It’s a new year, and therefore a new opportunity to completely bungle another year‑long movie challenge! Last year’s project, Twenty 20‑Fav, burned out around October after 30 entries, with ten still left on the table. Maybe I’ll get back to finishing it. Then again, maybe not. Who’s to say?
This year, though, we’re scaling back (slightly) with a much more manageable goal: 26 shark movies in 2026. That’s roughly two every month, with a couple extras thrown in just for fun.
Why shark movies? Wasn’t the 50th anniversary of Jaws last year? Yes. And if I were a smart man, I would have struck while the SEO was hot. But have I ever been known to be a smart man? (Don’t answer that.)
Anyway—let’s talk about shark movies.
For as long as humans have been climbing into boats and venturing out into open water, sharks have been there as a constant threat: an unknowable eating machine lurking just below the surface. Even the origin of the word “shark” is a bit of a mystery, possibly deriving from the Mayan xoc and picked up by European explorers. I’ve heard it described as a word that seemed to emerge fully formed from the depths onto unsuspecting fishing boats and simply hung around through sheer force of will.
Sharks occupy a similar place in our imagination as dinosaurs—creatures that might devour us if we’re not careful, yet majestic in their own ways. And just like with dinosaurs, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to tell a compelling shark‑attack story in popular fiction. (The fact that the same person cracked the code on both counts in the modern era might be no accident.)
Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film adaptation of the Peter Benchley novel “Jaws” is, of course, the granddaddy of all killer‑shark movies. Its influence on culture is undeniable: it accidentally birthed the summer blockbuster and the fifty years of crowd‑pleasing popcorn fare that followed. It’s also been cited as responsible for shifting public perception of sharks and sparking a wave of shark hunting that both Benchley and real‑life shark hunter Frank Mundus—the inspiration for Captain Quint—later came to regret.
It also, naturally, spawned a shitzillion copycats. For all its production woes, Jaws proved not only that you could make a compelling shark‑attack movie, but that the formula worked with practically any wild animal. Alligator, Orca, Grizzly, Piranha—a whole host of rip‑offs and goofs surfaced in its wake, along with a litany of other shark‑attack films, many of which we’ll be covering in this series.
But Jaws wasn’t the first killer‑shark movie. That distinction most likely belongs to the 1936 Australian film White Death. You could also make a case for John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island from the same year, though that one only features sharks in a notional sense. White Death, on the other hand, revolves around a man hunting an elusive great white. That won’t be where our survey begins, mostly because the best version I can find is a bite‑sized chunk on YouTube.
Instead, we’re starting with the 1956 film The Sharkfighters, which follows American naval researchers attempting to perfect a formula for shark repellent. Yes: shark repellent. Batman had to get it from somewhere.
So please, join me as I begin another ridiculous journey into a category of films I know relatively little about. We won’t be covering Jaws in this series—though I have written about it before. If you’re interested in my thoughts on Captain Quint and his relationship with the atom bomb, you can read that here.
NEXT TIME: THE SHARKFIGHTERS
Leave a comment