21 movies that made us afraid to go into the water

One could say that James Cameron has a way with water. Between starting his career with Piranha II: The Spawning and then eventually moving onto Titanic and Avatar: The Way Of Water, the director seems most in his element surrounded by H2O. In 1989’s The Abyss, a U.S. recovery team works with an oil-platform crew to recover an American submarine in the Caribbean before the Soviets do. It’s not a spoiler this many years after the movie’s release to say that they encounter strange alien life-forms in the oceanic abyss, but the scariest aspect of the movie is the terrifying challenge of working at crushing depths.

Although a shark makes a cameo in writer-director J.C. Chandor’s 2013 action-drama All Is Lost, the movie primarily exploits our fear of being stranded at sea with limited water, food, and supplies. Robert Redford plays an unnamed man (and the movie’s only character) whose ship collides with a shipping container in the Indian Ocean, causing him to salvage what he can and take his chances drifting on a life raft. The movie only has 51 words of dialogue, but all the fear, frustration, and hopelessness is written on Redford’s sun-damaged face. Even if you’re not a people person, the idea of being adrift in the ocean with no one around for thousands of miles is one of the scariest things imaginable.

Universal’s Creature From The Black Lagoon is the quintessential 1950s monster movie—it was even filmed in 3D, which was a popular marketing gimmick at the time. In this classic creature feature, a group of scientists try to capture and study a humanoid “Gill-man” from the waters of the Amazon. The black-and-white underwater cinematography is remarkable and may make you think twice about what is tickling your toes the next time you find yourself wading in murky water. Universal released a Classic Monsters disc collection with Creature From The Black Lagoon included on Blu-ray 3D, which is the way to go if you want to experience Gill-man with the picture depth that thrilled audiences in theaters in 1954.

In Renny Harlin’s 1999 aquatic horror flick Deep Blue Sea, a team of scientists at a remote underwater facility does research on genetically modified mako sharks in an attempt to extract a protein in their brains that could cure Alzheimer’s disease. There’s just one problem: the modified makos are smarter and more aggressive than normal sharks and will do anything to escape into the deep blue sea. This movie starring Thomas Jane, LL Cool J, Samuel L. Jackson, and Saffron Burrows not only amps up our fear of sharks by making them devious, it also taps into the fear of being trapped in the deep ocean with no easy way to escape to the surface. Sure, some of the CGI sharks are iffy and Shark Week fans know that the fish have no vocal cords and can’t growl like jungle cats, but Deep Blue Sea still has some nail-biting scenes of sharks stalking people that make us relieved our feet are firmly planted on dry land.

In 1998’s Deep Rising, starring Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Anthony Heald, and Djimon Hounsou, a group of hijackers board a luxury ship to loot it as it cruises the South Pacific only to discover that a group of large, tentacled creatures have already wreaked havoc on board. Critical praise for the action-horror movie directed by Stephen Sommers never got better than “dumb fun,” but it has since developed a cult following for being an entertaining Aliens knockoff. As Williams’ character keeps saying in the movie, “Now what?” Well, how about some calamari so we can literally swallow our fear of tentacles?

The tagline for 1989’s DeepStar Six is “not all aliens come from space.” Friday The 13th director Sean S. Cunningham’s deep-ocean horror film is about the crew of an underwater military outpost who must protect their facility from an unknown sea monster. Like several other movies on our list, DeepStar Six presents the ocean depths as similar to outer space—dark, inhospitable to human life, and filled with unknown terrors. Although the movie isn’t on the same level as Alien or The Abyss, the claustrophobic anxiety is still there.

In the survival horror thriller 47 Meters Down, two sisters (Mandy Moore and Claire Holt) have the genius idea to go down into shark-infested waters while on vacation in Mexico for ... fun? When the winch system holding the cage inevitably breaks and the sisters plummet to the bottom of the ocean, the siblings have to figure out how to get back to the surface and avoid a bunch of hungry great whites before their air runs out. The B-movie’s simple premise doesn’t take shark flicks to the next level, but it’s unsettling enough to make you rethink getting into a cage surrounded by apex ocean predators for kicks.

Director Bong Joon-ho’s 2006 monster movie The Host became one of the highest-grossing movies of all time in South Korea. The critically acclaimed creature feature about a giant monster living in the Han River that kidnaps a man’s daughter combines satire, horror, and some impressive special effects. Inspiration for the movie came from a news article about a deformed fish with an S-shaped spine that was caught in a polluted river.

In Humanoids From The Deep, humanoid sea monsters rise from the depths to assault the women and kill the men in the fishing village of Noyo, California. The film doesn’t shy away from graphic violence and nudity, much to the chagrin of director Barbara Peeters, who asked for her name to be removed from the film after Roger Corman added in the sexual violence without her knowledge or permission. Still, Humanoids From The Deep has become something of a cult classic. Leonard Maltin gave it a three-star review, writing that it is “fast, occasionally hilarious gutter trash from the Roger Corman stable.”

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is the mother of all shark flicks—the one that spawned three sequels, countless rip-offs and imitations, and invented the summer blockbuster. The story about a local sheriff (R0y Scheider) who teams up with a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a veteran seafarer (Robert Shaw) to battle a man-eating great white shark that’s terrorizing Amity Island has made several generations scared of swimming in the ocean. Spielberg combined real footage of great whites with a giant mechanical shark named “Bruce” to create one of the most iconic monster movies of all time. I still can’t hear that ominous score by John Williams without getting a little anxious, even if I’m miles from the nearest ocean.

In 1999’s Lake Placid, a giant crocodile is terrorizing a fictional lake in Maine as a dysfunctional group of scientists and police (including Bill Pullman and Bridget Fonda) try to figure out a way to kill the monster reptile. A highlight of the movie is watching a foul-mouthed Betty White (who was an animal activist in real life) offer a blindfolded cow to the killer croc. Since crocodiles can hunt humans in the water and on land, they literally have a leg up on sharks. Lake Placid spawned five direct-to-Syfy channel sequels, but none of them balance horror and laughs quite like the original.

1989 seemed to be the golden year for oceanic-terror movies, with the release of The Abyss, DeepStar Six, and Leviathan. The latter is directed by George P. Cosmatos and stars Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays, and Daniel Stern. It features yet another team of deep-sea explorers perched at the edge of a wrecked Soviet freighter who is terrorized by a mutant monster that is the result of a botched genetic experiment. The miners come to realize that the company rep played by icy-blue-eyed Meg Foster doesn’t want anyone to reach the surface alive and expose the truth about the horrors below.

A megalodon is an extinct giant shark that ruled the oceans millions of years ago and left fossilized teeth the size of your hand as the only evidence of its existence. The Meg, starring Jason Statham as deep-sea diver Jonas Taylor, is about a group of scientists exploring the Mariana Trench—the deepest place on Earth—who accidentally enable a living 75-foot megalodon to escape to the surface and eat lots of boats and people. Some believe it’s possible that megalodons still exist in the deepest, most unexplored parts of the ocean, and The Meg runs with the idea. A sequel, The Meg 2: The Trench, swims into theaters on August 4.

Of all the movies on our list, the low-budget horror film Open Water really chills the blood when you learn that it is based on the true story of a vacationing couple who went scuba diving only to be accidentally left behind by their tour boat. Stranded at sea and bobbing at the surface, the couple (played by Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) fight to survive as sharks circle them. The sleeper hit spawned two sequels unrelated to this tragic story.

Speaking of movies that made us afraid of the water that are based on actual events, The Perfect Storm is based on the true story of the Andrea Gail, which was lost at sea during the Perfect Storm of 1991. In the 2000 movie directed by Wolfgang Petersen, George Clooney plays the Andrea Gail captain who tries to navigate a once-in-a-lifetime storm event with tragic consequences. The movie starring Mark Wahlberg, John C. Reilly, Diane Lane, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Karen Allen will make you seasick as you watch the Andrea Gail hopelessly struggle against wicked waves, harsh hurricane winds, and haaaaaw-shuh Boston accents.

In horror movies, if you can get the audience to use their imagination to fill in the blanks that your budget won’t allow, you’ve got a winner. This is the case for 1978’s Piranha, a cheap-but-effective Jaws rip-off about killer piranha that are accidentally released into the rivers surrounding a lush resort. Some flashes of fast-moving fish with sharp teeth are all that’s needed to convince you to stay out of the murky water and check out the resort’s bar instead. The movie spawned a sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning, which was James Cameron’s film directing debut, as well as the remake Piranha 3D and its sequel, Piranha 3DD.

Jaws spawned several dubious sequels and a whole genre of shoddy killer-fish flicks (here’s looking at you, Sharknado), but there have been a few other shark movies with legit bite. Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2016 film The Shallows is one of them. In the well-reviewed survival thriller, Blake Lively stars as a medical student and surfer on vacation named Nancy who becomes stranded 200 yards from shore as a hungry great white circles her. With an injured seagull as her only company, Nancy has to use the limited tools available to her to get back to the safety of the sand. This nail-biter is the worst-case scenario for any surfer to be in and will easily convince you to never sign up for lessons. The popular misconception that you are safe from sharks in the shallows is blown out of the water here. Thanks a lot, Mr. Collet-Serra!

You might not have heard of the 1977 horror movie Shock Waves, but fans of either zombies or scary aquatic movies should seek it out. In this grainy, low-budget thriller, a small tour boat becomes marooned on a remote island whose only inhabitant (Peter Cushing) is a former Nazi commander overseeing a small army of zombie supersoldiers which, like a bull shark, move effortlessly between ocean and marsh environments. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers co-star Brooke Adams is a familiar face among the tourists, and John Carradine plays the grizzled captain of the tourist boat. The images of gray-skinned, goggled zombies—with no apparent need for breathing air—silently sneaking up on the cast in tranquil water are eerie and unsettling, to say the least. The most that could be said is that Shock Waves is the unsung Citizen Kane of aquatic Nazi-zombie movies.

If you’re upset that the best movies about aquatic terror seem to have been made decades ago, check out 2019’s Sweetheart directed by J.D. Dillard. In the survival thriller, Kiersey Clemons plays a young woman named Jennifer who washes ashore on a tropical island after her boat sinks. Not only must Jennifer fight for survival during the day, she must elude a terrifying monster that emerges from the waves each night. If this spine-tingling creature feature doesn’t make you rethink that camping-on-the-beach idea, nothing will.

The 2009 psychological horror film Triangle, directed by Christopher Smith, combines a real fear of water with an irrational cinematic fear of being stuck in a time loop. Melissa George plays Jess, a single mother who goes on a yacht trip with friends only to have the boat capsize. The survivors make their way to a mysterious, seemingly abandoned ocean liner on which Jess appears to be trapped in a time loop, seeing other versions of herself and others repeat the same actions. Is it all in her head from experiencing the trauma of being stranded at sea, or will she have to eliminate every other version of herself to become the one true Jess? If you’re looking for an aquatic thriller that will mess with your head, hop aboard!

Alphabetically last but certainly not least on our list is the 2020 sci-fi action-horror film Underwater starring Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, and T.J. Miller. If you’ve read the rest of this article, the plot should sound very familiar: a group of oceanic researchers working at a drilling facility at the bottom of the Mariana Trench encounters hostile creatures after an earthquake devastates their deep-sea station. Stewart doesn’t go “full Ripley” à la Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, but at least in this claustrophobic thriller, she has the look and the fire in her belly to become an action heroine after too many years on the surface acting in too many Twilight movies.