10 great shark attack films

Released in the summer of 1975, 50 years ago, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws made audiences around the globe afraid to go back into the water. Although its rapacious great white shark appears only briefly on screen, Spielberg masterfully builds suspense through the interplay between what’s seen above the surface and what lurks below. Scenes of carefree tourists swimming are juxtaposed with ominous shots of their dangling legs beneath the waves, all intensified by John Williams’ famous menacing score. 

The true horror lies in the anticipation – the dread of the unseen predator poised to strike – making Jaws not only a cinematic thrill but also a perverse pleasure. With its massive box office success and overwhelmingly positive reception, Spielberg’s film heralded the birth of the high-concept summer blockbuster and supercharged the shark as one of cinema’s most enduring threats.

As a subspecies of eco-horror, shark attack films rely on a handful of flexible yet familiar tropes. A fishy predator claiming a coastal or oceanic area as its hunting ground. A figure of authority teaming up with a scientist and/or shark hunter to stop it. Numerous gruesome deaths will ensue, before the shark is ultimately destroyed in a dramatic, often explosive finale. 

But while these elements form the genre’s foundation, they have evolved to include increasingly unconventional settings. This evolution reflects the genre’s lasting appeal, bolstered by a wave of recent shark-themed franchises and sustained by new releases such as Dangerous Animals (Sean Byrne, 2025) and Fear Below (Matthew Holmes, 2025).

Director: Steven Spielberg

Going drastically over budget and over schedule by a staggering 104 days, and cursed by a mechanical shark continually malfunctioning during production and frequent bad weather, Spielberg thought Jaws would be the end of his filmmaking career. Adapted from Peter Benchley’s novel, its story sees a great white making Amity Island its feeding ground through a number of lethal attacks. Amity police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is forced to set out to hunt down the shark with the help of oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and grizzled shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw).

This simple adventure story of three men on a boat is elevated into a tense horror through its script, lead performances and Spielberg’s skilled direction. Although the shark is hardly seen, it is both a physical and symbolic threat as it comes to represent both a tangible test to Brody’s increasingly insecure masculinity and a return of the repressed past for Quint, culminating in a film that is as rich in meaning as it is in adventure.

Director: Enzo G. Castellari

Of all the shark attack films that followed in the wake of Jaws’ success, Great White is perhaps the most notorious. The plot is extremely similar to Spielberg’s film: a great white makes a coastal community its feeding ground only to be hunted by two men on a boat, one of whom is a grizzled shark hunter. Other similarities occur to the extent that Universal Pictures attempted to prevent the film’s distribution. Their attempts were initially unsuccessful, but courts later agreed and Great White was pulled from American cinemas.

Herein then lies the pleasure of Great White. While it wallows in ‘borrowing’ from Jaws it also embraces exploitation through bizarre scenes (the shark ‘roars’; the mayor’s legs are bitten off while he hangs from a helicopter) and a blatant disregard for continuity as the film cuts from actors to real-world shark footage, resulting in the fish fluctuating in size and species.

Director: Renny Harlin

With audience expectations evolving since the release of Jaws, Deep Blue Sea established new shark attack tropes in a number of ways: by swapping the bulk of the great white for the sleek and fast mako, by making its sharks continually visible as opposed to hidden, and by deftly combining real world footage with animatronic and CG sharks. Despite this, its narrative remains conventional, seeing an underwater research station becoming the hunting ground for the genetically modified sharks it has created.

Renny Harlin, an accomplished director of action cinema including Die Hard 2 (1990) and Cliffhanger (1993), delivers competent set-pieces, filling the film with numerous explosions and deaths as characters are mauled, bitten, chewed and swallowed whole in a variety of graphic combinations. Despite some poor CG, the sharks are a palpable threat. As they speed through the debris and flames in pursuit of their prey, they compound the sense that Deep Blue Sea is one long – but quite thrilling – chase sequence.

Director: Chris Kentis

Open Water is based on the real-life experience of tourist couple Tom and Eileen Lonegran who were accidentally stranded at sea while on a scuba-diving trip. When the film’s couple realise a rescue isn’t coming, they initially bicker as hunger and exhaustion set in. Hours pass almost imperceptibly, underscored with the ever-increasing threat of circling sharks.

Through assured direction, Chris Kentis steadily builds a strong sense of hopelessness within his characters. Alone, they are dwarfed by the ocean, its sheer volume visually consuming them as much as the sharks will eventually do. The perception of nature then dramatically shifts in this film, from the underwater spectacle marvelled at through a diving mask into something bleak and relentless. No longer exotic, the ocean becomes a blank space of indifference, isolating the couple even further as they submit to their fate.

Director: Andrew Traucki

The Reef’s narrative is the epitome of shark attack films: a group of characters stranded at sea become prey for the requisite great white. Tasked with delivering a yacht to its new owner, Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling) invites four friends along with him. On their second day, the yacht strikes a coral reef and capsizes. Once in the water, the group decide to rescue themselves by swimming to a nearby island.

As soon as the shark appears, the film becomes a futile race for the shore. As the characters frantically swim for their lives, they are pursued, taunted and then consumed, one by one, in fast and brutal attacks. The film makes tense drama out of the shark’s steady whittling down of the group. The question of who will be next compounds the characters’ descent into arguments and anxiety, as the camera, right next to them and bobbing between above and below, exaggerates their terror.

Director: Anthony C. Ferrante

The first in the popular six-film franchise of straight-to-streaming disaster films, Sharknado adds an enjoyable dose of silliness to the Jaws template. A hurricane moving off the coast of Mexico draws into its funnel shark-infested seawater, which is released when the hurricane hits the mainland to flood Los Angeles.

The plot only gets more absurd from this point onward and, much like Great White, positively wades in increasingly bizarre set-pieces. Car roofs are ripped off by ravenous sharks. A character falls from a helicopter directly into the open mouth of a waiting predator. Tornados form around the sharks to create the titular sharknados. Then, in the closing scenes, the (ironically named) hero Fin (Ian Ziering) chainsaws his way out of a shark and rescues one of the film’s heroines. Funny, ridiculous and gleefully mindless, Sharknado is a prime example of contemporary exploitation – a markedly successful one given its equally popular sequels.

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

The Shallows contains its narrative within the restricted space of a rocky outcrop where surfing medical student Nancy (Blake Lively) is stranded just 200 yards from the shore following a shark attack. Jaume Collet-Serra’s film realistically plays out the drama in vivid detail, as Nancy steadily dehydrates, sustains blood wounds and gets ever weaker as the great white increases its attempts to attack her.

While the narrative of The Shallows is ostensibly Nancy surviving her ordeal, like Jaws it invests its shark with meaning beyond lethal threat, as it functions as both apex predator and major metaphor for the recent loss of her mother. Just as the shark circles Nancy, so does her grief, patrolling her psychological borders, waiting to consume her. The external injuries she sustains, bloody and raw, reflect her psychological wounding and, in order to survive her ordeal, Nancy must confront the shark and her grief, killing one to be able to process the other.

Director: Johannes Roberts

With cage diving becoming an increasingly popular tourist activity, it was inevitable that screenwriters would find it a potent mix of circumstances for a shark attack film: the safety of the cage, full air supply, strong metal cable between boat and cage. All can be inverted to turn recreation into a desperate struggle for survival. While holidaying in Mexico, sisters Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) are enjoying a shark watch cage dive when the winch boom breaks and their cage sinks 47 meters to the ocean floor. Stranded, the sisters are soon surrounded by the prerequisite great whites and running out of oxygen.

Despite the open bars of the cage and the vast ocean location, Joahnnes Roberts’ film is a claustrophobic experience, filled with dread as the women desperately use what little equipment they have to enable their escape while fending off increasing numbers of sharks. Their actions are believable and within the limits of their inexperience, heightening the tension and preparing the audience for a surprising closing plot twist.

Director: Jon Turteltaub

Filled with numerous Jaws references, The Meg blatantly acknowledges its heritage to go one step further, swapping the 25-foot great white for a gargantuan 75-foot megalodon. While exploring the Mariana Trench, a research team are attacked by the titular beast. Rapidly running out of oxygen, rugged rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is sent to recover them. As they make their escape, the megalodon follows them into the warm waters of the ocean where it begins to wreak destruction as it heads towards the mainland.

While deftly combining taut set pieces with the careful building of a relationship between Taylor and oceanographer Suyin (Li Bingbing), The Meg is ostensibly an action vehicle for its star, Statham. As such, Taylor repeatedly faces off against the shark in spectacular (but also absurd) action sequences as he punches, kicks, stabs and impales his way to saving himself and his crew, resulting in a highly polished and highly entertaining $130 million B-movie.

Director: Xavier Gens

Of all the films within this list, Under Paris makes most blatant its ecological themes when its first scenes open amid the greasy waters of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where a group of marine researchers are tracking an over-sized mako they have named Lilith. Unsurprisingly, she attacks and kills them all. Three years later, Lilith has mutated further, growing in size, capable of parthenogenesis and adapted to fresh water, enabling her to make her way across the Pacific and into the River Seine where she and her offspring begin to hunt.

While a tangible threat, Lilith carries meaning within her great bulk. Mutated by pollution and efficiently adapting to both environment loss and climate change, she and her offspring are an eco-warning writ large. As a violent force of nature, she is the embodiment of environmental disaster, a signification she successfully carries through to the film’s bleak and unexpected ending.