Jaws is a masterpiece. There’s no other way to contextualize the enduring legacy of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster classic, widely considered the first of its kind. Yet, while wholly unintentional, Jaws has simultaneously rendered an entire subgenre of horror cinema thematically and narratively moot. The killer shark movie never has, and I’d argue never will, exceed the gargantuan bar that malfunctioning robotic Selachii mounted back in 1975. Several have tried, and the best of them (The Shallows, The Reef) have endeavored to shift away from the scale and small-town tragedy of Spielberg’s original. How much longer can we chum the same waters? Kiah Roache-Turner’s Beast of War, which is out now, remarkably suggests there’s still some life left in the deep sea.
I was fortunate enough to sit down with Roache-Turner for a conversation on shark cinema, the environmental responsibility of horror filmmakers, and, amusingly enough, what he might like to do with an Alien film, another classic that has all but defined a subgenre. “Let’s make an entertaining Alien film. Let’s move aside the philosophy and the emo. Just make a balls-to-the-wall homage to James Cameron, him taping two twin machine guns together to defeat aliens,” he told me. “I’m just like, ‘Oh man,’ I would love to see a real hardcore Alien movie.”
Hardcore is apt, since Beast of War is itself a hardcore killer shark movie. The concept? A group of Australian soldiers waylaid in the middle of the ocean after their ship capsizes face not only the threat of the elements and enemy soldiers, but also a gnarly, almost zombie-like shark lurking beneath the surface. Roache-Turner said, “I think it’s kind of the definitive monster in a way because when you are in the open ocean and you’re floating and you’re in water, and it’s unnatural, we’re not supposed to be in water, really. We’re land creatures, so we’re already out of our element, and it’s our legs floating under a dark abyss.”
He added, “That’s the most vulnerable you can be, I think, as a human being. And then when you look down and you see these giant jaws coming up out of the darkness to munch on your legs, and there’s nothing you can do about it, but scream.”
I share with Roache-Turner how I conceptualize the killer shark movie as an “Oh, no” subgenre, a type of film that, expectedly, has me repeating “Oh, no” from start to finish. Hell, Martin Wilson’s 2021 entry Great White had me sweating. That primal descriptor is apt, because it certainly puts me on edge. “[Jaws] opens with a woman swimming in dark oceans, and suddenly she starts screaming and thrashing around, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s now my worst nightmare.’ There’s something primal about it for sure,” he said.
Jaws was the template. With killer sharks, it always is. “There’s that top shot [in Jaws] where you see the shark coming at the guy like a bust underwater, and it drags him under the kayak. That is just the best shark shot in the history of cinema,” he said. “I tried to get one better than that, and you just can’t. It’s so good. And as a filmmaker going into that genre, you know two things: that shark films are successful, and that you’re probably not going to do better than Jaws.”
Roache-Turner’s effort is earnest and monstrous in the best way. It is itself inspired quite literally by a Jaws anecdote, namely the story of the USS Indianapolis. “You can never do better than Jaws, but I really wanted to try and make something original,” he explained.
A huge part of that originality is Beast of War’s subtle yet propulsive political framing. Roache-Turner shares that he didn’t intentionally plan for Beast of War to shoulder heavy political baggage, though that it does so fluidly alongside the pyrotechnics of a killer shark is no small feat. “If I’m going to have an indigenous lead set in a period film, we need to present how it was, even though it is just a big entertaining shark film,” he said. “There is a space for socioeconomic discussion in horror films. It just depends. I guess you [the audience] decide what it’s going to be.”
And with the politics of shark films, especially, the environmentalist in me needed to interrogate the broader nature of killer sharks and their real-world consequences. Wendy Benchley, wife of Jaws author Peter Benchley, has spent decades working in conservation as a specific reaction to Jaws and its reframing of the public’s perception of sharks as not just wondrous marine creatures, but terrifying threats to be culled. Roache-Turner agrees, saying, “I know that sharks don’t naturally eat people, and actually, they’re really beautiful creatures. One of the most amazing creatures on earth, like crocodiles. They haven’t changed their shape for a hundred million years. They were the same shape when they were dinosaurs, all those millions of years ago.”
He adds, “But at the end of the day, as a horror filmmaker, I can’t really think about that.”
There was a cadence of sincerity in his response that resonated with me, largely because I grapple with the same irreconcilability. I love killer shark movies and watch them regularly, yet I know the longstanding media effects have been disastrous. It’s less evasion, more matter-of-fact truth. In genre cinema, especially, we’re challenged and made uncomfortable. Beast of War probes more than just a subgenre—it poses challenging yet worthwhile questions about the nature and legacy of horror in general.
“One of the things that we did do was to be really careful about making this a monstrous shark. It looks like a zombie shark,” Roache-Turner explained. “[Our shark] doesn’t really look like your standard great white. It looks like something from the fevered imagination of a graphic novelist. So, we’re not purporting to be real here.” And believe me, that shark is a true beauty. Gorgeously rendered, exceptionally staged, and shown just enough to terrify without shattering the illusion.
“They’re all legitimate questions. I’m just not sure how you can answer it in a horror landscape because in a horror landscape, you are taking a lot of negative aspects and intensifying them,” he admits. We touch on Sting, arachnophobia, and even the baby that started it all, Wyrmwood. As a steward for the next generation of horror filmmakers, we’re in good hands with the likes of Kiah Roache-Turner. He’s thoughtful, earnest, and knows how to make one helluva killer shark. The subgenre will endure, dwindling shark population or not, though there’s comfort in knowing the best of them, like Beast of War, manage to do more than entertain.
Categorized: Interviews
