What Separates ‘Fear Below’ From Other Shark Films

There’s no shortage of shark films out there, but Aussie take Fear Below offers up something a little different to what viewers have become accustomed to.

Set in 1946, the feature follows a team of professional divers who are hired by ruthless criminals to locate a sunken car in a river. When they enter the murky waters, they discover they’re not alone, and an already dangerous mission becomes deadly.

During a panel at Melbnova earlier this year, star Arthur Angel, who plays “old, salty diver” Ernie Morgan, told Supa-Fans what separates Fear Below from other creature features.

“I remember talking to [director] Matthew Holmes about that, like, ‘Why do you want to make a shark film?’ And he said, ‘I’d like to challenge some of the clichés that are out there about sharks,’” Angel said.

“I mean, usually when you see a shark film, it’s a great white. The point of difference with this one is it’s a bull shark. Also, with the traditional shark films in the sea, it’s usually these sorts of interchangeable characters and they’re usually stuck on a raft or they’re stuck in some kind of thing on the water. But this time, I think he wanted to challenge that and thought, ‘Okay, how can I make a shark film differently?’ So, what he did was he wrote a script where it was set in 1946 Australia.

“So that gave us a little bit more. It was a bit more fun visually, stylistically. He had gangsters in there, he had bad guys, so it was pulling away from the shark. And so, the real villain really wasn’t the shark, it was the gangsters, and we just happen to have a shark in there.

“It was also set in a river. When female bull sharks want to give birth, they swim up river, and when they give birth, they’re quite aggressive, so it’s very plausible. You don’t really hear about it, but there have been a few incidents here in Australia where sharks have attacked humans in a river. Usually, they’re always out there in the ocean, somewhere. As I said, they’re usually great whites; this is a bull shark. And I think that was really interesting.

“The other thing about Fear Below is, you don’t see the shark that often. [Matthew] didn’t want to use stock footage because if you start using stock footage, it goes into that realm of documentary.

“In reality, if you came across a bull shark, you wouldn’t really see it as it’d be murky in a river, so there’s suggestions of the shark coming through. And the other point of difference is that there was drama. It’s about the plot and the characters. So, there’s a lot going on.”

Angel also revealed that, despite the film’s premise and setting, “not one actor was actually in water.”

“We were not [under] the water at all, only on the surface,” he said. “A lot of it was done in-studio and in-camera, and the actual shark itself was made out of latex. It was probably about three metres long, which is what the bull shark is, an average female bull shark. And it was suspended, and so a lot of haze was pumped into the studio. It was filmed at 32 frames per second, as opposed to 24 frames per second. So that meant everything moved faster.

“We were wading through water and everything was a bit slower in our big, heavy suits. And we had to do a lot of rehearsing for that, and had to walk in one of those old-fashioned suits, because also the thing is that this is set in 1946 Australia, so the diving suits themselves were those traditional heavy boots. And we had to learn how to walk through that.

“They designed a [shark] head, like a puppet head, and a tail, and a fin. So then, when we did actually film in an actual river, we had divers moving the head around. It was filmed in that very traditional way.”

Maximillian Johnson (Actor) and Tracey Rose Sparke (Costume Designer) will partake in a Fear Below panel at Supanova in Sydney (21-22 June), and fans can catch some special cinema screenings at Ritz Cinemas (Sydney) and Cinema Nova (Melbourne) on Friday, 27 June before it hits stores on DVD, Wednesday, 9 July. 

Lead image by Brittany Mackay