I’m at the day job and my manager comes rolling into the department with a cart full of big, black crates: seven of them. I can feel my intestines tensing and my chest puffs full like a porcupine bearing its nettles. My manager sees my face and gives me a sincere pout. “I’m sorry,” she says, and leaves me alone with the seven immense boxes. I know what this is without ever opening a crate. It’s more Funko Pops.
We already have no room for them; there’s no special display ready to take on this sizeable workload, but apparently fandom needs these little vinyl tributes like most people need food and shelter…(who am I kidding, I snatched up the Chase Exclusive Addams Family Gomez as soon as I saw his adorable little face and fencing sword). So I put away the merchandising chart and open the box on top. Immediately, the aggression toward these stupid little tchotchkes falls away and I pick up a fun-size Great White Shark. In his mouth, a compressed air canister. I’m in love.
There is an abstract feeling of warmth and compassion when looking at the small (albeit large for Funko) shark. Maybe the idea of owning such a renowned predator, giving it a home, makes me feel a little more in control of the deep, dark depths of the ocean. The fear has a name, thalassophobia, and it’s the fear of deep bodies of water with things lurking in the unknown depths. Do those aerial photos of giant shadows under small boats give you the wiggins? Then you just might have it, too. But we’re drawn to it, the elation and gravitas of seeing a bigger, bolder shark. We saw it last year in The Meg (2018), and we never stop going back to 1975’s Blockbuster smash Jaws. When Shark Week premiered in 1988, Discovery Channel’s ratings doubled from the year prior. Despite the number of shark-bite fatalities being less than that of attacks by dogs, there is a primal charisma in sharks being cast as vicious maneaters.
In recent years, sharks have jumped out of the water and into every mode of destruction imaginable. In 2011, Sharks made the leap into sand and snow (the films Sand Sharks and Snow Shark respectively), sending tremors through land-lubbers who thought it was safe to just stay out of the water. In 2013, Ghost Shark imagined a new kind of haunted horror, creating a menace that attacks from bathtubs, ponds, and yes, even small cups of water. This is the same year of the infamous first installment of the psychotic franchise Sharknado, which sees the natural terror of the shark clamp its teeth into the natural disaster of a tornado. And this is just the tip of the iceberg (another natural anomaly that hides its grotesque size underwater). Sharks just keep evolving in the imaginations of big monster filmmakers.
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Sharks have been getting bigger, badder, and apparently are growing more heads. There have been films about two-headed and three-headed sharks, Dino-sharks, Sharktopi, Jurassic Sharks, Megoladons, Mega-sharks, and genetically-engineered Smart sharks. No matter how bad these films are (most produced by the SyFy network), we still demand more. It seems the only water not covered is micro-sharks, like vicious little piranhas in shark form, and maybe that’s why this Funko Bruce Pop! is sitting on my mantle alongside Bret “The Hitman” Hart and Leatherface. Anything this cute couldn’t possibly eat me alive. And it’s true, even at full size, it’s highly unlikely a shark would eat me, or any one for that matter, unless it mistook us for a seal.
That brings me to a seemingly unanswerable question: why sharks? They’ve gotten bad wrap in cinema as a prolific go-to monster of the deep. Knowing that the love of horror is rooted in catharsis, what possible relief does one get from the 2010 boom of Shark spectacle? It hasn’t let up, in fact it’s doubled down (about 47 Meters Down). Yet, removed from a few notable exceptions, shark films swim in the realm of absurdity. We want these creatures abstracted from what they actually are. They’ve become hyperbolized versions of themselves, hungry and vicious and somehow “enhanced.” Even the most basic iterations see the sharks adapting to improbable environs: in Shark Lake (2015) with Dolph Lungren, we see a bull shark adapted to freshwater. In Jaws: The Revenge (1987), we see a shark “out for revenge” – an emotion ratcheted up from homosapiens to give the shark “motivation.” The tagline even boasts, “This time, it’s personal.” Rarely do we see a shark just…being a shark (this abstraction become more potent with the notably bad CGI).
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In 2018, Tripwire Interactive announced the PC game Maneater, in which you actually play as a shark, avoiding the threats of the ocean, finding food, and terrorizing beach-goers in your wake. It feels like the ultimate culmination of our shark obsession: in the end, we identify with sharks. Though, we do not fully understand them. I assume this is why Shark Week is so popular – giving us knowledge and insight into elusive and mysterious shark behavior. The More You Know, you might say.
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Sharks are the top of their food chain, apex predators, but they also maintain the ecosystem of the sea. Their presence serves as an indicator of ocean health, and they maintain the diversity of their environment. In this, it’s easy to see the similarities between sharks and ourselves. Despite our mastery of land, these buggers master the ocean – and our knowledge of the undersea world is still severely limited. Ultimately, sharks are respected for maintaining the balance of the sea for us, and yet, we still seek our own species dominance. And maybe this is why we cast them as villains time and time again. In Planet of the Sharks (2016), it’s even acknowledged that when the Earth is 98% water, sharks dominate the planet, not humans, and they’re out for a kill. But, the Shark Evolution over the past nine years should remind us that sharks are mostly feared when they aren’t sharks at all.
There are exceptions, films which see sharks unenhanced, and somehow these are the most terrifying and well-made shark movies of all time. The Shallows in 2016 pits a great white against Blake Lively, terrorizing her in a seemingly inescapable predicament 200 meters from shore. 47 Meters Down (2017) offers a claustrophobic horror that is only made more tense by the presence of the hungry, sharp-toothed fish. And, of course, there’s Jaws. Jaws premiered before the push for shark conservation and understanding, but it still holds up as being the best Shark movie ever made. And maybe that’s what makes it? Maybe, our relationship and understanding that sharks are the humans of sea, the ones that maintain order and ecology but have the capacity to murder us without fair warning, makes these films all the more terrifying. Similar to our obsession with Ted Bundy or Jeffery Dahmer, they’re like us, but they’re not us, for one very horrifying reason. These kind of “normal” shark films are as rare as shark attacks themselves, and they do offer the catharsis that if we ever found ourselves face to face with a shark…we might still make it our alive.
Or maybe, just maybe, after all the thought, speculation, love, and respect, shark cinema is just a ridiculously good time. I mean, what’s more amazingly gratifying to watch than an extended underwater sequence of a shark fighting a zombie (Zombi 1978)? That’s for you to decide.
Author’s Note: I had the electrifying experience of swimming with sharks in Jamaica back in 2010 (see: below photo – that’s me on the left), and with the experience, I can honestly say that that, too, was a ridiculously good time.
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