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Today's episode of Sounds of Cinema examined the themes and legacy of George A. Romero's landmark zombie films Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978). What follows is one of a series of commentaries featured on the program, with this one looking back at the legacy of Night of the Living Dead and its many sequels and imitators.
Night of the Living Dead is one of the most influential
films in the horror genre and in American cinema. George Romero and
company did not invent the zombie. These creatures had featured in
movies before 1968 such as White Zombie and Voodoo Island. But in most of those films the zombies were mindless slaves controlled by a villain. Night of the Living Dead set the zombies loose and the movie created the template for a whole genre of films.
Romero would continue to follow up Night of the Living Dead throughout his career, starting with Dawn of the Dead in 1978 and then Day of the Dead in 1985. He returned to the genre in 2004 with Land of the Dead and followed it with Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead in 2007 and 2009, respectively. Romero’s later films failed to recapture the impact of his earlier work but Day of the Dead has enjoyed a reappraisal in recent years.
Night of the Living Dead producers John A. Russo and Russell Streiner also continued to work in the zombie genre, writing the story for 1985’s Return of the Living Dead. Directed by Dan O’Bannon, this film was a comic take on the zombie genre and has its own devoted fan following. Return of the Living Dead inspired four sequels.
John Russo also spearheaded one of the most unusual artifacts in the Living Dead pantheon. To coincide with Night of the Living Dead’s
thirtieth anniversary, Russo oversaw a special edition of the film
that included fifteen minutes of newly shot footage and a new music
score. This version was—rightly—disparaged by the fans and has all but
disappeared.
Night of the Living Dead was lauded for its black and white
cinematography but the movie has had several colorized editions and a
3-D conversion. The movie has also been remade twice, both in color.
The 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead was produced by
George Romero and directed by Romero’s frequent special effects
collaborator Tom Savini. It was a noble effort that both revisited and
updated the material. A 3D remake of Night of the Living Dead starring Sid Haig was released in 2006.
Night of the Living Dead inspired a couple of animated projects as well. 2009’s Night of the Living Dead: Re-Animated
is a mixed media remake that uses the audio from the 1968 film and
recreates the visuals through various styles of animation. 2015’s Night of the Living Dead: Darkest Dawn
was a sort-of remake of the original story told through computer
animation and featuring the voice talents of Tony Todd and Bill
Moseley.
Aside from direct sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, Night of the Living Dead inspired a whole genre of zombie films whose entries are too numerous to count. Films such as the Resident Evil series, [REC], Night of the Creeps, Zombie, World War Z, Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead, and the television show The Walking Dead all trace back to the 1968 film. The influence isn’t limited to the shuffling, undead cannibals. Night of the Living Dead
created a boilerplate that filmmakers have followed for the past fifty
years and most zombie films adhere to the siege formula originated in
the 1968 movie. Night of the Living Dead also established a
political framework and a set of socio-economic themes that have formed
a baseline for most of the zombie films of the past half-a-century.
There are some signs that the zombie genre might finally move beyond Night of the Living Dead. The past few years have seen the release of some innovative titles. The Girl with All the Gifts and ParaNorman and Cargo and It Stains the Sands Red
made a deliberate effort to move the zombie genre into new and
interesting places. But whatever the future of this genre might be, the
zombie film is inexorably tied to the efforts of George A. Romero and
his crew and the little horror movie they made in between beer
commercials in rural Pennsylvania.
For more on Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, click here.
Today’s episode of Sounds of Cinema kicked off the month-long Halloween theme with a look at haunted house pictures. What follows are the movies discussed on today’s show as well as some additional titles.
The Amityville Horror (1979) The Amityville Horror was based on the supposedly true story of a haunting experienced by the Lutz family in their Long Island home. The facts in the case have been a matter of dispute but that controversy only added to the mystery of the Amityville haunting. The 1979 movie was enormously successful and inspired a series of sequels although the follow ups had little to do with the original material. A remake of The Amityville Horror was released in 2005.
The Beyond (1983)
Lucio Fulci is one of the legendary directors in the horror genre. His movies were mostly known for their gore but he mounted ambitious productions on small budgets. Many of Fulci’s fans consider 1983’s The Beyond (also known as The Seven Doors of Death) to be the director’s masterpiece. The movie concerns a hotel constructed over a gateway to hell. At the time of its release, The Beyond was subject to censorship and like most of Fulci’s films it was critically derided but it has since achieved a modest reputation as a work of surrealist horror.
The Cabin in the Woods (2012) The Cabin in the Woods was a high concept metafiction about the clichés and subgenres of horror. It was a witty and generally smart picture that was also a bit cynical about the attraction of horror for the audience.
The Changeling (1980)
A man mourning the death of his wife and child rents an isolated mansion and is accosted by the spirit of a murdered child. Martin Scorsese named The Changeling one of his favorite horror films.
The Devil’s Candy (2017) The Devil’s Candy is an exceptional example of domestic horror. The family relationships are the strongest element in the film. The father and daughter, played by Ethan Embry and Kiara Glasco, share a love of heavy metal music and the soundtrack includes songs by Pantera and Metallica. This complements the film’s visual style which channels the demonic imagery of heavy metal album cover art.
Hellraiser (1987)
The Hellraiser franchise is now synonymous with the character of Pinhead but the original movie is really a haunted house picture. A married couple move into the husband’s childhood home but the reanimated corpse of the husband’s older brother is living in the attic and he seduces the wife into bringing him victims so that he can regenerate the rest of his body. Hellraiser was one of the best horror pictures of the 1980s and it’s one of the best debut features by a director in the genre.
House (1986)
A troubled novelist moves into the home of his recently deceased aunt in order to complete his next book. The movie isn’t a horror comedy but some of the visuals are a bit silly in a way that makes the movie campy fun. Interestingly, House was produced by Sean Cunningham, director of Friday the 13th, directed by Steve Miner, who helmed Friday the 13th Part 2 and 3, and features a music score by Harry Manfredini, who scored Fridays 1 – 6.
House on Haunted Hill (1959)
Directed by William Castle and starring Vincent Price, The House on Haunted Hill tells the story of a millionaire who offers ten thousand dollars to five people who agree to be locked in a spooky house overnight.
Monster House (2006) Monster House is a good example of a family movie that respects the intelligence of both kids and their parents. This is an animated film but it gets pretty intense and is thematically heavy while managing to be appropriate for the family audience.
The Orphanage (2007)
A couple renovates an orphanage into a home for handicapped children and their son plays with imaginary friends who might be ghosts. The Orphanage is a thoughtful haunted house picture. It may not deliver the shocks of a mainstream horror film but it does tap into something that is mysterious about childhood. The Orphanage was directed by J.A. Bayona who also directed this year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
The Others (2001)
Written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar, The Others is a very effective haunted house movie. The story concerns a mother and her two children who have an allergic reaction to sunlight. The mother maintains strict control over the household but her grip is disrupted by supernatural phenomena.
The People Under the Stairs (1991)
In the late 1980s and early 90s, Wes Craven wrote and directed a series of horror films for Universal Pictures. Among them was 1991’s The People Under the Stairs. The movie is fundamentally a haunted house picture but not in a supernatural sense. The story involved a young boy who breaks into his landlord’s house and discovers a terrible secret hidden in the walls. It’s one of Craven’s wildest and most entertaining pictures.
The Shining (1980)
Based on the book by Stephen King, The Shining has been adapted twice. The more popular version is the 1980 motion picture directed by Stanley Kubrick. This film starred Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall as a married couple who spend the winter as caretakers of an isolated hotel and the husband gradually goes insane. King was unhappy with Kubrick’s film, as it diverged greatly from the novel, and he produced a made-for-television remake that aired on ABC in 1997.
Poltergeist (1982)
Poltergeist was a very intense and quite successful haunted house picture in which a family’s youngest daughter is abducted by ghosts. Released in 1982, the movie was rated PG but it is more intense than that rating suggests. Poltergeist inspired two sequels and a television series. A remake of the original film was released in 2015.
It’s October and that means it is time for a month of Halloween-related programming on Sounds of Cinema. Each episode this month will take a look at a particular theme or set of films and feature music to match. Here is a preview of what’s to come:
October 7: Haunted House Movies
Sounds of Cinema will kick off October with a look at haunted house movies including The Beyond, The Amityville Horror, and The Devil’s Candy. The show will also feature reviews of The House with a Clock in its Walls and Hell Fest.
October 14: Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of George A. Romero’s seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead and the fortieth anniversary of its sequel Dawn of the Dead. This show will take a look back at the two films and how their legacy continues to shape horror and the zombie genre.
October 21: Literary Horror Films
2018 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of the novel Frankenstein. This episode of Sounds of Cinema will take a look at some of the film adaptions of Mary Shelley’s book as well as other esteemed horror literature adapted to the silver screen. Listeners of 89.7 KMSU FM will hear the pledge drive edition of Sounds of Cinema.
October 28: Halloween Series Retrospective
This episode will survey the Halloween series from John Carpenter’s 1978 classic through its many sequels and reboots. The show will also include a review of the newest installment in the series.
October 30: Halloween Special
The annual Sounds of Cinema Halloween Special will provide the soundtrack for your All Hallows Eve with an hour-long mix of Halloween-related film music. The show is anticipated to air the evening of Tuesday, October 30th. Exact air times are yet to be determined.
Sounds of Cinema’s regular broadcast can be heard every Sunday morning on the following stations:
9am on 89.5 KQAL FM in Winona, MN and online at kqal.org
11am on 89.7 KMSU FM in Mankato, MN and online at kmsu.org
This September marks the tenth anniversary of the 2008 economic crisis that begat the Great Recession. According to the Brookings Institute, this event was the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that job losses were unprecedented. The causes of the 2008 collapse are somewhat complicated but the crisis was rooted in the home mortgage market. Banks loaned money to customers who could not afford to pay it back and then repackaged those home loans as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations that financed other parts of the economy like pensions and retirement savings. When enough home owners defaulted on their mortgages, the whole system came crashing down, taking some of the largest investment banks in the world with it and destroying American wealth. Forbes reports that the median family net worth dropped 40% between 2007 and 2010 with the brunt of the loss felt by the middle class.
In the ten years since the start of the Great Recession, filmmakers responded with stories about economics, power, and capitalism. What follows is a brief look at some of the notable titles in the genre I call recession cinema.
Documentary Films
Documentary filmmakers were the primary cinematic responders to the economic crisis. The recession was decades in the making, with its origins reaching back to the Reagan and Clinton administrations, but for most people—including the political and economic elite and the journalists covering Wall Street—the events of 2008 seemed to come out of nowhere. The financial press corps in particular failed to understand and report what was happening until it was too late. In the aftermath, documentary filmmakers stepped up to explain the crisis and untangle a convoluted web of confusing financial jargon and political corruption.
One of the first recession documentaries was I.O.U.S.A. This film exposed the extent to which the American economy was propped up on unsustainable credit and it was released in August 2008, about a month before the economic collapse metastasized into a national and global crisis.
Filmmaker Michael Moore also got in on recession cinema with 2009’s Capitalism: A Love Story. Like a lot of Moore’s movies it was entertaining and rabblerousing but it was also a little unfocused. In fact, Capitalism: A Love Story might capture Moore’s best and worst tendencies more severely than any of his other films. But Capitalism: A Love Story is notable for the extent to which it was in touch with the struggles of everyday Americans. Very few filmmakers put the stories of middle and working class people on the screen but Moore’s movie did that in some heartbreaking sequences of people being evicted from their homes. At the time of its release, Moore teased that Capitalism: A Love Story might be his final movie but he has continued to produce and direct since then, most recently this year’s Fahrenheit 11/9.
Also notable among recession documentaries is The Queen of Versailles. Lauren Greenfield’s film documents the lives of David and Jackie Siegel of Westgate Resorts who owned one of the most elaborate homes in the United States. The filmmakers captured the way their lavish lifestyle hit the skids during the recession. But the portrait of the Siegels was not flattering and David Siegel filed a defamation lawsuit against the filmmakers but ultimately lost.
Any survey of recession cinema must include Charles Ferguson’s 2010 documentary Inside Job. In less than two hours this film broke down exactly what happened and explained it in a way that was accessible to general audiences but also put the crisis in a larger context. Inside Job explained the relationships between Wall Street bankers, Washington bureaucrats, private and government regulators, and celebrity intelligentsia who unwittingly conspired to create an economic house of cards. Inside Job remains the definitive documentary about the 2008 crash and it is mandatory viewing for anyone trying to grasp what happened.
To the extent that they could, documentary filmmakers filled in a gap left by the popular press. There can be no denying that business journalists missed the biggest financial story of the last thirty years. But documentary features, which can take years to make, are no substitute for everyday coverage provided by regular publications. Cinema simply cannot get into the details the way that a book or a series of exposés can. And documentaries are also easier for the public to ignore than a consistent stream of news from local and national outlets. That’s especially true in a polarized media environment where the documentary genre has become increasingly politicized.
Feature Films
The economic collapse of 2008 filtered through different filmmaking genres and made an impression on movies that might not otherwise have taken notice of economics. For instance, Bridesmaids is an unusual romantic comedy precisely because the economic instability of the lead character is such an important part of the story. A lot of romantic comedies are about wealthy and glamorous people or proletariats who become bourgeois by falling in love with a wealthy person. Although it doesn’t dwell on the matter, economic anxiety is a key part of Bridesmaids and shapes the internal and external conflict of the main character.
Also notable was The Dark Knight Rises. Economic resentment underlines the way in which supervillain Bane recruits an army of disillusioned Gotham citizens to turn the city into a miniature failed state. It was surprising to see such an overt political theme in a studio tentpole film and The Dark Knight Rises remains unique in that respect. None of the superhero films since have taken on such ideas.
Filmmaker Uwe Boll made a point of exploiting recession anxiety. The filmmaker, who is generally derided but has nevertheless carved a niche for himself in the industry, directed a number of revenge fantasies in which a heavily armed assailant opens fire on the political and economic ruling class. Among these was 2013’s Assault on Wall Street which is exactly what it sounds like.
One of the most interesting titles in recession cinema, and one that has been underappreciated, was Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 picture The Girlfriend Experience. The film is about a high class escort, played by Sasha Grey, who caters to wealthy Wall Street clients. The film is cerebral but it also makes a pointed analogy between this woman’s occupation and what her clients do for a living. More generally, The Girlfriend Experience explores the commoditization of our personhood, a theme Soderbergh would revisit in his Magic Mike movies. The Girlfriend Experience has since been adapted into a television series.
Aside from slipping into the subtext of a lot of features, the recession also provided filmmakers with narratives about people directly affected by the collapse. A few productions attempted to tell stories about average folks starting over, such as Larry Crowne and Everything Must Go, but these films weren’t very good. Much more popular and more successful were dramas about people working in the banking industry. Margin Call is among the most impressive of these. The film dramatizes a twenty-four hour period in which the staff of an investment bank realizes their firm is on the brink of collapse. Margin Call does the job of drama with the characters working through complex moral and ethical problems. It is also an incisive portrait of cutthroat capitalist survival and the final monologue delivered by Jeremy Irons puts the collapse in a larger historical context.
Based on the nonfiction book by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the HBO feature Too Big to Fail dramatizes the 2008 financial collapse by focusing on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and his inner circle as they attempt to stave off an economic collapse while negotiating with the United States Congress and the major investment banks. Too Big to Fail neatly summarizes what happened in the fall of 2008 and how the response to the crisis was compromised by free market ideologies and the power structure of Washington and Wall Street.
Similar to Margin Call and Too Big to Fail but with a very different tone was 2015’s The Big Short. Based on the book by Michael Lewis, The Big Short dramatized the true story of investors who identified the mortgage bubble for what it was and positioned themselves to make a great deal of money when the bubble burst. The Big Short was very funny except when it wasn’t and the film subversively questioned the ways we measure success.
Other notable banking dramas included Arbitrage, starring Richard Gere as a compromised hedge fund manager, and 99 Homes about the eviction of homeowners by unscrupulous mortgage lenders.
One of the unusual banking films in recession cinema was Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a sequel to the 1987 film. Michael Douglas returned as Gordon Gecko and the film focused on how he rebuilds his brand. The 2008 collapse is actually a set piece in the Wall Street sequel and Gordon Gecko’s return is a metaphor of the power and resilience of the banking system.
Hollywood’s Cognitive Capture
Hollywood’s failure to tell stories about the average working class citizen and its emphasis on the economic elite reveals the industry’s own biases and blind spots. In the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse, many of us wondered how the business press and the regulatory agencies failed to see it coming. The answer was cognitive capture; the journalists and regulators were so close to the people and institutions they were supposed to monitor that they saw the world and the economy the same way the bankers did. The observers didn’t have the critical distance to think outside of the box. Hollywood is just as susceptible to this kind of thinking and it shows in their movies.
Hollywood’s cognitive capture is evidenced by two titles. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street was based on the life and crimes of Jordan Belfort. The film does not evade Belfort’s misdeeds but it does certainly glamorize them and his debauched lifestyle. In this film, Belfort was an antihero but he was still nevertheless characterized as a hero. Even though he’s punished in the end he’s never really remorseful. The penultimate scene of Belfort in a minimum security prison is a wink and nod to the audience. The Wolf of Wall Street tapped into the American taste for excess and the movie was among the biggest box office successes of Scorsese’s career.
Another example is the 2015 remake of Poltergeist. The movie demonstrated a dim aware of the housing crisis. A family has purchased a new house after suffering an economic hit and losing their previous home. The new house is large and spacious and well-kept but Poltergeist includes a bizarre dialogue exchange between the parents and their upscale friends. While hosting a house warming party, one of the guests makes a clumsy remark about how the family is now living in a bad neighborhood. It sounds as though the family is living on skid row but in fact it is the kind of home many Americans only dream of owning. The faux economic hardship of Poltergeist comes across as a wealthy Hollywood producer’s idea of what poverty looks like.
American cinema’s focus on Wall Street and forsaking of Main Street is an inevitable outgrowth of the industry’s focus on spectacle. Hollywood—and by this I mean American cinema as a whole, not just major studios—is a dream factory. They are in the business of manufacturing fantasies. In feature films we see people who are better looking than we are but also more courageous and more successful. The titans of Wall Street embody that fantasy. As much as Americans might claim to identify with the simple tastes of blue collar heroes, the fact is that many successful Hollywood films give us just the opposite and the audience eats it up. This brings to mind Ronald Wright’s famous observation that average Americans “see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Hollywood plays to that delusion. They also reinforce it.
Labor Day represents the end of the summer movie season so here is a look back at the past few months. The industry rolls out its prestige pictures in the fall and winter but the summer is all about entertainment and box office. The summer most clearly demonstrates Hollywood’s priorities and the season allows insight into what the production and exhibition industries are doing right and doing wrong.
The Box Office Returns . . . Sort Of
The summer of 2017 was dominated by headlines about the depressed box office which was the worst in twenty-five years. Less attention was paid to the box office of 2018. According to The Hollywood Reporter, revenue was up by fourteen percent and this summer is projected to be the fifth best season on record. However, the attendance figures—the actual number of tickets sold—was the second worst since 1992. That means fewer people were going to the theater and paying more money to do so. Even though both attendance and revenue were up over last year, the overall trend is not a healthy one for theaters.
Where Are the Family Films?
Something that’s been missed in the reporting of the summer box office was the dearth of family films. By this I mean movies that are rated G or PG and are intended for parents and small children. (PG-13 action films don’t count.) Over the last twenty years Hollywood has mostly given up on this field. Admittedly, some G and PG hits of earlier decades like Planet of the Apes, Jaws, and Top Gun would probably get a PG-13 rating today but a PG title like E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial just isn’t fashionable right now and isn’t a part of Hollywood’s release slate. Aside from animation houses like Pixar, no one is turning out truly family oriented movies and the only notable animated releases of summer 2018 were Incredibles 2 and Hotel Transylvania 3. This lack of family films may help explain the overall lack of ticket sales. Where a title for older audiences may attract single or double ticket buyers, a family film will attract parents and their kids who purchase three to five tickets at a time.
Still More Sequels
One of the ironies of the 2018 summer box office recovery is its reliance on sequels. The dominant narrative of the 2017 season was that audiences were staying away because of “franchise fatigue.” However, eleven of the top twenty films of summer 2017 were franchise titles. In 2018, franchise releases accounted for fourteen of the top twenty summer films. Clearly, “franchise fatigue” wasn’t the answer. What was different was quality. Summer 2017 was dragged down by such lousy films as The Mummy, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Transformers: The Last Knight. The summer of 2018 had its own disappointments like The Meg (which was lousy but nevertheless an international box office hit) and Mile 22 but the major releases were generally of high quality and the box office reflects this.
What to Make of Solo?
The popular understanding about Solo: A Star Wars Story is that the movie was a financial disappointment. But the numbers indicate something a little more complicated. Solo earned $213 million domestically and $392 million worldwide, putting Solo among the top ten grossing movies of the year so far and among the top five titles of the summer. But there are two variables here. The first is cost. Variety reports the production budget of Solo to be about $250 million with another $150 million spent on promotions. And since studios and theaters split the ticket revenues, Solo would have to make about $800 million just to break even. The second issue is expectations. This is the first Star Wars title under the Disney regime to make less than one billion dollars worldwide and it is the lowest grossing live action Star Wars feature film (unadjusted for inflation). Solo’s failure has bigger implications for the summer box office and for the industry as a whole. If a movie can be among the year’s top earners and still be a financial disappointment that indicates studios are spending too much money and have unrealistic box office expectations. That’s not sustainable and it could very easily blow up in Hollywood’s face.
Smart and Subversive Films
The summer box office is synonymous with popcorn entertainment and 2018 certainly provided that with titles like Avengers: Infinity War, Crazy Rich Asians, and Mission: Impossible – Fallout. But there was a surge of smart and subversive movies, many of them by filmmakers of color, that provided an alternative summer movie experience. BlacKkKlansman, Sorry to Bother You, The First Purge, and Blindspotting were in touch with the political zeitgeist and offered stories that were innovative and challenging as well as entertaining. Although prestige titles are usually released in the fall, a few summer releases will likely be candidates for best of the year lists including Eighth Grade and First Reformed. Documentaries also did very well including the Ruth Bader Ginsberg profile RBG and the Mr. Rogers biography Won’t You Be My Neighbor? The latter became the highest grossing biographical documentary. These films are encouraging. They represent an artistic bedrock underneath Hollywood’s decadent extravagance and these titles point a way forward when the event film paradigm eventually crumbles.
Yesterday’s episode of Sounds of Cinema featured a review of The Meg, the big budget killer shark film adapted from the novel by Steve Alten. The Meg is bad but not in a way that is any fun and that makes it a disappointing exception in the killer shark film genre. This niche of movies is quite prolific and it has generated a lot of titles that achieve a sublime schlockiness that is undeniably entertaining.
Jaws remains the de facto shark film. This movie wasn’t entirely original—monster movies had long been a staple of Hollywood—but Jaws was executed in a way that elevated the material into a perfect combination of populist entertainment and cinematic craft. But Jaws was—at its heart—the kind of monster picture that would have played at a drive-in a few decades ago and one of the attractions of monster movies in general and the killer shark genre in particular is their unapologetically low brow thrills. The iconic Jaws poster art captured this appeal.
Jaws ushered in a wave of killer shark movies such as Up from the Depths, Devil Fish, and Tintorera as well as other animal attack pictures like Grizzly and Orca. The 1981 Italian film Great White [also known as The Last Shark] followed the formula a little too closely. The picture was so similar to Jaws that Universal successfully sued to keep it out of US theaters. The shark movie genre has never really gotten past Jaws and films as diverse as Open Water and Deep Blue Sea and Shark Tale continue making deliberate references to it.
The Jaws series quickly descended into studio financed versions of the low budget sharksploitation churned out by independent filmmakers. Following the respectable Jaws 2, Universal embraced the B-movie nature of the genre with 1983’s Jaws 3-D. A reworking of Revenge of the Creature, the film plays like a comic book version of a shark movie as a giant great white goes on a rampage inside of a fantastical reimagining of Sea World. Jaws 3-D was released just as stereoscopy was going through a resurgence (one that would end shortly after the movie’s release). The 3-D format required a particular lighting and photography style and this combined with the sci-fi-like setting, the odd special effects, cornball dialogue, and the colorful 1980s production design resulted in a motion picture that is one of the most satisfying pieces of killer shark shlock.
Most of the shark films released from the late 1970s through the 80s were low budget affairs that tried to replicate the Jaws formula. Like the 1975 film, these stories revolved around a large man-eating shark that arrives at a tourist destination just in time for the resort’s grand opening. The hero is usually a blue collar type who fights the shark as well as a corrupt politician or business owner who is willing to put people in harm’s way for the sake of dollars. The films typically conclude with a fishing expedition in which the shark is spectacularly destroyed.
The Jaws formula triangulates conflicts between the individual, nature and society. These stories are primarily about our primal fears but secondarily about social anxieties. In these pictures, mankind engages in a struggle to survive with one of nature’s greatest predators but the protagonist also participates in a moral contest with the community. The endings of these films tentatively reaffirm man’s dominion over the earth while also questioning civilization’s priorities.
Other shark movies made at this time deviated from the Jaws formula. One of the popular alternative approaches combined shark action with crime stories and undersea treasure hunts such as 1975’s Shark’s Treasure and 1979’s The Shark Hunter and 1988’s Night of the Sharks. These films strayed from the primal thrills of the Jaws-formula with scenarios that were cynical and often brutal. One of the unfortunate qualities of these films was the routine killing of actual sharks. Many animals, especially tiger sharks, were often abused by the production and killed on camera.
After 1987’s Jaws the Revenge ended Universal’s high profile killer shark series the genre faded out until the late 1990s. One of the major titles kicking off this new wave was 1999’s Shark Attack. This film and its contemporaries adhered to the Jaws formula but instead of relying upon clumsy mechanical sharks or enlisting real ones to be killed on camera, the movies of the Shark Attack-era used documentary footage (even if it didn’t necessarily fit into the continuity of the action). Shark Attack heralded a new era of killer shark movies that included Red Water and Blue Demon and Shark Zone as well as sequels to Shark Attack.
In between the post-Jaws fad and the debut of Shark Attack, the Discovery Channel had massive success with its annual Shark Week programming. There was always a tension in Shark Week between the Discovery Channel’s stated goal of providing educational programming and commercial-driven sensationalism. This played out in Shark Week’s mixed messages as fear mongering shark attack documentaries were intercut with calls for shark conservation. Over three decades, Discovery’s Shark Week programming has gradually gotten dumber and in recent years the channel has become one of the biggest purveyors of shark shlock. In 2013 and 2014 the channel featured pseudo-documentaries that deliberately misled the audience. While Discovery has since reigned in the fictionalizations, the link between Shark Week and sharksploitation films is evident in the cross promotion with features like The Shallows and The Meg.
The era of shark films that started with Shark Attack were also distinguished by a particular focus on the Carcharocles megalodon, an ancestor of the great white shark that was the size of a city bus. An entire subgenre of shark movies about the megalodon has emerged including 2001’s Shark Hunter and 2002’s Megalodon and 2018’s The Meg. Probably the most popular megaladon film among killer shark aficionados is 2003’s Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. The movie is such an extraordinary cinematic train wreck that it has to be seen by lovers of shlock cinema. (And it is far more entertaining than The Meg.)
The megalodon films were made possible by advancements in digital technology that made giant sharks accessible to low budget filmmakers. These digital tools were seized upon by The Asylum, an independent production company whose films frequently play on the SyFy Channel. The Asylum styled itself as Roger Corman’s American International Pictures for the digital age with throwbacks to the drive-in B pictures of an earlier era. Sharks are the cornerstone of Asylum’s oeuvre. The company’s output shifted the sharksplotation genre into a new phase with deliberately silly titles like Mega-Shark Versus Giant Octopus, 2-Headed Shark Attack, and Planet of the Sharks. But The Asylum’s greatest success was the Sharknado series. With six installments in all, Sharknado is one of the unlikeliest cinematic successes of this decade. The first film was released in 2013 and became a sensation. It premiered on the SyFy Channel but Sharknado was given some limited theatrical showings that played to sold out crowds. A sequel followed every year since with D-list celebrities vying for cameo appearances. (Donald Trump angled to play the President of the United States in 2015’s Sharknado 3 but when that fell through he had to settle for being the actual President.)
The past three years have seen sharks return to theaters. 2016’s The Shallows, 2017’s 47 Meters Down, and 2018’s The Meg were well received by audiences. The movies befitted from high production values, competent filmmakers, and a strong cast but they were also rooted in the primal thrills of classic sharksploitation.
Given the ratings bonanza of the Sharknado series and the box office success of The Meg it is unlikely that sharksploitation will ebb anytime soon. The genre has proven remarkably flexible and its evolution has mirrored the changes in filmmaking over the past four decades. While real sharks are in danger of extinction, killer shark movies are here to stay.
