In 2025, the same year that marks the 50-year anniversary of Jaws, Australia is having a year of shark films that challenge the norms of this genre.
The recently-released Dangerous Animals (directed by Sean Byrne) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The film depicts a murderous fisherman who kidnaps tourists and feeds them to sharks.
Another film, Fear Below (directed by Matthew Holmes), is a 1940s gangster-meets-shark thriller about a bull shark isolated in unusual murky river waters.
Finally, directed by Kiah Roache-Turner, Beast of War (released on 9 October) is also a period film, staging the shark ambush among a series of Australian World War II soldiers stranded once their ship is attacked and sunk.
Sharks on screen
Sharks have an ambivalent relationship to humans. The Australian Shark Incident Database reports that over the past 10 years, there were an average of 20 incidents annually where humans were injured by sharks, including an average of 2.8 fatalities. These statistics should be viewed in the context of an estimated 600 million individual visits to the beach.
Despite these tiny numbers, the fear of being attacked by a shark is common, and has led to policies and technologies that currently see approximately 100 million sharks killed globally per year.
Research has shown that shark mortality is directly linked to how sharks are characterised in both news and entertainment media.
The majority of fictional shark films overtly portray shark-human interactions as being deeply threatening to humans. Such mischaracterisation led marine scientists to pen an open letter to Columbia Pictures in 2023 voicing concern about how their production The Shallows – touted as “Jaws for a new generation” – could negatively impact public opinion.
While most shark films centralise threat to humans in their narratives, the uses to which the figure of the shark is put has evolved over time. The context for their threat and the ways in which shark and human interact has, we argue, shifted from a straightforward relation of “attack” to one of “encounter”.
Seen as part of a broader shark conservation movement, this evolution is significant for impacting how humans think about themselves as part of a larger system of human-environment relations.
Evolving representations
The most familiar image of the shark on screen is a monstrous entity – an oversized, malevolent creature that intentionally stalks humans. Jaws is widely credited for popularising this image and for instigating the sub-genre of “shark horror”. The film’s personification of the shark as an evil serial killer has been reliably repeated in almost every shark horror film since, including Deep Blue Sea, Shark Bait and The Black Demon.
“The Jaws Effect” describes the way this image is used as a political device to rationalise how sharks are negatively understood and treated in the world.
The story context for shark-human contact in shark horror often uses the heroism of triumphing over the shark to reflect a broader sense of self-actualisation, often in a way that privileges male control.
Alternatively, the shark can stand as a metaphor for grief or trauma, including in a range of newer films that Susan Hopkins identifies as “postfeminist shark horror”. In films including The Shallows, The Reef: Stalked and 47 Meters Down, the lead characters are assertive and sexualised women who confront and slay monstrous sharks representing their own “damage”.
Numerous recent shark films can also be understood in the terms of eco-horror, where the story context highlights negative effects of human activity on the climate and environment. In The Meg, Under Paris, The Reef, Deep Blue Sea 3 and the campy Sharknado series, ecological disruption is explicitly cited as the reason for the killer shark’s appearance.
In Under Paris, for instance, the ocean pollution of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is connected to a mutated shark that has adapted to the freshwater environment of the Seine, where it threatens a triathlon event.
While action and affect in these films remains firmly trained on the figure of the threatening shark, the context for this threat is not simply “natural” shark doings, but the human-induced environmental change that has altered its behaviour.
Australian context
The three Australian shark films that have premiered this year both follow and depart from these gendered and environmental representations. However, as Fear Below director Matthew Holmes comments during an interview, each film takes the standard generic formula of the shark creature feature and embeds it in another genre style as a point of difference.
Released to theatres this week, Beast of War follows a series of World War II soldiers stranded in the Timor Sea among the wreckage of their warship after it’s attacked by Japanese bombers.
Structured with the camaraderie common between soldiers in a war film, the narrative stars Mark Cole Smith as Leo, an Indigenous officer who’s treated poorly by his fellow white Australian soldiers. The shark – a six-metre-long great white – stalks the soldiers at sea against this backdrop of racism.
Picking off the prejudiced members of the team one by one, the shark acts as an enforcer of social equality. Leo survives the shark attacks with his closest comrade, but this survival mirrors the narratives of self-actualisation and male control typical of previous shark films.
While period-set shark films are uncommon, Fear Below’s twist on the shark genre is similar. The film is also set in the 1940s and follows a team of divers hired by gangsters to retrieve stolen gold lost beneath murky river waters.
Using authentic diving suits from the time, the film focuses on the claustrophobia of the gold retrieval – with the added complication of a deadly shark. Another effort to deviate from the stock-standard shark film is the shift of the titular shark – most commonly the great white – to a bull shark, an Australian shark species where the females swim upriver to seek safety during pregnancy.
Fear Below also evolves the shark genre with gendered and racial character dynamics. The film’s heroes are the two diving specialists – Jimmy, played by Indigenous actor Jacob Junior Nayinggul, and Clara (Hermione Corfield), a white woman.
Both characters suffer under the racist and sexist attitudes of the gangster characters (representing the prevailing attitudes of the time), who are treated as the higher villain, and part of their plight is to escape the abuse of the gang while also surviving shark attack. Corfield is far from a sexualised object, spending most of the film in authentic 1940s diving gear.
Yet, despite both Fear Below and Beast of War attempting to deviate from the generic shark film, their take on the shark as attacker, and the representation of shark as villain, is fairly typical.
Dangerous Animals offers an alternative. In the film, a serial killer (played by Jai Courtney) poses as a guide taking tourists out to safely swim with the sharks. Instead, he tortures his guests, luring sharks to the boat while filming the subsequent feeding frenzy.
The film suggests that the sharks themselves aren’t the villain, and that the shark encounter only becomes a violent attack due to the monstrous actions of the human male.
The film’s approach to filming the shark is also more staged around the idea of “encounter” rather than “attack”. Shark films – including Fear Below and Beast of War – commonly feature the typical underwater shot of an approaching shark, mouth open and full of teeth. This shot engages with the longstanding fear of attack, or the fear of being devoured alive.
In Dangerous Animals, all the shark attacks are viewed from above water, from the perspective of the serial killer. Shots filmed underwater and sourced from real footage taken by shark researchers and divers alternatively show sharks as majestic and non-aggressive.
As Dangerous Animals director Sean Byrne has said:
“… It’s high time that sharks stop being demonised and we see them for the majestic creatures they are.”
Much of the commentary regarding Jaws at 50 has focused on how the film shaped a global understanding of human-shark interaction as inherently dangerous.
With these three new productions, Australian cinema is emerging as a key site for challenging and complicating that view for 21st-century audiences – displacing the singular threat of the shark to a broader context of dangerous gendered, raced and environmental conditions.
