The Scariest Thing About This Blake Lively Horror Movie Isn’t the Shark

The 2016 horror movie The Shallows pits Blake Lively against a shark menace, but the shark itself isn’t the most terrifying element of the film. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, The Shallows stars Lively as Nancy Adams, a surfer who is attacked by a shark and finds herself stranded on a patch of coral reef. With her bleeding leg preventing her from swimming back to the relatively nearby shore, Nancy must fight for her survival against the looming threat of her pursuing shark.

The Shallows has drawn acclaim for its effective use of its shark and Lively’s performance in the movie’s survival story. However, unlike most Sharksploitation horror movies, the finned creature itself is not the true source of the movie’s terror. While the shark is indeed an integral element of the film’s effectiveness as a horror movie, The Shallows works as well as it does because of the ocean itself.

The Shallows Bases Its Horror In Being Trapped At Sea

While the shark is certainly a terrifying menace in The Shallows, its home environment of the sea is the very thing that allows it to be scary in the first place. While Lively’s Nancy is stranded with the shore in sight, The Shallows is absolutely painstaking in keeping her there. In being trapped in the situation she’s in with the shark pursuing her, Nancy’s isolation on the batch of coral reef presents its own set of problems in her lack of food, shelter, and drinkable water.

Simply being stuck on the coral reef, Nancy faces death from dehydration, starvation, incurring an even worse cut that could cause her to bleed to death, or simply being exposed to the elements. Worse still, Nancy has no means of communication to seek help beyond simply calling out to any passers by she sees on the beach and simply hoping they hear or see her. With all of these factors, the ocean is the true villain of The Shallows for the terrifying environmental prison it represents. Of course, that isn’t to take anything away from the shark itself.

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The Shallows Uses The Shark Like Jaws Does

The shark’s on-screen presence in The Shallows is relatively obscured for much of the movie. Most of the time, Nancy and the audience primarily see the shark’s fin cutting through the water towards her with occasional glimpses of the shark’s underwater silhouette. Aside from a handful of quick glimpses on-screen of the shark attacking other surfers, the underwater killer largely isn’t seen in its full glory until Nancy’s final showdown with her sea-faring predator. In that respect, The Shallows follows the Jaws playbook of keeping its shark a mostly unseen threat whose menace is nevertheless constantly felt.

The infamously troubled production of Jaws – specifically the technical issues encountered with the movie’s mechanical shark being filmed at sea – led Steven Spielberg to keep the shark largely off-screen until the final act. This ended up making Jaws a historically effective horror movie with the audience’s imagination running wild on the menace lurking in the deep.

The Shallows acts as a kind of modern day Jaws to great effect in never letting Nancy or the audience forget that the shark is out in the water waiting for her, while actually using the oceanic beast as minimally as possible. Moreover, with modern CGI on its side, The Shallows is also able show off the shark’s agility and hunting prowess marvelously when it is on-screen, as well as giving it a memorable death when Nancy finally tricks it into swimming into underwater rebar and impaling itself.

The Shallows Shows The Power Of Horror Movie Minimalism

The Shallows is a prime example of a survival story in which Mother Nature provides the filmmakers with most of what they need to keep the audience on their toes. With a beach, a coral reef patch, and a floating buoy as its set, The Shallows puts Nancy up against the elements to superb effect. The Shallows doesn’t forsake the modern tools of CGI, puppeteering, and camera wizardry, it also knows where to place them in its story to get the most out of them. And, just as importantly, when and where not to use them to get the same effect (a practice growing increasingly common in shark-based horror movies, as also seen in the equally effective 47 Meters Down.)

Simply situating Nancy in the area of the ocean that she is in, The Shallows keeps its suspense and sense of dread constant throughout with a clear feeling of “So close, yet so far” every time the refuge of the beach is visible. The shark itself might be what keeps Nancy from simply swimming back to safety, but The Shallows is a remarkably effective horror movie in the more subtle threat it makes the ocean itself into. Even better, when The Shallows does put its shark to full use, it is a well-deserved pay-off with how much the unstoppable beast of the high seas has been held back on-screen.

The Shallows is available on STARZ.