In 1936, an Australian film called White Death made nary a splash. American adventure novelist Zane Grey (starring as himself) bets that he can catch a “bigger fish” than a six-foot shark displayed on the shores of Sydney. Thus spurs a journey to capture the eponymous white death, the first silver screen “appearance” of a then-fantastical predator that, today, we refer to as the great white shark. Poorly reviewed and never properly screened stateside, White Death largely exists as a bygone relic. Yet it also incorporates several hallmarks of what would become the “sharksploitation” genre, which would only boom about 40 years later with Jaws. These elements include ambitious underwater photography; up-close looks at the creature, whether real or replica; and an onslaught of real-world abuse toward marine life.
To this final point, the bumbling oaf of the film—who emphatically opposes the lead’s hunt for the animal—is loosely based on Grey’s own experience with the Royal Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Animals, which objected to his inhumane fishing practices in Australia (some of which were filmed for White Death). In a transparently petty move, the end of the picture finds the RSPCA-inspired character declaring that Grey’s quest was not only justified, but essential for protecting human life. Though the lackluster underwater footage, threadbare plot, and laughable prop shark (shoddily concocted out of wood and canvas) don’t make White Death particularly exciting, much of its DNA can be seen throughout the nearly 90-year canon of shark cinema.
White Death distills the central thesis of nearly all early killer shark movies: These “man-eaters” need to be slaughtered, even in the opinion of scientists. In Jaws, Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), the unexpectedly cool marine biologist, teams up with police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) and hardened fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw) to vanquish what he deems a “rogue” great white off the coast of Massachusetts. The first feature film to perfectly meld the ever-burgeoning world of aquatic exploration with the implicit fear that comes from plumbing the depths of the unknown, Jaws undeniably remains the most successful sharksploitation film of all time, instantly becoming the reference point which any future entry must measure itself against. In this subgenre, sharks are the ultimate threat to characters’ lives—and, at times, even the flesh-and-blood divers and crew behind the scenes.
To fully understand the sensation caused by Jaws, three predecessors provide nuance to both the scientific and public opinion of sharks in the years before its release. The first time color photography was achieved underwater was in The Silent World (1956), co-directed by oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and filmmaker Louis Malle. A travelogue of sorts that charts Cousteau and his crew’s various expeditions to far-flung corners of the ocean, the documentary contains some sequences that prove rather unsettling. In one, a baby whale is unintentionally mutilated by the propeller of Cousteau’s ship, and its gushing wound immediately attracts a school of sharks. The crew begins culling these sharks with hooks and harpoons, dragging their thrashing bodies onto the deck for further examination. Though ostensibly done for the sake of scientific advancement, there’s a distinct queasiness here: If these are the motivations of oceanographers, how might this impact public perception of these creatures? Winner of the Palme d’Or (the only doc to receive such an honor until Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 almost 50 years later), the documentary Oscar, and grossing over $3 million at the box office, The Silent World‘s popular appeal was pronounced; Wes Anderson notably based his character Steve Zissou on Cousteau, who in The Life Aquatic hopes to document the killing of the “leopard shark” that devoured his best friend.
In 1969, the Burt Reynolds effort Shark! became a media sensation due to a purported tragedy. Allegedly, while filming off the coast of Mexico, José Marco was mortally wounded by a shark. Footage of Marco’s death is said to have been cut into the film itself, which was only then retitled Shark! to cash in on the controversy. A photo spread of the fatal encounter was published in Life magazine, but the entire story was swiftly challenged by Skin Diver magazine, which posited that the attack was a hoax featuring “a dead or drugged grey shark.” Marine biologist Richard Ellis added that “no one was hurt except the shark.”
Finally, 1971’s Blue Water, White Death was the first to successfully record a great white shark, and is perhaps the most relevant predecessor to Jaws itself. Following a crew that travels to South Africa hoping to encounter the animal, there is an ingrained level of respect for the great white here. The team deeply admires marine life, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they aim to protect it. The first leg of their six-month expedition finds them trailing a commercial whaling boat in the hopes that a great white will be drawn to the resultant carcasses. Despite being seen as a necessary sacrifice for their research, an uneasy air descends upon the crew as they watch a sperm whale succumb to the harpoon; its blowhole sputters ruby red blood, its fins thrash about with a survivor’s gumption. After the death rattle, they descend into protective cages as the sharks arrive to feast. Oceanic whitetip and blue sharks abound, yet no great white.
After two weeks of inclement weather, they follow the whaling vessel again. By this point, they’re practically bloodthirsty; the group is delighted by the slaying of a massive whale, which they hope will be suitable enough to lure a great white during a planned nighttime dive. Alas, a lighting malfunction leaves them blind, with no chance of capturing the great white. The next day, perhaps out of desperation, they leave their cages and swim among the sharks. One diver, Valerie Taylor—an Australian shark expert and prized spear fisher—gets nervous amid the sheer quantity of oceanic whitetips, which bump against the crew to size them up. Using a bang stick, she shoots one shark at point-blank range, sending it spiraling into the depths below. Later, during the film’s stunning climax wherein three great whites finally appear, photographer Peter Lake braves the cage and descends into the water. One of the sharks aggressively chomps at bait that is tethered to the cage; its brute strength sends the aluminum shell into a furious spiral, the creature’s jagged teeth only inches away from Lake, who eventually cuts the bait’s line and frees the cage from its maw.
This final dramatic moment is said to have profoundly inspired Jaws novelist Peter Benchley. A scene in the film directly mimics it, as Steven Spielberg was also a fan of Blue Water, White Death. He scouted Valerie and her husband, Ron Taylor, to film a real great white shark—to be used in Hooper’s submerged brush with the beast—on the strength of their work in the documentary. Jaws not only presented the viewpoint of a fictional marine biologist, but employed the efforts of the world’s foremost shark experts to help craft a horror film about an unnaturally human-hungry specimen. A fisherman was also tasked with killing a real tiger shark to be used as the film’s red herring catch.
In fairness, several of the above have expressed remorse for their actions and in turn dedicated the bulk of their lives to shark and broader marine conservation efforts. Jacques Cousteau went on to be dubbed “the father of the environmental movement.” Valerie Taylor continues to advocate against ocean pollution and shark nets as an octogenarian. Peter Benchley, eternally remorseful for the paranoia induced by Jaws, devoted the rest of his life to undoing the societal stigma against sharks that Jaws perpetuated. Unfortunately, eager opportunists sought to cash in on the blockbuster phenomenon produced by Spielberg’s film, and they were willing to obtain marketable results by any means necessary.
The first shark-centric film to release after Jaws was Mako: Jaws Of Death (1976), which, aside from the obvious name-drop in its title, manages to present a totally novel approach to human-shark relations. Its protagonist is Sonny Stein (Richard Jaeckel), a man who discovers that he has a telepathic connection with sharks. As a result, he becomes a fervent protector of the species against humans, who he considers the ultimate threat to their survival, making him an outlier in the nascent sharksploitation canon. While the film features no mako sharks whatsoever, it does offer incredible footage of human crew and tiger sharks interacting without too many safety precautions, especially for the sharks. It’s very clear that sharks were intentionally executed for the purpose of the film’s plot, a bitter irony considering the character motivations at its core.
Even more brazen are the marine life murders in Tintorera (1977), a British-Mexican co-production that fuses sexploitation with sharksploitation. Although it advertises itself as a killer shark movie, it is ultimately far more concerned with a love affair between an American businessman (Hugo Stiglitz), a womanizing Mexican swim instructor (Andrés García), and a young British tourist (Susan George) visiting a nearby Cancún resort. By trade, the American and Mexican men hunt tiger sharks, locally known as tintorera, which are ruthlessly snuffed on camera with spearguns. A single tiger shark is poised as the culprit behind a slew of deadly attacks (in these sequences, it’s clear that a dead or drugged shark is being dragged through the water by fishing line to “give chase”), which sends the American on a personal mission of mass extermination. However, sex and shark slaughtering take up the bulk of the screen time as opposed to man-eating terror. The animal cruelty isn’t just limited to sharks, either: A sea turtle’s throat is slit to chum the water and a manta ray is senselessly speared in the back of the head for sport. (On this level, the film feels on par with Cannibal Holocaust.) While the actions toward living creatures are nauseating, solace lies in the fact that Tintorera didn’t dramatically increase shark-related anxieties more than it did pique interest in its ménage à trois.
For nearly two decades, the sphere of sharksploitation was fine with endlessly rehashing Jaws. Aside from the three dismal direct Jaws sequels it produced, there was a 1976 softcore send-up entitled Gums, whose villain is a nymphomaniac mermaid, which is actually quite amusing. The same can’t be said for the 1981 Italian rip-off Great White (sometimes titled The Last Shark), which was so brazen in its plagiarism that Universal Pictures successfully lobbied to pull the film from theaters shortly after its U.S. release. Of course, Jaws also brought about the golden age of animal attack flicks, including Grizzly (1976), Orca (1977), Piranha (1978) and Alligator (1980), which all closely followed the narrative formula of Spielberg’s classic.
It wasn’t until 1999 that the genre, at the time rife with B-movie pastiche, was given a new jolt of life. Deep Blue Sea brought out the big guns, utilizing then-fledgling CGI to craft its ultra-smart makos, whose brains were genetically enlarged in the hopes of curing Alzheimer’s. Harkening back to Mako: Jaws of Death, it also positions mankind as the ultimate monster, even if the sharks these scientists produce are calculated killers. Primarily shooting just above the water tanks used in Titanic, director Renny Harlin insisted on including real footage of actor Thomas Jane swimming with sharks. “It was so terrifying that I don’t want to remember it,” the actor once commented. Subverting more than the restrained appearance of the shark in Jaws, Harlin’s film also bucked tired tropes that plagued the horror genre as a whole. There is no final girl, and a Black man ends up being one of the sole survivors of the sharks’ onslaught.
A few years later, another film would use live sharks, this time with an emphasis on accuracy and the relative comfort of all involved. Made by husband and wife filmmaking team Chris Kentis and Laura Lau—both avid scuba divers—Open Water (2003) capitalizes on the advent of digital video and its creators’ ample experience of swimming with sharks. In an effort to display authentic shark behavior in this hypothetical retelling of a real disappearance, lead actors Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis dove into waters freshly chummed with tuna, which brought about their cold-blooded co-stars. Kentis, forgoing the option of a chainmail suit, swam freely with his makeshift waterproof camera, documenting human and shark performers in all of their glory. Employing the help of “shark wrangler” Stuart Cove, the Open Water team avoided shark-related injuries altogether, though Ryan did suffer a barracuda bite. Both a lo-fi horror offering in the spirit of The Blair Witch Project and an active attempt to dispel the misconceptions of sharks partially given credo by Jaws, Open Water ended up grossing $55.5 million over its miniscule $500,000 budget. Fear of sharks may be a warranted—even natural—human response, but the moral of Open Water is that these creatures don’t operate out of monstrous bloodlust, but mere instinct. Neither malice nor compassion come into play.
Also helmed by a de facto ocean obsessive, The Reef (2010) took a less intimate approach to splicing in vérité footage of great white sharks captured in the waters of South Australia. None of the actors in the film were expected to tread water with the ocean’s apex predator; writer-director Andrew Traucki sparingly showed the great white that was picking off the film’s shipwrecked ensemble one by one, allowing the characters’ paranoia to fester until the stalking shark once again legitimizes their horror. It’s a clever conceit that showcases the animal’s awesome power in its raw form, making audiences dread the unlikely, but reportedly real-life, scenario that might pit us against it.
The fare that followed brought back a concerted focus on CGI sharks, vastly ranging in quality: The Shallows (2013), 47 Meters Down (2017), and its 2019 sequel are all taut thrillers featuring young women who fight for survival against great white sharks. Veering toward the nonsensical, Sharknado (2013) and The Meg (2018) are two sides of the same coin. Last year, the French entry Under Paris—the release of which was timed to the 25th anniversary of Harlin’s film—once again made the decision to argue that humans are the ultimate environmental evildoer, meaning that the rebellion of the natural world against us is just that: only natural.
Most recently, Australian filmmaker Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals (2025) infused the serial killer subgenre with the presence of sharks. Played by Jai Courtney, the film’s crazed murderer is fascinated with sharks, which prompts him to feed unsuspecting tourists to them during moonlit rituals. Blending the man-made terror offered in Deep Blue Sea and Under Paris with the use of real shark footage in Open Water and The Reef, Byrne’s film is wholly original while also somewhat underwhelming. Its commitment to eschewing the characterization of the creatures largely attributed to Jaws is commendable, but the general dearth of sharks is disappointing, the ethical nature of their filming notwithstanding.
Jaws may have brought sharks to the pop culture mainstream, but it didn’t single-handedly create the wave it rode in on. Whether observed in landmark documentaries or hastily exploited for publicity, the great white and its requin relatives have long been a source of fear and fascination for researchers and the general public alike (Benchley and Spielberg included). Even so, Jaws forever changed the landscape of the shark movie, with every notable successor essentially aiming to bastardize, simplify, or straight-up plagiarize its genius. But in the 50 years since, some filmmakers have looked back and vowed to frame sharks in a different light, one which doesn’t villainize them as beasts, but rather celebrates their power. Jaws scared multiple generations out of the ocean, but it has also undeniably influenced a rise of reverence for the top of the food chain within it.
