Underrated Movies About Sea Monsters
The ocean can be a scary place, even when there aren't any monsters in it. The idea of oceanic monsters has been with us for as long as people have been sailing the seas, however, so it's no surprise there are plenty of sea monster movies out there. Countless movies made about the horrors of the open ocean, from shipwrecks to sharks - and even some horrors that might not actually exist.
Although these might not be the best movies about sea monsters that you'll ever watch, we've rounded up a batch of underrated sea monster films that deserve a second look. Vote up the ones that make you afraid to go back in the water…
- 1190 VOTES
A year before he gave us the gift of the cinematic masterpiece that is the 1999 version of The Mummy, director Stephen Sommers had already produced a previous rip-roaring monster adventure film, this time set on the high seas. In Deep Rising, when a group of mercenaries raid a stranded cruise ship, they find the place eerily deserted - because it has already been attacked by a giant beast from the depths of the ocean.
The movie is an absolute blast, featuring a cast that includes Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Djimon Hounsou, and Sommers regular Kevin J. O'Connor, to name a few. The real star, though, is the big, tentacled sea monster that has the ship in its grasp.
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- 2145 VOTESPhoto: MGM/UA Communications Co.
It's Alien on the bottom of the ocean, a formula that several other movies would also put to good use. Released in 1989, Leviathan was part of a spate of similarly themed movies that came out that year, including DeepStar Six and the better known Abyss.
With an impressive cast that includes Peter Weller, Meg Foster, Daniel Stern, Ernie Hudson, and more, Leviathan is probably better known for its creature effects, which were produced by Oscar winner Stan Winston - who also designed the special effects in Aliens just a few years before.
- 3177 VOTES
Underwater
Photo: 20th Century FoxKristen Stewart stars in Underwater, a 2020 deep-sea disaster movie that hit theaters just before the COVID-19 pandemic, thereby making a massive dent in its potential earning power. Stewart and her co-stars play the crew of a deep-sea drilling rig that is damaged by an apparent earthquake. The challenge of trying to escape the crumbling installation and make their way to the surface is thrilling enough, but it also seems that something else is down there with them. The drilling company dug too greedily and too deep, waking up something monstrous on the ocean floor.
The reveal of the identity of that monstrous threat is better saved for the movie itself, but it helped to give Underwater something of a cult following.
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- 4125 VOTESPhoto: Tri-Star Pictures
Helmed by Sean S. Cunningham - best known as the director of the original Friday the 13th - this deep-sea monster movie was one of a host of films on similar themes that came out in 1989, alongside Leviathan and James Cameron's The Abyss.
While DeepStar Six might be better known for its striking poster image than for anything that happens in the flick itself, it's a solid creature feature, with a deep-sea monster (inspired by the extinct arthropods known as eurypterids or “sea scorpions”) designed by Chris Walas, who won an Oscar for his work on David Cronenberg's The Fly.
- 578 VOTES
Cold Skin
Photo: Samuel Goldwyn FilmsBefore Robert Eggers's sophomore film The Lighthouse (2019), Xavier Gens directed this 2017 French-Spanish co-production about a young man who comes to a remote island inhabited by a grizzled old lighthouse keeper. The events here are a lot less ambiguous than they are in Eggers's opus, however, as the island in question turns out to be overrun with fish-like humanoids who attack the lighthouse at night. Are the creatures really what they seem, though, or is man the real monster?
The philosophizing might not always land, but there's plenty of creature action to keep you distracted from pondering it too deeply.
More Cold Skin - 693 VOTESPhoto: Netflix
The Sea Beast is basically How to Train Your Dragon, but with sea monsters… and there's nothing wrong with that. This 2022 Netflix original is an anti-imperialist fable about learning how to understand those who are different from us, from Chris Williams, the director behind Disney's Big Hero 6. At the time, it became the most-watched Netflix animated original to date, and also earned an Oscar nomination for best animated feature.
For those who may have missed it, loads of giant sea monsters are in this movie, and lots of fun to be had watching both the eponymous beasts themselves, and the humans who set out to hunt them, only to find that there may be more to them than meets the eye.
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- 791 VOTESPhoto: Lions Gate Films
Stuart Gordon made a name for himself directing goopy body horror adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft stories. The last of these was Dagon, a 2001 take on Lovecraft's 1931 novella “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” even while it borrowed its title from another HPL story. Moving the action to the Spanish coast, Gordon's Dagon tells of a fishing village called Imboca, where a deal with the eponymous deity leads the residents to transform into half-human/half-fish monstrosities.
The result might not be Gordon's best, but it's an unmissable bit of high-concept weirdness, filled with gloppy special effects that have to be seen to be believed.
- 877 VOTESPhoto: Trimark Pictures
There are lots of weird creatures in the ocean, and even weirder ones in movies about mutated undersea life. Few are as bizarre as the various denizens of The Rift, a 1990 B movie starring R. Lee Ermey, Jack Scalia, Ray Wise, and others.
Helmed by Juan Piquer Simon, who is better known for other cult flicks such as Pieces, Slugs, and the Mystery Science Theater 3000 “classic” Pod People, The Rift might not be much to write home about in the plot department. But it packs the screen with some intensely weird (and frequently gross) monster visuals before all is said and done.
- 963 VOTES
Sweetheart
Photo: Universal PicturesPretty much a one-woman show for actress Kiersey Clemons, the 2019 survival horror flick Sweetheart sees a shipwreck survivor, Jenn, wash up on a seemingly deserted island. However, Jenn learns she's not alone when she finds herself stalked by a fish-like humanoid that lives in the waters just offshore. Even when other survivors arrive, things might actually be worse than before, as she now has to contend with the jealousies and betrayals of her fellow humans.
This tense thriller has a great monster reveal, but it flew under the radar for a lot of viewers.
- 1074 VOTES
Sector 7
Photo: Shout! FactoryThe skeleton crew of an offshore oil rig come face-to-what-passes-for-a-face with a newly discovered aquatic life form and have to fight for their lives in Sector 7, a 2011 South Korean monster movie.
Originally released in 3D, Sector 7 is inundated with CGI that now looks a little dated, but it's still worth checking out to see a Korean take on the kinds of claustrophobic monster movies that were so common in American video stores following the success of Alien. The fact that these particular monsters take inspiration from such unlikely sea creatures as sea squirts is a bonus.
- 1176 VOTES
She Creature
Photo: CinemaxIn the early 2000s, Cinemax released a string of made-for-TV movies reusing the titles of old 1950s monster movies from American International Pictures, but taking the plots in new directions. The first of these was She Creature, borrowing its title from the 1956 The She-Creature, which was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. This version follows two turn-of-the-century carnies who capture a live mermaid with plans to use her as a sideshow attraction. Unfortunately for them, however, she is far from docile - and is very hungry.
Starring Rufus Sewell and Carla Gugino, this watery and claustrophobic flick was written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez, who may be better known as the writer of the screenplays for films like Gothika, Snakes on a Plane, and the American remake of The Eye, and features a mermaid monster brought to life by Oscar winner Stan Winston.
- 1257 VOTES
Cashing in on the success of Jaws, a pile of Italian-produced movies about aquatic animals threatening seaside towns hit screens in the late ‘70s and early ’80s. Among these, Tentacles is unique for, among other things, choosing a giant octopus, rather than a shark, as its antagonist.
Starring John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins, and Henry Fonda, this star-studded flick nonetheless suffers from some of the budgetary constraints that hampered many of its peers. It's still absolutely worth seeing, though, and if you need a little more convincing, at the end, the octopus gets taken out by a pair of trained orcas, which is definitely not something you see every day.
- 1360 VOTES
Sea Fever
Photo: Gunpowder & SkyThe 2019 Irish sci-fi thriller Sea Fever might ultimately be a parable about global warming, with some perhaps uncomfortable parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's also a solid and sometimes skin-crawling watch. It got festival play in 2019, but didn't receive a wide theatrical release, meaning it flew under the radar of many viewers.
Fortunately, although its themes are timely, they are also timeless. You can watch this sea-bound suspense film about a fishing trawler that becomes threatened by an oceanic parasite whenever you feel like it on the horror streaming service Shudder.
More Sea Fever - 1480 VOTESPhoto: United Artists
California's Salton Sea becomes a site of terror in 1957's The Monster That Challenged the World - a monster movie classic that is not as well-known as some of its contemporaries. The monsters in question are prehistoric giant mollusks released into the salty, landlocked body of water by an earthquake. The race is on to stop the slimy critters before they find a way to break out into the rest of the world's waterways - the only way the title of the movie is at all accurate, because otherwise the monsters don't challenge much more than one town and an Army base.
The result is a flick that helped to inspire such subsequent movies as Jaws and Joe Dante's Piranha.
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- 1551 VOTESPhoto: Toho
Directed by Ishiro Honda in the midst of his classic run of Godzilla movies, the 1970 Japanese kaiju film Space Amoeba is about an amoeba from outer space, just as the title indicates. However, once the amoeba in question reaches Earth, it gets into a variety of local sea life, mutating them into giants who menace an island in the South Pacific. Among these are a giant cuttlefish, two enormous stone crabs, and a gargantuan mata mata (a type of turtle).
So you get four kaiju-sized sea monsters for the price of one, all brought to life with the same kinds of classic tokusatsu special effects that made the original Godzilla films such beloved monster movie staples.
- 1662 VOTESPhoto: Allied Artists
Giant mutated crabs stalk a scientific research team on an isolated South Pacific island in one of the weirdest of the '50s drive-in giant monster movies. What makes Attack of the Crab Monsters so strange is the nature of the monster’s mutations: The giant crabs can absorb the minds of anyone they devour, subsequently speaking in the voices of the deceased in order to lure in new victims.
It's a bizarre, eerie twist that makes this 1957 creature feature stand out from its peers, even though many modern viewers may have skipped over it assuming it was just another “big bug” movie.
- 1745 VOTESPhoto: Warner-Pathé
When it comes to classic stories of seafaring monsters, few did it better than William Hope Hodgson, an English author of numerous weird tales who passed in 1918. The Lost Continent isn't an adaptation of any of Hodgson's stories - the 1968 film is a reworking of the Dennis Wheatley novel Uncharted Seas - but it may as well be.
Like many of Hodgson's tales, The Lost Continent takes place in the seaweed-choked Sargasso Sea, which is filled with all sorts of weird monsters, from a giant octopus and hermit crabs to prehistoric scorpions. It's also got the survivors of some Spanish conquistadors who were shipwrecked amid the seaweed, and now hold court from their ruined galleon, where they feed interlopers to the carnivorous seaweed.
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- 1855 VOTES
The Lure
Photo: Janus FilmsThe Lure, an extremely unlikely retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale “The Little Mermaid” is a Polish musical horror film about two sirens who leave the ocean behind to take up singing and dancing in a nightclub.
The 2015 film was shown in dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival and released on Blu-ray and DVD in the United States by the Criterion Collection, but the weird approach and surprising subject matter mean that this out-of-left-field horror picture remains unseen by many who might otherwise appreciate its unusual charms.
- 1934 VOTESPhoto: New World Pictures
There's a lot going on in Island of the Fishmen, a 1979 Italian horror flick starring Richard Johnson, Barbara Bach, Joseph Cotten, Claudio Cassinelli, and others. Set in 1891, the picture not only features the eponymous fishmen, but also the lost continent of Atlantis, mad science, a volcano, and voodoo, just for starters.
Directed by Sergio Martino, who is more famous for giallo films like Torso (1973) and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972), Island of the Fishmen was later re-released as Screamers, with about 30 minutes of footage removed. Regardless of which version you watch, though, there's plenty of gloppy fishman action waiting for you.
- 2051 VOTES
Island Claws
Photo: CT VideoCrabs - both regular- and giant-size - menace the Florida Keys in this passion project from one-time director Hernan Cardenas, who made absolutely nothing else. Who needs to make anything else, though, when you've got this lazy summer movie complete with a giant, roaring crab?
It may take a while to arrive, but the big crab really is a sight to see, and the run-up features plenty of normal-size crabs scuttling all over everything. If you like monstrous crustaceans and don't mind a little made-for-TV pacing, your ship has come in.
