12 Reasons Sharksploitation is a Fintastic Documentary

Sharksploitation is among the three serial killer documentaries streaming this summer. At first, I thought it was somewhat of a stretch including Sharksploitaiton on that list. But not now after having seen it. Not all shark movies have sharks who in essence are serial killers, but a good deal do.

Anyway, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the Shudder Original release on July 21 ever since I learned about it from Bloody Disgusting.

A trailer hadn’t been released at that time. One has now. (And is included below.) I didn’t know much about it beyond the short synopsis, “In the wake of the blockbuster classic Jaws, a new subgenre was born. This new documentary explores the weird, wild cinematic legacy of sharks on film and the world’s undying fascination.”

That was all the hook I needed. I waited with bated breath for Sharksploitation‘s release and immediately watched it. There were so many reasons to love the documentary, but here were the top 12 reasons I thought it was absolutely fintastic. (Sorry, not sorry. Couldn’t resist the play on words.)

1. The variety of talking heads.

There were directors and producers of shark (and other animal attack) movies, including Roger Corman, Joe Dante, and Joe Alves, and so many more.

But there were also people like professor and monster expert Dr. Emily Zarka and horror film historian Rebekah McKendry, Ph.D.

Scientists of the sea were also represented by oceanographer and marine biologist Gregory Stone, PH.D., and marine biologists Vicky Vasquez and David Shiffman.

Conservationist Wendy Benchley, Peter Benchley’s wife, also participated in the documentary.

2. The clear definition of what exactly a sharksploitation movie is.

At its core, sharksploitation movies are exploitation horror movies, but they exploit sharks instead of women. Or, as director Adam Rifkin summed it up, it’s a “sub-genre that capitalizes on the popularity of shark mania.”

But then actor Matthew Mercer added that what almost all shark movies are exploiting is Jaws.

There’s also something else these kinds of movies have in common. Or, as Rebekah McKendry, Ph.D. put it, “It is not a sharksploitation movie unless someone screams ‘Get out of the water!’”

3. How shark movies capitalize on, or exploit (tomayto, tomahto) thalassophobia.

I never thought about it, but yes. They do —even if you don’t have a fear of the ocean and dark water. Shark movies plunge you into undeniably uncomfortable territory.

4. All the history and trivia.

Sharksploitation included all kinds of great tidbits. Here are just some of my favorites.

Which movie was the first to use a rubber shark?

That’d be Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931).

The first sharks in movies weren’t adversaries.

People were aware of their danger and respected that, but they also accepted that it was something they had to live with. Treasure hunting movies had dangerous sharks, but James Bond movies introduced the concept of sharks as evil.

Sharks were more often portrayed as gods rather than malevolent or benevolent, as they were in Tabu (1931), Omoo-Omoo The Shark God (1949), and She Gods of Shark Reef (1958).

Shark lore from around the world.

Sharksploitation briefly explores some of the legends and myths from cultures around the world. In some places, they believe sharks are almost mystical. In others, they believe that they may contain the spirits of ancestors. And some cultures have lore about sharks helping and protecting seafarers.

Sharks were never used to execute people.

Professor and monster expert Dr. Emily Zarka explained that’s an invention of movies. As far as she knew, people using sharks to execute people in real life never happened.

The first illustrations of sharks attacking people started in the 18th century

Dr. Zarka explained it started in the 1700s with depictions of sharks following alongside slave ships. (Sadly, it’s not hard to imagine why. Likely to feed on dead or dying “cargo” that was tossed overboard, which is a stomach-churning thought.)

But it was until the 19th century that more shark attack encounters arrived in print. She said there was one story in particular that papers “latched onto” about a cabin boy whose leg was bitten off by a shark when he fell overboard in Cuba.

Dr. Zarka said it inspired the painting “Watson and the shark,” which is an exaggerated account of the encounter. She also mentioned it was painted by a famous American painter but didn’t name who. I of course had to look that up: John Singleton Copley.

A couple of movies caught deaths on camera —and kept the footage in the final cuts.

A stuntman died during the making of Shark! with Burt Reynolds, that was later renamed Man-Eater. The producers had been filming when it happened and kept the footage in the movie. But even worse, they used it to garner publicity by advertising the tragedy. “That is the dark side of the term ‘exploitation,’” Adam Rifkin said.

Another death during filming was also included in a movie. This time it was the death of a shark that was hit with a boom stick in the documentary Blue Water, White Death.

The importance of the documentary Blue Water, White Death.

Before Blue Water, White Death (1971), there was only one underwater photo of a great white shark. (Taken by Ron Taylor.) The film captured not only photos but videos, which was due to the invention of shark cages. Peter Gimball created them for the filming of the documentary.

Where the term “jumping the shark” came from.

The movie defined “jumping the shark” the same way the Oxford Dictionary did: it’s “a point at which far-fetched events are included merely for the sake of novelty, indicative of a decline in quality.”

The term was born from a Happy Days episode where Fonzi jumped a shark in homage to Jaws.

Piranha created a very big fungus among us problem.

Director Joe Dante shared how they filmed Piranha (1978) in a pool, and the fake blood they used created a fungus that literally ate the paint off the pool’s walls. The pool brought in scientists to try and identify the fungus.

The whole pool had to be shut down to kill the fungus before it was unleashed anywhere else. Dante felt that was the most interesting part of Piranha. I agree. (And I’m wondering why it hasn’t inspired a horror movie of its own. That’s a scary plot if I ever heard one!)

What they used broccoli and milk for in 47 Meters Down

Director Johannes Roberts explained they filmed the movie in a pool, but he wanted to create a more real atmosphere. Ocean water isn’t sanitized like pool water. It’s murky, and there’s plankton and whatnot floating around.

So they pulled a bunch of broccoli apart and tossed it in the water with milk, which apparently got pretty stinky. The pool was under a canvas tent, and they filmed during a heat wave. Ewww. (But at least they didn’t create a whole new fungus.)

Sharks don’t growl IRL.

Today’s shark movies all include the sound effect, thanks to Jaws: The Revenge (a.k.a. Jaws 4). Although, it also happened in Jaws 3, too, but only in one scene. (After the glass shatters.)

Sharks do get cancer.

Sharks have amazing healing properties, but somewhere along the way they also got accredited with never getting cancer. The marine biologists in the movie explained sharks very much are susceptible to the Big C.

Peter Benchley has a shark named after him.

In Sharksploitation, marine biologist Vicky Vasquez talked about the ninja lanternshark, a new shark species that was discovered in 2010.  They’re jet black and can glow, which hides their shadow and serves as an invisibility cloak. Thus, they can sneak up on prey. That’s how it got it’s common name.

But because they discovered it shortly before the 40th anniversary of Jaws, they decided its scientific name would be etmopterus benchleyi. But it wasn’t to honor the man who had written the book that inspired an iconic movie. Rather, “it was to recognize all the wonderful work that the Benchley family has done for ocean work that no one would think about.”

Either way, it’s pretty cool.

5. The timeline.

To travel back and forth between movies, Sharksploitaiton created a timeline of movies they covered, which also included the various eras of shark movies, such as:

• Treasure hunting movies (which always had a shark scene much like Westerns had an obligatory rattlesnake scene)
• Jaws
• Jaws Rip-Offs (which included other “when nature attacks” movies like Piranha, Alligator, etc.)
• Syfy movies (Sharktopus, Sharknado and the like)
• People being left behind or stranded in shark-infested waters (Open Water, The Reef, etc)

6. Seeing so much footage from movies on best shark movie lists.

I recently analyzed 10 lists of best shark movies partially in anticipation of the Sharksploitation documentary, which included footage from many of them, including Shark!, Blue Water, White Death, and Tintorera: Killer Shark. (Just to name a few.)

7. Sharksploitation unequivocally laid to rest what inspired Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws.

People used to say Jaws was inspired by the 1916 Jersey Shore shark attacks, but History vs. Hollywood disputed that. They included a quote from Benchley where he explained it was something he saw in a newspaper article. Sharksploitation had archive footage of that moment in which Benchley said:

“In 1964, long before all of this drama had happened, I read a story in the New York Daily News about a fisherman who had caught 4,550 pound great white shark off the beaches of Long Island. And I thought, ‘My God, what would happen if one of those things came into a resort community and wouldn’t go away?’”

8. The marine biologist who shamed Shark Week.

I didn’t even realize there was a megalodon controversy/conspiracy theory until I watched Sharksploitation. Apparently, many people now believe something like the movie The Meg could actually happen, which is due to some Discovery mockumentary that posits such a shark is still alive.

They never named the movie, but I think it’s Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives. It’s been part of Shark Week before. (Or maybe all of them since 2013 for all I know.)

The trouble is, the mockumentary specifically warned viewers that the government and scientists are lying about the megalodon’s extinction. All of Sharksploitation‘s marine biologists disputed that.

“Megalodon went extinct 370 million years ago,” oceanographer and marine biologist Gregory Stone, PH.D. said. “And in my opinion, I can’t imagine any way whatsoever there’s still any in existence today.”

Marine biologist Vicky Vasquez added, “Nowadays, it’s the megalodon mockumentary that really irks scientists because it’s the idea of being…of people being tricked into thinking that there’s something out there that’s not really there and that it can encourage current negative behavior. It did what Jaws did by accident. Jaws accidentally convinced people something was real, and the meg mockumentary was trying to get people to think that something that wasn’t real could be.”

But my favorite part was when marine biologist David Shiffman shamed Shark Week. He explained how he speaks all over the world and has been asked about megalodon’s existence ever since.

“I’ve spoken to thousands of people all over the world,” he said. “I’ve given these public talks about sharks and shark conservation. I can’t remember the last time someone didn’t ask me about megalodon. This is…Shark Week just absolutely broke public trust with this.”

9. The Human Week shirt.

Shiffman’s shirt was also a hoot. It said “Human Week” with a cartoon graphic of sharks gathered in front of a TV.

10. The emphasis on respect and conservation.

I was expecting Sharksploitaiton to only be about shark movies. Nope. I was pleasantly surprised that it also highlighted shark conservation efforts and the continued for it. #SharkLivesMatter

11. All the quotable moments.

Oh my goodness, if I had been reading Sharksploitaiton as a book instead of watching it as a documentary, I definitely would’ve highlighted the quotes from the following folks.

On demons and monsters

“Peter Benchley used to say, ‘We love our demons. And sharks represent iconically a kind of demon-y thing. Sharks are not demons, but they are dangerous, and when you go into their wild environment, when you go into any wild animal’s environment, you’ve got to respect the rules of that environment.” ~Gregory Stone, Ph.D. – Oceanographer, Marine Biologist

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“Whenever we tend to demonize something, if that’s a human or an inanimate object or an animal, it’s from a lack of understanding.” ~Dr. Emily Zarka

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“So sharks become associated with being kept as pets, by being controlled by humans. And more specifically, being controlled by villains. So it’s really doubling down on this idea that sharks themselves are inherently bad or evil because they’re being used in an evil way by humans, which of course begs the question of who are the real monsters in that situation?” Dr. Emily Zarka

Sharks, the Supernatural, and Losing Mystery

“It goes back to this idea that we want to believe in the supernatural and the mysterious. I think especially as technology and science advances, we lose a little bit of the mystery. Or we think that we lose some of the mystery that exists in our world and the idea that someone is out there who could discover this thousands-of-year-old giant megalodon or prehistoric creature is really attractive, not only cause it allows us to stake our claim over part of the environment that we might not understand, but because it allows us to keep that imagination alive.” ~ Dr. Emily Zarka

It’s All About Perspective

Dr. Zarka explained she was a fan of exaggerated, campy, and implausible horror sci-fi while the zombie vs. shark scene in Tintorera played. She said we can enjoy such movies, as along as we keep a couple of things in mind.

“And I think that’s the important thing with looking at any kind of horror film or any kind of film that paints a real person or a real animal, like a shark, as being a monster or being evil in some capacity, is if we approach it as fun, as an exaggeration and not as reality, I think that we can still appreciate it.”

Absolutely essential

“We absolutely must have sharks in the ocean. We need our apex predators ’cause they keep the balance in the ocean, and if you don’t have them, the balance gets all out of whack.” ~Wendy Benchley

12. The biggest takeaway.

Sharksploitation helped me view sharks and the shark horror movies I love through a new lens. Sharks are neither our enemies nor our friends. They’re just like us: creatures living their lives and honoring their natures.

But it’s their natures —misunderstood as they may sometimes be— that have inspired some incredible movies.

Sharksploitation Trailer

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