“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”
– Vincent van Gogh
When we gaze at the crashing waves, it is akin to staring into a smoldering fire or up at the night sky. We engage with something elemental, integral to our own existence. Whether we look up at space or down into the ocean depths, we end up staring into ourselves. We are literally made of water and stardust. Aquatic and underwater horror as a subgenre combines our most important evolutionary emotion with our most crucial element of survival. Fear pushed us out of danger, and water enabled us to stay there.
Plus, sometimes we just want to watch someone ride a Jet Ski out of an exploding cruiseliner.
This is an entirely subjective ranking of the most important aquatic horror films based on a proprietary and tequila-fueled algorithm that weighs not just filmic essentiality but also the crucial “fun factor,” which you will see weighs quite heavily indeed. This list is hopelessly personal and self-consciously wary of the tyrannical judgements of any op-ed that tries to empirically limit the joy of others. If I have missed or grossly overestimated something, feel free to cut me off a big slice of humble pie.
Ah, 1989. What a year to be a fan of submerged horror. It was largely quantity over quality, but still—DeepStar Six, Leviathan, The Rift, Lords of the Deep, The Evil Below, The Abyss—this will not be the last time the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Nine is featured on this list (although the best of these films—James Cameron’s visually stunning The Abyss—can’t truly be entertained as a horror film). The rest of the lot comfortably occupies B-movie territory, and DeepStar Six certainly qualifies as such.
Director Sean S. Cunningham also directed the first Friday the 13th and produced several of the others in that series, but DeepStar Six was destined for late-80s obscurity. Its plot is familiar: a deep sea nuclear base cracks open the crust of the earth and unleashes a subterranean monster, in this case designed mostly by Chris Walas, best known for his work on The Fly and Gremlins. The film doesn’t quite know what to do with itself for parts of the midsection, but eventually all hell breaks loose, brought about just as much (if not more) by gross human error than by any giant crustacean.
Lewis Teague’s Alligator is not the only film on this list that makes no pretense as to its filmic inspiration. Its formula—an oversized apex predator hunted down by some combination of law enforcement, scientist and hunter—was established most famously in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. No film has exerted as much influence on this list as that 1975 hit, and John Sayles’ self-aware script for Alligator does not seem to mind the comparisons.
Sometime in the late ‘60s, a baby alligator is flushed down a toilet in a Middle America city. Over the next 12 years, it grows to a gargantuan size by feeding on the corpses of stolen pets, discarded in the sewers after being used in illegal scientific experiments. The plot is really just a pretense for disaster, but there is an undercurrent of anti-capitalist sentiment that seems to denounce the exploitative actions of immoral human enterprise. It’s a tad ironic, considering that director Lewis Teague learned from the fast-paced philosophy of B-movie legend Roger Corman, who perfected and taught a provocative and exploitative brand of independent filmmaking. But it works: the film’s oddball sense of humor and predictable mayhem make it a staple in the giant reptile subgenre.
Stubbled tough guy Jason Statham has yet to meet a baddie he can’t beat, but The Meg presents him with quite literally his largest adversary yet. This subgenre proves again and again that humans never learn to not mess with the earth’s submerged crust, a bad idea on a good day and an even worse one when exploring the abyssal Marianas Trench. Statham’s character quickly establishes himself as a tragic badass haunted by past tragedy, called out of his self-imposed and beer-soaked exile in Thailand to save the day and fulfill his redemption arc.
The overall tone and subsequent marketing campaign took a notably comic angle—it’s a nautical horror comedy with plenty of cheeky dialogue and instantly recognizable character archetypes. This is not necessarily a bad thing, although it probably confounded fans of the book which I gather had a somewhat more serious tone. Director Jon Turteltaub has worked extensively with Disney, and he brings his mainstream, predictable-yet-satisfying genre tropes to The Meg. Is it cheesy, predictable, and dumb? Sure. Does it entertain? You bet. Treat it like a PG-13 Disney theme park ride and you won’t be disappointed.
I have already said that 1989 was a heady year to be alive for fans of B-quality aquatic horror. You could say that Leviathan is to A Bug’s Life what DeepStar Six is to Antz, a comparison no one wanted or asked for. DeepStar Six and Leviathan were released mere months apart, and their overarching plots are nearly identical: a team of deep sea miners discover a mysterious organism at the bottom of the ocean before being picked off one by one.
Leviathan takes place in 2027, and it’s genuinely amusing to see what people in the late ‘80s thought the future would look like. Another way it dates itself is in its gender relations: Daniel Stern plays an incorrigible creep, and nearly every line of his dialogue is a gross assault on one of the two women, behavior which is winked at by the script as something mildly naughty but ultimately harmless. But he does, as they say, get his comeuppance. The studio of legendary makeup and VFX wizard Stan Winston designed the repulsive mutating creature, and there is overall an undeniable B-level enjoyment in the vein of more mature films like Alien and The Thing.
“Deepest, bluest, my hat is like a shark’s fin,” said American poet LL Cool J as a throwback to his 1987 track “I’m Bad,” in what has to be the wettest hip hop music video ever. My favorite thing about Renny Harlin’s ‘99 shark thriller is LL’s Preacher character surviving an entire horror movie while Black, based on tenacity and sheer charisma. The original script predictably killed him off early, but he was so damn likable that they rewrote the script to keep him around.
Make no mistake, this film is absurd from top to bottom. I think of Finnish director Renny Harlin as a somewhat less compelling Stephen Sommers, but his films are undeniably Loud and Fun. The VFX team actually built an impressive and convincingly terrifying animatronic shark, but they supplemented these practical effects with tragically short-lived CGI, making for a wildly uneven visual experience. Regardless, the entertainment value is there: the explosive pyrotechnics, the bipolar special effects, the fun hip hop soundtrack, Thomas Jane’s inability to run anywhere without falling down, Samuel L. Jackson’s iconic death scene—there is more than enough going on to earn a spot in aquatic history.
When it comes to the many derivations of Spielberg’s Jaws, the original Piranha is the biggest fish in a small pond. Director Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins) is proficient in a kind of digestible, pulpy thriller—in this case he could not have found a better pairing than Executive Producer Roger Corman, who has been referred to as the “King of Schlock,” a title he bears with some mild objection. Corman’s vast body of work (and to a lesser extent, Dante’s) succeeds not in the longevity of emotional impact but in an immediate gratification for violence, titillation, and playful genre tropes.
Corman openly acknowledges that Piranha is an “homage” to Jaws, and Universal Pictures even considered suing to prevent its release; they pulled back after Spielberg himself saw the film and called it “the best of the Jaws rip-offs.” Despite several production issues, the silly and self-aware horror comedy made the most of its $600,000 budget and hatched several sequels of its own.
When I saw Open Water in theaters in 2003 I thought it was amateurish, silly, and excruciatingly boring. This was no lukewarm dislike: this was the pure and confident hatred of a 17 year-old boy with a little experience and a lot of opinion. Rewatching it 17 years later, I can understand why a less-patient me wasn’t thrilled: by definition, it actually is amateurish. It was produced for a mere $120,000 and premiered at Sundance before being bought by Lionsgate for $2.5 million. There is an undeniably raw quality to the whole production, and the audio-video quality simply does not have the level of professional gloss of any of the other films on this list.
That said, you might argue that this home video quality adds to the overall effect, like a self-shot vacation video gone horribly, unfixably wrong. The plot itself is an absolute worst-case scenario for divers (the creators are Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, husband and wife and avid divers); due to a head-counting mistake, a husband and wife are abandoned by their boat while scuba diving in the Caribbean. As the hours tick by we experience with them the gradual and intensifying waves of confusion, disbelief, horror and despair—for this reason, the pacing moves at a crawl. Open Water is an effective slow burn of naturalistic nautical horror, with one of the bleakest endings in the genre.
H.P. Lovecraft was practically unknown throughout his life, and he never did succeed in paying the bills with his writing. He wrote thousands of letters and his catalogue of stories was published in a variety of amateur journals and pulp magazines. He died where he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, destitute and convinced of his literary obscurity. Posthumously, his gothic universe and Cthulhu Mythos has been embraced and built-upon in every branch of popular culture. His impact on literature, film, television, music and video games is significant.
Dagon was inspired by a short story written in 1917, and it was the first to really introduce elements of his famous Cthulhu Mythos. However, the plot of this film is moreso adapted from Lovecraft’s novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth: when a young couple becomes stranded in the soggy Spanish fishing town of Imboca, they discover a miserable cult of cursed inhabitants in debt to an ancient god who—wouldn’t you know it—demands sacrifice. Dagon starts off a bit shaky but picks up steam as it goes along, and its second half proves to be impressively weird and gruesome.
The newest film on this list echoes late ‘80s films like DeepStar Six and Leviathan while adding obvious references to Alice in Wonderland, Alien, and H.P. Lovecraft. And it’s clear that a lot has changed in visual effects in the past 30 or so years; the set design and visual effects update a well-established underwater formula for the 21st century. Underwater satisfies the most fundamental appeal of such a niche subgenre: the awful and brain-tingling sensation of existence at the bottom of the ocean, with all the weight and pressure and darkness which makes human life there such an aberration.
A blonde and close-cropped Kristen Stewart anchors the film with a gritty and stoic emotional dimension, Vincent Cassel adds a certain veteran presence, and T.J. Miller is, well, T.J. Miller. Although his smartass wisecracks come across as a bit discordant against the backdrop of terrifying abyssal destruction, I did find myself missing him after his unfortunate end. Underwater never quite ascends to be something profoundly innovative, but it is a welcome addition to a small and nerdy deep sea genre.
Pandemic films like Contagion have enjoyed renewed interest in the midst of the worldwide pandemic, and there is a similar level of extra-cinematic intrigue in revisiting Barry Levinson’s The Bay. In it, a small coastal town on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay suffers a fast-moving outbreak of mysterious origins during their annual Fourth of July Crab Festival. All of this is communicated after the fact in found footage style, the individual pieces and wider impact of the story coming together through a variety of personal recordings and local news coverage.
There are times when the film’s constant dedication to convincing us of its own faux-documentary format is a tad overwrought, but when The Bay is not getting in its own way it provides some genuinely chilling moments and an atmosphere of stomach-turning dread. The plot was inspired by actual research into polluted American estuaries (the subject of a Frontline documentary called Poisoned Waters) and if anything, this film’s message is even more urgent than it was 8 years ago. A deadly combination of industrial and governmental malpractice is causing wide-scale environmental disaster across the globe, and the amount of subsequent human and animal suffering is only accelerating.
One year before the release of The Mummy, Buena Vista dropped a box office dud called Deep Rising, also directed by Stephen Sommers. It is just one of two of his films that failed to turn a profit, and for this reason it has been largely lost in the obscure depths of ‘90s monster movies. Critics didn’t help either; Roger Ebert called it an “Alien clone with a fresh paint job,” and included it on his dreaded “Most Hated” list. Rest In Peace, Roger, but one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Treat Williams plays a cocky, enterprising captain in a role clearly written for Harrison Ford (who turned down the part); his catchphrase is an exasperated “Now what?!” He transports a group of hard-nosed mercenaries into the middle of the South Pacific to rob the most expensive luxury cruiseliner ever made, just to find that they’ve been beaten to it by vicious tentacled monsters. It’s true that Deep Rising is basically a B-movie with a blockbuster budget—but what’s not to love about that? It’s big, cheesy and wildly entertaining. Sommers himself best describes his approach: “Don’t let them tell you less is more. More is more.”
Nicole Kidman began her film career in 1983 at the age of 16, and after just six years working in Australian film and television, she found her breakout role. Like many films that live somewhere under the roof of horror, Dead Calm positions its story against a backdrop of indescribable grief. The details of this tragedy don’t always figure strongly into the ensuing plot other than to provide a sort of emotive canvas on which everything else unfolds. Not only does it provide immediate depth to our understanding of the characters, but it informs us what is at stake emotionally.
Kidman plays opposite Sam Neill as a wife and husband still recovering from the tragic death of their son; they are becalmed on their sailing yacht when they spot a listless schooner and are unexpectedly joined by a single survivor—the peculiar and perfectly tanned Hughie, played by Billy Zane. It’s not long before a psychological and physical struggle pushes grief to the side, and genuine tension is created through strong performances and an uncaring ocean setting.
There is one fact of life that aquatic horror frequently circles around with equal parts dread and fascination: nature is fucking metal. Civilization and technology has, in many ways and for many people, proved a crucial buffer between us and the horrific realities of our world. But what do we do when we find ourselves on an equal playing field, stripped of our tools and comforts? We didn’t evolve to go toe-to-toe with the natural world. We evolved so we wouldn’t have to.
When three vacationers visit Backwater Barry’s River Tours to explore the mangrove swamps of northern Australia, they find that Barry isn’t in. The next best thing is his associate Jim, and they set off to cruise the sprawling tropical forest. It doesn’t take long at all before their boat is flipped by a massive saltwater crocodile defending his territory, and much of the middle act depicts the crushing and slowly dawning realization of their desperate predicament. There is little to no CGI used—the effects are practical and the crocodile is real, and the presence of this prehistoric predator conjures the kind of primal dread that most of us only imagine in our worst-case scenario fantasies.
#8 and #9 are back-to-back Andrew Traucki films, and if you look at his filmography you will find a deep unease with the unsympathetic power of the natural world, specifically an often fatal preoccuption with ocean and water. There is an efficient and unvarnished quality to his storytelling which often takes its inspiration from real life stories of tragedy and survival. Such is the case here, when a small group of friends capsize near the Great Barrier Reef in the waters of Queensland Australia, and they must decide to swim to a nearby island or take their chances on the upturned vessel.
As important as sharks are to Australia (several of the movies on this list were filmed there), there somehow hadn’t been an Australian-made shark movie until The Reef. And unlike the sensational nature of films like Jaws and Deep Blue Sea, The Reef (similar to Open Water) strives for something more realistic—the sharks are all real and the special effects are practical. As Traucki puts it, “the fear and tension in The Reef [comes] from the unknown and uncertainty, what you can’t see rather than what you can.” If you think of the nakedly terrifying moments of attack as the film’s kinetic energy, then Traucki is crafty enough to emphasize the potential: the unbearable horror of an endless horizon, where all the imagined scenarios play out on loop before the inevitable catastrophe.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the sly king of Corinth who earned notoriety and long-term cachet by cheating death not once but twice. For his sneaky ways, he also earned a special place in Hades, endlessly rolling a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down. Repeat this futile process for all of eternity and you have what is now recognized as a Sisyphean task—an endless and futile loop of maddening recurrence.
Triangle was written and directed by Bristol-born director Christopher Smith, and while it takes place in Florida it was shot entirely in the other “Sunshine State,” Queensland, Australia. It premiered at the London FrightFest Film Festival in 2009, and was released theatrically in just a small handful of countries (it never found its way to US theaters). This lack of distribution has kept it in a state of relative obscurity, but it is a clever, mind-bending psychological thriller that should appeal to fans of cerebral dramas like Memento or Primer.
Creature From the Black Lagoon begins, strangely enough, with the Biblical birth of our planet. The opening moments of the film depict the swirling creation of the heavens and seas, and provide an immediate and cosmic perspective for everything that follows. Even after these dramatic opening shots, this astronomical thread persists through the film, and it informs a scientific curiosity which becomes a major theme. In this case science exists against a backdrop of religious understanding, two things which in my opinion are not always mutually exclusive.
This universal context adds a sort of gravity to a ‘50s monster movie that might, to modern audiences, feel in some ways like an antiquated novelty. But the truth is, there is still an appeal to this film which is now over 60 years old. It explores subjects which have not aged—namely, the scientific pursuit of human understanding, and the strange and unknown places that such pursuits can take us. And, as is usually the case, the monster is found not in the forgotten cave or lagoon but in the destructive greed of White colonialism (a point that may have been somewhat unintentional). Julie Adams herself touched on something important: “There always is that feeling of compassion for the monster. I think maybe it touches something in ourselves, maybe the darker parts of ourselves, that long to be loved and think they really can’t ever be loved. It strikes a chord within us.”
Look, I know this is my hottest take on the list. I am putting Piranha 3D above Creature from the Black Lagoon and the original 1978 Piranha. Top 5, baby. Fight me. I can’t blame you for assuming that this gory reboot would be an absolute shitshow; after all, it’s the fourth film in a series that never had much critical clout in the first place. It was shot in 2D before going through 3D conversion (a historically bad proposition), and it was never screened for critics—another massive red flag.
But Piranha 3D illustrates why I would rather watch a lowbrow film that knows exactly what it is than a highbrow film with an identity crisis. One commonality with the films of Alexandre Aja is a dedication to extreme carnage, and he shows no signs of reforming. The film crew estimates that they used 75,000 gallons of fake blood every day of shooting (did I accidentally add a zero? I’m honestly not sure). I mean, come on: Jerry O’Connell plays a sleazy, coke-snorting parody of Girls Gone Wild-creator Joe Francis, Ving Rhames goes full Boromir by tearing off a boat propeller and cutting apart hundreds of swarming piranha, and at one point Adam Scott swings from a stage truss onto a jet ski, pulls two spring breakers aboard, pumps a shotgun with one hand, and starts blasting leaping piranha out of the fucking air. It’s everything I wanted and more.
There are two directors on this list that are represented twice, and French filmmaker Alexandre Aja is one of them. He has built a solid filmography by bringing skillful direction to satisfying remakes and genre pieces; his movies are emotionally and physically violent, and his frequent partnership with cinematographer Maxime Alexandre brings a certain consistency of visual style. Crawl appeared on my list of the best horror films from 2019, and Quentin Tarantino has suggested that it was his overall favorite from that year.
My 2019 list featured several movies with a distinct arthouse feel, and a cerebral quality that proved both confounding and alluring. The Sam Raimi-produced Crawl, on the other hand, is a modern creature feature with a refreshingly straightforward plot. A young woman drives straight into the course of a Category 5 hurricane to check on her father at a family home near the Florida coastline. They reunite, but are quickly joined by rising waters and territorial gators. Aja & company lay out a white knuckle thriller and smartly avoid overcomplicating things.
Submechanophobia is the fear of mechanical or human-made objects under the water; some typical triggers include buoys, oil rigs, boat propellers, and shipwrecks. Below scratches that itch and then some—so much of its appeal lies in wide shots of a hulking sub cruising through the adumbral deep, low angle shots of enemy ship propellers, and the haunting and inexplicable noises found when traveling through deep seas. There is a sense of weighted claustrophobia built into the setting of a WWII-era submarine, shot on an actual replica towed out into the middle of Lake Michigan.
Below was directed by David Twohy (mostly known for writing and directing much of the Chronicles of Riddick series), and it was produced and co-written by Darren Aronofsky. The latter was originally bound to direct but ended up making Requiem for a Dream instead. Unfortunately, Below was a box office flop. It made back only $2.6 million of its $40 million budget, and the critical reception was lukewarm. I admit that my enthusiasm is partially informed by my love for the Supernatural Underwater Horror microgenre, but the underrated Below is partly why this list exists in the first place. It has a deep cast of character actors (Olivia Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Holt McCallany, Jason Flemyng, Ron Livingston, and the first “serious” film role of Zach Galiafinakas), and it tells an effectively spooky ghost story hundreds of feet below the surface of the Atlantic.
Imagine being John Carpenter and having to follow up a smash hit like Halloween, one of the most profitable and adored independent films of all time. With some hindsight we might even say that it was an impossible task. The Fog is not as suspenseful as Halloween or as terrifying as The Thing—it’s hard being the middle child of two horror masterpieces. And it is a touch heavy-handed, with the tension slowly diffusing the longer the film goes on; it sticks a lot of irons in the fire and has some trouble attending to all of them.
Despite these narrative shortcomings, The Fog remains an independent cult favorite because of its perfect execution of atmosphere and mood. It begins with a spooky campfire story, and sets the table with beautiful shots of a quaint coastal California town on the eve of its centennial celebration. The film employs one of my favorite structural tropes by linking the disparate corners and characters of the town through the sounds of a local radio broadcast, in this case deejayed by the lonely Stevie Wayne (Adrianne Barbeau, total smokeshow). The film was produced for just over $1 million, but because of Dean Cundey’s stunning cinematography, you would never know it. It’s these audio-visual achievements that make The Fog feel like a minor classic despite its storytelling flaws—the delightfully spooky Antonio Bay feels like a world you can live in (murdering ghost pirates aside).
You had to know it was coming. Putting Jaws at the top of a list of aquatic horror movies has been a tradition ever since it came out in 1975. And while it is painfully obvious, it strikes me as earned and perhaps even unavoidable. I tried to come up with some excuse—any excuse—to put another film at the top of this list, but anything besides Steven Spielberg’s smash hit would strike me as dangerously cute. After all, over half of the films on this list probably wouldn’t exist without it.
Myriad production difficulties plagued Spielberg’s early-career story of a shark attack off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard but nevertheless it became the first film ever to hit the $100 million mark at the box office—adjusted for inflation, it has earned nearly $2 billion worldwide. It literally invented the “Summer Blockbuster,” effectively ending a five-year Hollywood recession and redefining the perceived profit potential of hit films. It kick-started the career of John Williams, who wrote for it one of the most iconic and influential film scores of all time. The film put a huge dent in coastal tourism while simultaneously causing a spike in shark fishing and beach sightings.
It bears mentioning: Jaws is also the single most damaging property ever when it comes to the dangerously inaccurate public perception of sharks, whose numbers have been decimated by human activity. Peter Benchley, who wrote the book on which the film is based, later expressed regret that he had ever written it. From a conservational standpoint, the film is a disaster. This does not change the fact that it has resonated with audiences and critics ever since it came out over four decades ago. Such is the complicated cultural legacy of one of the greatest thrillers of all time.