The 12 best aquatic horror movies of all time, from Jaws to Deep Blue Sea

Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)

A geology expedition exploring the Amazon is terrorized by the titular creature in director Jack Arnold's horror classic. For extra credit, read Mallory O'Meara's excellent book The Lady From the Black Lagoon about the creature-designing Milicent Patrick. —Clark Collis

Dagon (2001)

H.P. Lovecraft is the undisputed literary master of aquatic horror, and director Stuart Gordon's movie goes a long way to capture the writer's tone of slimy, tentacled dread in this adaptation of his tale The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Ezra Godden and Raquel Meroño play a vacationing couple who discover there is something very fishy about the inhabitants of a Spanish coastal town. —C.C.

Deep Blue Sea (1999)

You know what you don't want to do? Make sharks smarter! That's a lesson learned too late by Saffron Burrows' doctor character in this Renny Harlin-directed chum-fest as a search to find a cure for Alzheimer's proves disastrous for the inhabitants of an underwater research facility. Outside of Jaws, the movie features the greatest death in the aquatic horror genre, which, even after two-plus decades, we have zero intention of spoiling here. —C.C.

Deep Rising (1998)

Treat Williams plays sailor captain John Finnegan who transports a group of mercenaries on a mission to sink a luxury liner for the insurance pay-off. The problem? They find the ship infested by a massive sea monster. Should have taken out massive sea monster insurance! Williams is a genuine treat in Stephen Sommers' hilarious, gruesome movie and receives ship-shape backup from Famke Janssen, Wes Studi, and Kevin J. O'Connor among others. —C.C.

The Host (2006)

Throughout his career, Bong Joon Ho has deftly blended dark comedy, thriller, and action elements in films like Snowpiercer (2014) and Parasite (2019), and this sci-fi horror film about a monster that emerges from a South Korean river is no different. After the creature kidnaps a young girl, her family sets out to rescue her, leading to an unpredictable adventure. —Kevin Jacobsen

Jaws (1975)

You're gonna need a bigger list to detail the many reasons why Steven Spielberg's thriller remains the definitive shark movie. —C.C.

Leviathan (1989)

How happy were fans of aquatic horror in 1989? Pretty freakin' happy. January saw the release of Deepstar Six, in which the crew of an experimental underwater base — including characters played by Miguel Ferrer and My Two Dads star Greg Evigan — are stalked and killed, Alien-style, by a mysterious creature. (FYI: Deepstar Six was directed by Sean S. Cunningham whose Friday the 13th could also be described, technically at least, as an aquatic horror film.)

Just a couple of months later this second tale of beneath-the-waves terror swam onto screens. An ace cast, led by Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, and Ernie Hudson, battle a Thing-like creature at the bottom of the ocean. Incredibly, James Cameron's horror-adjacent underwater movie The Abyss was also released in 1989 as was Lords of the Deep, which found Piranha star Bradford Dillman once again getting involved in H2O-related mayhem. —C.C.

Piranha (1978)

Joe Dante's solo directorial debut is the most entertaining of the many Jaws rip-offs, in large part because he and screenwriter John Sayles don't try to hide its Spielberg-apeing nature. Bradford Dillman and Maggie McKeown are the leads while Kevin McCarthy is the government scientist who created a strain of deadly piranha. "The thing I tried to bring was a little bit of self-consciousness," Sayles told EW in 2010. "Some of the fun is: 'Okay, this is a dollar ninety-eight version of Jaws.'" —C.C.

Sea Fever (2020)

In Sea Fever, Hermione Corfield plays a marine biology student whose spell on a fishing trawler goes eye-poppingly awry after the crew encounters a huge, parasitic ocean-dwelling creature in the Atlantic Ocean. The Neasa Hardiman-directed film — which costars Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott — drew comparisons to the spread of the COVID pandemic upon its April 2020 release. —C.C.

The Shallows (2016)

Blake Lively's surfer goes mano a mano — or womano a sharko — with a great white in this nerve-shredder from director Jaume Collet-Serra.

"It's such a physical movie," Lively told EW in 2016. "There's a scene where I'm swimming up to the buoy and I crack my face under water and my nose is pouring blood and that was real." —C.C.

The Shape of Water (2017)

Guillermo del Toro elevated the aquatic-horror genre to a position of Oscar-winning respectability with The Shape of Water, even if the real horror emanates from Michael Shannon's increasingly unhinged general rather than Doug Jones' amphibian creature. —C.C.

Underwater (2020)

Box office-wise, this pretty much sank without a trace (aha!) but the Kristen Stewart-starring Underwater is more fun than a barrel of sea monkeys and has an ending that H.P. Lovecraft would surely have approved. —C.C.