‘Shark Night 3D’ – Slaughter in the Water Labor Day Weekend

There are two basic types of shark film. One is a documentary which teaches the audience about sharks, such as the programming shown in IMAX theaters or during the Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week. The other, for better and worse, is often a thriller showing hungry sharks that terrorize and eat people. “Shark Night 3D” is most definitely the latter.

Taking place at a lake house where seven friends are sharing a vacation, “Shark Night 3D” infests the lake with sharks so the audience can watch the carnage. Sharks in a freshwater lake are pretty unlikely, but it’s not impossible; bull sharks can thrive in both salt and freshwater and consequently are considered among the most dangerous to humans.

The fictional horror movies involving sharks span anywhere from realistic (like “Open Water”), to outright hilarious in their lunacy (“Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus”), to culturally iconic (“JAWS”). These films unfailingly cast sharks as villains with preternatural abilities and motives against humans.

Novelist Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel JAWS and co-wrote the screenplay, realized later in life that his work had caused an irrational fear of sharks, based on parts of his story that were factually incorrect. Benchley became a conservationist whose specialty was correcting the damage he’d done to shark’s reputations. Certainly, “JAWS” has become the standard by which all other shark horror movies are judged.

Many shark species are endangered. Last year, the UK’s Mail Online reported that great white sharks are more endangered than tigers, with only 3,500 left in the ocean. Clearly, sharks have more to fear from human beings than we have to fear from sharks. Apparently, one is more likely to win an Academy Award or be killed by pieces of falling aircraft, than to be attacked by a shark.

Be this as it may, sharks have continued to capture the imagination of movie audiences again and again, since “She Gods of Shark Reef” came out in 1958. “Shark Night 3D” will not be the last horror film about sharks, and time will tell where on the continuum it belongs.


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