Under The Sea: Why The Dark Depths of the Ocean Remain An Excellent Setting For Tense Thrillers

At the end of Ron Howard’s Splash — which some would argue is his best film — Tom Hanks’ lovelorn Allen Bauer decides to abandon terrestrial life to follow his lover, mermaid Madison (Daryl Hannah), into the briny deep after, apparently, growing gills. Framed as a “happily ever after,” Splash shares an ending with Stuart Gordon’s H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Dagon speaks a little to the absolute, chthonic horror of even considering such a thing. In my dreams, the sequel to Splash would be an R-Rated horror film set entirely underwater with our young couple honeymooning amongst sharks, giant squid and every manner of heretofore unseen marine abomination. James Wan, who made his name with high profile horror films, imagined an Eldritch scene in Aquaman as our aquatic heroes dive impossibly deep into an abyss, lit only by a red flare as the ocean around them boil with monsters. There had to be a good reason, in my mind, our prehistoric ancestors grew legs for greener, and drier, pastures. I can’t be alone in that feeling as the very particular subgenre of horror films set under the sea continues to churn out installments at reliable intervals.

The latest is William Eubanks’ Underwater, a horror film starring the always-game Kristen Stewart about a station set on the ocean floor when a series of “anomalies” manifest as monsters of the deep, released by a minor natural disaster and, naturally, human curiosity. It’s a familiar conceit; familiar enough that the basic beats of its story will be familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the genre (or has seen Alien), but that it remains as effective as it is as a shock-generator speaks to the essential horror of its setting. The only thing as terrifying as being stuck in a metal tube in outer space is being stuck in the same close quarters in the ocean, it seems, even without the introduction of hostile monsters or catastrophic collapse. As Underwater opens, Stewart’s Norah says in voiceover that time loses meaning on the ocean floor. James Cameron’s superlative sci-fi opera The Abyss (1989) suggests a similar kind of dislocation and madness through the murderous, paranoid insanity suffered by Lt. Coffey (Michael Biehn) after too long in the deeps. It’s interesting to note that the sensory deprivation pods that lead to madness in both Basil Dearden’s The Mind Benders and Ken Russell’s Altered States are essentially water tanks in which the scientist/victims are suspended. There’s even some suggestion that Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo (and Melville’s Captain Ahab who may have served as inspiration for him) has been made strange at least in part due to too much time spent on the water.

In all of these films, the element of immersion becomes a key character-warping tension. It’s instructive to interrogate the conventions of films like this to understand the nature of the conversation they’re having with our subconscious and more, why filmmakers continue to find the setting evergreen. Freud’s construction of the “unconscious mind” famously used an iceberg as its diagram. The tip of the iceberg is consciousness, while the overwhelming bulk of what comprises a person’s identity is submerged and largely undetectable by the logical, waking mind. Jung expands on this model of the unconscious by suggesting that the underneath is populated by “shadow” projections. That is, those elements of the personality that are unexamined and, in many cases, actively repressed by the conscious mind. They turn into monsters down there. Setting a film underwater, then, forces an immediate, intimate proximity with the monsters we’ve created and allowed to fester. Consider the effectiveness of the angler fish and shark sequences in Finding Nemo and The Little Mermaid as metaphor for the loss of children to a dangerous, unpredictable world and how the resolutions for both are the fathers allowing that the fears they hold for their kids are fears they’ve largely nursed at their own breast.

The release of Underwater, then, is a lovely opportunity to revisit the long history of submarine horror movies. Sean S. Cunningham’s Deepstar Six (1989) begins with the same main plot point of an underwater calamity and a rift opened while George P. Cosmatos’ Leviathan (1989), released at essentially the same time as both Cunningham’s and Cameron’s films, finds as its monster a body-warping, sentient, contagion. Alec Gillis’ Harbinger Down (2015), while set on a ship on the surface, plays with a similar body-horror monster contagion premise, raising the thought that the ocean is, in addition to all the horrors it conceals, also perceived by us as a mutagen of not just of the mind, but of the body. In The Tempest, Shakespeare has the spirit Ariel sing of the transformative nature of the sea: “Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that does fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.” A George Clayton Johnson short story called “Sea Change” was submitted as a Twilight Zone episode in 1960 but deemed too intense for the dinner hour. It tells of a sea captain who loses a hand to the ocean, only to have the ocean grow another version him out of the lost appendage.

Mary Ann Fisher’s Lords of the Deep (1989), Jean-Claude Dubois’ The Evil Below and J.P. Simon’s The Rift (1990, starring none other than R. Lee Ermey), mine near-identical ground in their tales of transgressing into the unexplored depths only to find that when one looks into the abyss in pursuit of monsters, it does, indeed, look back into you. A big budget attempt to cash in on Michael Crichton’s post-Jurassic Park renaissance netted the lackluster – dare I say “soggy” – big budget, A-lister Sphere (1998) while Stephen Sommers, just prior to resurrecting The Mummy as a viable intellectual property, helmed the energetic Deep Rising (1998) that same year. The proximity of many of these projects to each other speaks to the unconscious, zeitgeist nature of such things. Periodically, it seems, the climate becomes ripe again for plunges into the dank basement of our personal and national identity. Underwater is a little bit more than just another jump-scare creature feature in that context. It would pair neatly, in fact, with last year’s Ad Astra and nautically-themed The Lighthouse. Rather, it’s a signal flare that maybe there’s something we should be talking about that we’ve left to simmer for too long. Given the current state of our reality, you can kind of take your pick.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.