PZ Myers has tagged me with a quiz-thing where I’m supposed to list the ocean or seafaring movies that I’ve found scariest. This is, I suppose, because of Halloween coming up and Dr. Myers’s general fetish for many-tentacled sea beasties. Anyway, to indulge him:
:: Pinocchio. There’s some really spooky stuff in this movie, to be honest, and the whole Monstro the Whale sequence is pretty intense. The scariest part of the movie has nothing really to do with the ocean, of course — that would be the Pleasure Island sequence, and especially Lampwick’s creepy fate — but there’s a lot of material in this movie to put the lie to the notion of Disney being all-cuteness, all the time.
[Yes, I screwed up and typed Peter Pan originally. Sue me, you lubbers!]
:: Jaws II. This is a better movie than many tend to think nowadays, even if it really is nowhere near as good as its classic preceding film. But it does amp up the horror a bit. The original movie just posits a great white shark finding a spot where there’s some particularly nice and tender feeding; Jaws II has another shark that seems to be actually hunting all these teenagers on their boats. Some of their demises are particularly grisly, especially one poor girl who gets chomped whole as a young boy sits on the hull of the capsized boat looking on, about five feet away. And later on, the shark manages to take out a helicopter.
:: Deep Blue Sea. This is actually a pretty silly movie. OK, it’s an extremely silly movie. There’s not a moment in it that is in the least bit plausible. The special effects are pretty laughable. So why do I list it? Because it’s one of the few movies of the “lock some characters in an enclosed space with a ravenous beastie” type that actually plays by the rule of “Anyone in this movie can die.”
:: The X-Files: “Piper Maru” and “Apocrypha”. These are two memorable mytharc episodes from Season Three that deal with black oil being found at the bottom of the sea.
Anyone who wants to list some movies, go right ahead. Keep ’em ocean-themed, though!
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I agree about Peter Pan…although, that bit where Tinkerbelle flies into Monstro’s nose always makes me giggle.
Have you seen Open Water? Not only is their situation de facto scary, but the characters’ words and actions also suggest that in deep crises, we can let our best instincts take over, or our worst, or both in turn, and it doesn’t really make a difference. We die anyway.
Also, the sea lion bit in the (mostly bad) kids’ movie “Eight Below” was a truly scary scene.