) and Sabertooth (2002) both involve genetically mutated predators, while Deep Shock (2003) concerns sea monsters released from a deep ocean trench. As the trend began to establish itself, directors leaned into absurdity with films like Boa vs. Python (2004), Frankenfish (2004), and Hammerhead (2005), which follows a father researching his son’s cancer treatments when he accidentally merges his own DNA with that of the curious oblong shark. Jack Perez’s schlock spectacular Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009) not only presents the titular monsters as mortal enemies frozen in time, but sees the prehistoric fish bite the Golden Gate Bridge in half and pull a commercial jetliner out of the sky.
This pattern reached surprising ubiquity with Anthony C. Ferrante’s bombastic crowd-pleaser Sharknado (2013). When an approaching hurricane manages to sweep up an unprecedented number of schooling sharks, the aptly named Fin (Ian Ziering) must save his family from torrents of the bloodthirsty man-eaters, somehow flying through the air. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Fin allows a great white to swallow him whole only to cut his way free — while rescuing his previously eaten ex-wife — with a whirring chainsaw blade.
Capturing the attention of early Twitter users, reactions to the film went viral, transforming this unapologetic gorefest into a cultural phenomenon. Sharknado has become a catchall description for gleefully ridiculous storytelling while spanning five sequels, complete with cheeky subtitles like Oh Hell No! and The 4th Awakens.
Shark Week’s Arrival Chums the Waters of Fact and Fiction
While these ridiculous B-movies spiraled out of control, another channel was raking in ratings by embracing science over spectacle. The first Shark Week hit the Discovery Channel in 1988 with ten hours of original programming. Largely dedicated to ocean conservation and reversing popular misconceptions about marine wildlife, the modest block reached a record number of viewers and quickly became a yearly tradition. The summer event vastly expanded in 2000 — one year after the release of Deep Blue Sea — by pulling in celebrity hosts and shark-themed installments of popular shows like Dirty Jobs and MythBusters.
Discovery’s summer juggernaut made its way into mainstream cinema with the dressed-up B-movie Shark Night. David R. Ellis’ teen slasher meets aquatic horror film follows a group of raucous college students terrorized by various man-eating fish on a weekend getaway to Lake Pontchartrain. Inspired by Shark Week and Faces of Death (1978), a group of sadistic content creators has outfitted a collection of exotic sharks with cameras and set them loose in the lake, intent on selling homemade footage of real attacks.
Like a deep sea version of Jurassic Park (1993), Ellis highlights a smorgasbord of killer fish, each with their own specialties. From bull sharks, threshers, and hammerheads to the little-known cookiecutter shark, which leaves round puncture wounds in its victims’ skin, the film is a veritable who’s who for shark superfans, of course concluding with a special appearance by the dreaded great white.
Though Carcharodon carcharias has become the shark world’s final boss, the deadly fish is dwarfed by another aquatic predator. Fossils prove the existence of a giant Mackerel shark known as Megalodon that ruled the seas 20 million years ago. Now extinct, rumors persist about these massive carnivores lurking in the ocean’s uncharted depths. Shark Week 2013 lit a fire under these conspiracies with Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives, a faux documentary claiming to prove the existence of the ancient fish, along with a government conspiracy to hide this proof from a vulnerable public.
Still the most watched show in Shark Week history, the faux documentary received swift backlash from the scientific community and viewers duped by its verisimilitude. While disclaimers were added to subsequent broadcasts, a Discovery Channel poll taken after the event found that 70% of viewers were convinced that Megalodon continues to roam the seas.
Five years later, this extinct apex predator would reign supreme over aquatic horror with Jon Turteltaub’s blockbuster The Meg. Adapted from Steve Alten’s 1997 novel, the film stars Jason Statham as a beleaguered rescue diver forced to save a team of scientists from a Megalodon that has somehow escaped through a channel in the Mariana Trench. Explained away with bare-bones science, Turteltaub delivers an action-packed crowd-pleaser by remixing the subgenre’s greatest hits while exponentially increasing the size of the shark. Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench would harken back to Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus by pitting a plethora of jaw-dropping monsters against a multitude of giant sharks.
Based on a True Story Trends in Shark Horror
While B-movie fans were delighting in unrealistic creature fun, indie studios turned to the archives for more harrowing inspiration. Chris Kentis based his 2003 shocker Open Water on the 1998 disappearance of American scuba-divers Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who were left off the coast of northern Australia by an egregiously botched head count. Likely inspired by the low-fi success of The Blair Witch Project (1999), Kentis attempts to recreate the missing couple’s final days. His intimate, handheld style brings us into the ocean with the doomed couple as they helplessly float for excruciating days while unseen sharks swim ever closer.
Andrew Traucki’s The Reef is based on a similarly haunting true story. The 2010 indie gem follows a group of friends yachting through Australia’s Coral Sea when their boat is capsized by an underwater rock. Forced to choose between the sinking vessel and an extended swim to an unseen island, the survivors are stalked by a great white shark as they navigate the rocky current. Both films represent genre evolution as swimmers are left without a way to escape an inevitable watery death. After decades of screams to “get out of the water,” modern shark horror leaves its characters with no other choice.
Fictionalized versions of this endurance test format made their way to larger studios in a pair of similarly structured films, trapping empowered young women in the shark’s habitat. Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2016 film The Shallows follows Nancy (Blake Lively), a solitary surfer who manages to overcome an exploratory bite, but finds herself trapped on a narrow rock while a shark constantly circles the lagoon. With only a wounded seagull for company, she must outwit the massive predator and make it back to dry land before succumbing to her injuries and dehydration. Lively carries this grisly survival film that eventually trades verisimilitude for a stunning showdown with the apex predator.
The following year, Johannes Roberts would add new fear to this equation by dismantling a long-held safety net. 47 Meters Down follows sisters Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt), whose ramshackle shark cage disconnects from its boat and plummets to the ocean floor. With only the oxygen left in their tanks, they must find a way back up to the surface while dodging the sharks lured in by their guide. Playing with the darkness of the open sea, Roberts wrings out the horror of thalassophobia (fear of large bodies of open water) with this nightmarish reframing of the shark’s deadly world.
Man Versus Nature in Aquatic Horror’s Latest Evolution
Though the aforementioned trends are here to stay, modern variations tend to pit human characters against shark-adjacent human enemies. Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals (2025) forces a kidnapped surfer to overcome a sadistic shark enthusiast who dangles his victims over the water, then films the wild fish tearing each one apart. Kiah Roache-Turner’s Beast of War (2025) sees a group of Australian soldiers hunted by a great white shark when their carrier is sunk by enemy fire. Both films present sharks as neutral yet deadly extensions of the ocean itself while interrogating man’s capacity for violence and the human instinct to survive.
Renny Harlin’s Deep Water showcases a similar exploration of humanity. When a careless passenger on a commercial jet causes a catastrophic midair explosion, pilots Ben (Aaron Eckhart) and Rich (Ben Kingsley) try an emergency landing on a shark-infested coral reef. Scattered among the rapidly sinking wreckage, a handful of survivors must band together to escape the vicious feeding frenzy. With no true antagonists, Harlin nonetheless presents a series of jaw-dropping disaster scenes that nod to his 1999 shark spectacular while maintaining focus on a surprisingly touching message of unexpected bravery.
Twenty-seven years after reinvigorating the shark horror subgenre, Harlin’s newest entry may signal a new iteration of these visceral films. With renewed focus on oceanic conservation and rising threats of global warming, most films position sharks as a pure force of nature fighting back against a human threat. While sharks are simply doing what they do, it’s people who have transgressed by entering or abusing their territory. And only those who respect the natural world will live to swim another day.
