Fantastic Fest is known for its great horror and monster movie lineups every year, and this year, audiences were treated to the new shark film, Beast of War. The movie is inspired by the very real sinking of the Australian naval ship Armidale, which was sunk during WWII by Japanese bombers. The survivors made a makeshift raft and were forced to endure days of dehydration, starvation…and shark attacks.
Beast of War takes inspiration from the Armidale and blends it with a Jaws touch, focusing on a group of survivors and one giant, man-eating great white. Director Kiah Roache-Turner (who also directed the fantastic spider flick Sting) sat down with 1428 Elm to chat about his newest movie and the inspirations behind it.
1428 Elm: One of my favorite parts about Beast of War is the practical effects. Finally, we get another shark movie with an actual animatronic shark instead of CGI.
Kiah Roache-Turner: Yeah, horror is a textural medium. If you’ve got a monster that’s interacting with the actors, and the rain, and the smoke, and the actual space, then viewers really believe that it’s real. And if you believe that it’s real, it’s way scarier. But CG stuff moves too quickly and too perfectly, and there’s an uncanny valley that occurs with the object’s weight, it just never registers properly.
Especially for a shark movie, where you have a great white shark that weighs a ton. There’s a particular way that water will spread out around the fin because under that fin there’s this thing that’s basically like a bus coming at you from under the water. CGI isn’t able to get that down yet.
Honestly, I want you to know how much I appreciate that you did a legit shark for this movie. As a fan of shark movies, it was refreshing to see.
Roache-Turner: I’ve been hearing that a lot, and thank god we really pushed for that decision. It actually took a long time, I think about four and a half months of just pre-production, to build the thing. There was so much testing, and it can be a nightmare to get it all to work in a tank. But I’m glad that all the hard work paid off.
So, as someone who has now made a shark movie, what do you think is the formula to make a good shark film?
Roache-Turner: Well, the template is Jaws. But you know, Spielberg was a genius and channeled various inspirations like Hitchcock and David Lean, and then every B-movie he’d ever seen. Plus, his friends were some of the best writers and actors in Hollywood at the time. I really wanted to try and make something that had the Jaws vibe, where it was this great adventure, but also a horror movie.
I knew we’d never get it to look like Jaws, because we didn’t have $100 million, so I knew it would be a studio-based tank movie, which I’m not usually a fan of. But some films, like Sin City and 300, are so stylistic that using a studio really benefited them. Coppola’s Dracula was also a fantastic studio film. We took inspiration from those movies and ended up with a shark film that doesn’t look like many other shark movies. It’s got this acid-drenched Apocalypse Now visual element to it.
Aside from Jaws, what are some other shark movies you really love that helped inspire you?
Roache-Turner: The Shallows was great. 47 Meters Down was also really interesting, and I love the look of that movie. I've heard Dangerous Animals is really good too. I haven't seen it yet, but they were actually filming that movie while we were filming, so it was interesting to compare notes with their crew. I also love Deep Blue Sea. I was a big fan of it when I was younger. Some of the CGI hasn't aged well, but as a teenager, it was one of the only shark movies aside from Jaws that really got me excited.