The deep blue sea can be as terrifying as any movie monster on screen. Vast, fathomless and impenetrable to the human eye, it's not just the cold depths but the unseen creatures—real or imagined—laying just beyond the surface. Steven Spielberg figured that out when making Jaws (1975). It wasn't the sight of a toothy shark coming for us, it was the suggestion of it: the fin jutting out of the surf, making lazy circles until it suddenly turns and drives with purpose. Like an iceberg, the fin is just the tip of behemoth…until it drops out of sight, leaving us with nothing but our overworked imagination and worst fears to anticipate the ravenous creature.
Movies about the sea, and the creatures within, get a spotlight over three nights in July, and the shark is the first special guest of the series. The shark has become one of cinema's most terrifying menaces, a mix of prehistoric beast and single-minded predator, roused by the scent of blood or the splash of a potential victim, a chilling sight to behold as its razor teeth cut through the water toward its prey.
Howard Hawks' Tiger Shark (1932) stars Edward G. Robinson as a shy Portuguese fisherman in the tuna fishing culture of Monterey who loses his hand to a shark in the opening scene. The hook at the end of his arm and accompanying scar over his right eye become a constant reminder of the dangers of the fishing grounds. Hawks spent weeks with a production crew filming real life fishing crews in action off the Pacific Coast of Mexico before principle photography got underway, including the capture of sharks, which he used in the film's climactic shark attack. Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy makes the case that this early shark thriller "planted a seed that would be taken up in another, massively successful shark tale more than forty years later.
Sharks take a supporting role in The Sea Chase (1955), a rousing maritime cat-and-mouse thriller starring John Wayne as the Captain of a German tramp steamer in Australia at the outbreak of World War II. Sharks are just one of the obstacles facing his flight from the Australian Navy but the attack makes for a harrowing scene. In reality, the actors faced much more mundane trials while filming. Wayne suffered an ear infection and actors Paul Fix and Luis Van Rooten developed infections after skin diving.
The Sharkfighters (1956) takes on the real-life efforts of the U.S. Navy to develop an effective shark repellant for sailors and pilots in the Pacific theater of World War II. The film, starring Victor Mature as the former captain of a naval destroyer who helplessly watched his crew killed by sharks when his ship was torpedoed, is only loosely based on the facts but it features impressive scenes of sharks in waters off Cuba.
Wilde, the actor/filmmaker who created such lean, tough, at times brutal movies as The Naked Prey (1965), pit deep sea divers against the underwater predators in Shark's Treasure (1975) but, true to his own sensibility, he finds humanity far more dangerous than the natural world. Killer Shark (1950), meanwhile, pits young Roddy McDowall against the title creature as a kind of rite of passage as he learns the ropes of commercial fishing.
Of course, sharks are a staple of South Seas adventures, like Last of the Pagans (1935), an exotic melodrama of native lovers in French Polynesia, and Florida-based independent filmmaker William Grefé's Death Curse of Tartu (1966) helped him become something of a shark specialist. He went on to contribute the shark sequences to the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973) and direct Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976), one of the many films knocked out to cash in on the success of Jaws.
The second night of programming is devoted to another unique denizen of the deep: the octopus. Where sharks are sleek, scary, prehistoric predators that roam the waters for food, octopi are shy, solitary creatures who attack humans only when threatened. Yet their alien appearance, with eight rubbery arms that move with an otherworldly grace and a fleshy head with a beaked mouth, can be the thing of nightmares. In ancient times, they inspired such mythological creatures as the Kraken and the Medusa. In 19th century literature it was magnified into a creature that attacked ships in Victor Hugo's "The Toilers of the Sea" (1866) and Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870). By the 20th century, they made for a memorable movie monster.
The deep sea diving adventure Below the Sea (1933), a tale of treasure hunters who join a scientific expedition to retrieve sunken gold from World War I, features just such a giant octopus roused to attack a diving bell lowered to the ocean floor. Isle of Fury (1936), a drama of pearl divers in the South Seas starring Humphrey Bogart, is based a novel by W. Somerset Maugham but the love triangle at the center of the story is overshadowed by the undersea action spectacle promised on both film's poster and trailer: "See the undersea fight with a giant octopus." And Sh! The Octopus (1937), a B-movie comedy-mystery starring the comedy team of Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins as bumbling detectives, delivers on the title with writhing tentacles that reach through doorways to snatch up characters on dry land.
Much more serious is the CinemaScope spectacle Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) starring Robert Wagner as the impetuous son of Greek-American sponge diver Gilbert Roland. The film was shot on location in Key West and Tarpon Springs, Florida, with underwater sequences photographed with a specially designed French underwater camera called the Aquaflex to show off the beauty of the undersea world off the coast of Florida and in the Bahamas.
All of these films turned to full-sized rubber puppets, animating their tentacles with air hoses or, more often, manipulating them like marionettes with wires. Both approaches have their limitations. Special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen upped the ante on octopi menace with It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), one of the most entertaining of the atomic-powered giant monster movies of the 1950s. Driven from the depths of the ocean by atomic fallout, the radioactive mutant octopus goes in search of new feeding grounds and discovers the cornucopia called San Francisco. Harryhausen was a wizard of stop motion animation but what made his screen monsters stand out was the personality imbued in each creation. The tentacled attack of the Golden Gate Bridge by the giant cephalopod, each tentacle writhing like an angry snake, is one of the great monster movie spectacles of the golden age. To save time and money on the budget-strained production, Harryhausen gave the octopus only six tentacles (a hexapus?).
Tentacles (1977), a low-budget Italian-American production, was one of the hordes of Jaws knock-offs that were cobbled together in the wake of Spielberg's blockbuster, this one replacing the shark with a vengeful octopus terrorizing a quiet ocean community. And in Warlords of Atlantis (1978), a British action-fantasy about 19th century scientists enslaved by a society of underwater dwellers, a giant octopus is the guardian of the secret entrance to a hidden empire.
Night three of the series is devoted to sea monsters: fantastical creations, mythological creatures, and impossible beings. And who doesn't enjoy a giant monster rising up from the depths? At least on the screen, where it all comes to an end when the credits roll and we can safely remind ourselves that it's only a movie.
The sea creature of Mysterious Island (1961) is only one of the magnificent beasts brought to life by Ray Harryhausen. Based on the Jules Verne novel of the same name, the author's sequel to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," it sends a group of soldiers from the American Civil War thousands of miles by balloon to the mysterious island of the title, "a mixture of the strange and the beautiful," in the words of one character. Among the mutated creatures the party encounters is a prehistoric cephalopod with tentacles reaching out from a massive protective shell. Herbert Lom plays the visionary Captain Nemo, the mastermind behind the island's strange and wonderful (and dangerous) menagerie.
You could call Godzilla (1954) the godfather of creatures that rise from the depths to threaten the world. It spawned sequels, spin-offs, knock-offs and remakes but the 1954 original (especially the longer Japanese cut of the film) is a dark nuclear parable in a solemn key. Godzilla’s devastating rampage and radioactive breath leaves behind thousands of casualties and a city aflame, recalling nothing less than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It resonated profoundly with Japanese audiences. The rest of the world reveled in the dark spectacle of destruction. Godzilla relied on age-old technology, specifically a man in a latex suit, but the painstaking execution set it apart from the cheap American B-movie monsters. Special effects artists constructed a miniature Tokyo at 1/25 scale, complete with interior walls and floors, and the march of destruction was filmed with high-speed cameras to give the footage, when played back, the illusion of weight and magnitude. The screaming roar of anger and anguish was created by composer Akira Ifukube by dragging a leather glove coated in pine-tar along the lowest string of a double bass. The combination made Godzilla the lizard king of the atomic age and the most menacing of giant monsters in the 1950s.
The Lost Continent (1968) was Hammer Films' entry into the weird and dangerous menaces from the sea and, true to the studio's sensibility, this sea adventure is as much eerie horror as monster movie spectacle. A creeping undersea jungle of unnervingly aggressive seaweed drags a decrepit cargo ship into a swampy patch of the Sargasso Sea that time forgot. It's a twilight world of monstrous mollusks and snake-like vines with a taste for human flesh where survivors of previous wrecks have formed their own society.
Sea monsters invaded the drive-in movie in the wake of It Came from Beneath the Sea, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla, and they were a varied menagerie. Despite the claims of the title, the massive prehistoric mollusk of The Monster that Challenged the World (1957) leaves the Sargasso Sea for the hunting grounds of California aqueducts. Roger Corman, the king of the B movies himself, produced and directed Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), an ultra-low-budget production that mixes Cold War spy movie, double-crossing gangster thriller and sea monster spectacle with one of the cheapest monsters to rear its shabby trunk from the sea. The radioactive dinosaur of The Giant Behemoth (1959), which unleashes its fury in a rampage through London, is one of the final screen creatures brought to life by the godfather of stop-motion animation: Willis H. O'Brien, the creator of the original King Kong (1933) and mentor to Ray Harryhausen.
The fest ends on the greatest of all undersea creatures with Moby Dick (1930), a remake of the silent film The Sea Beast (1926) and the first sound era version of Herman Melville's classic novel of whaling and obsession. Directed by Lloyd Bacon, a reliable jack-of-all-trades at Warner Bros., this rather free adaptation becomes a swashbuckling maritime adventure with a love story shoehorned into Captain Ahab's pursuit of the great white whale. The Great Profile John Barrymore reprises his role from the silent version and the special effects, primitive by modern standards but state of the art for 1930, are still impressive for their scale and imagination. As created by the Warner Bros. effects department, this whale really is a kind of sea monster. Just don't expect to find any of Melville's novel on the screen.
