(Steven Spielberg would later call on this husband and wife team to film the underwater sequences involving real sharks for his horror blockbuster Jaws. Joining him on the voyage was producer Stan Waterman as well as Australian spearfishers and divers Valerie and Ron Taylor. Premiering three years before publication of Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel Jaws, this unprecedented documentary formally introduced the world to the great white shark and likely planted seeds that would go on to change cinematic history as we know it.įilmed in 1969, Gimbel and his crew departed from Durban, South Africa for a five-month expedition through the Indian Ocean in search of sharks they describe as “the most dangerous predator still living in the world.” Heir to the Gimbels department store fortune, Peter Gimbel was then known to US audiences as the first to dive and photograph wreckage of the SS Andrea Doria. It also includes shocking acts of animal cruelty and a dated understanding of marine wildlife. While not a horror movie per se, the film presents breathtaking footage of massive sharks shot from within cages designed specifically for the expedition. Directed by Peter Gimbel, the 1971 documentary Blue Water, White Death follows a group of aquatic photographers and adventurers determined to capture the first underwater footage of Carcharodon carcharias, the mythic apex predator commonly called the great white shark. Before the 1975 masterpiece Jaws made us all afraid to go in the water, another film presented equally terrifying footage of real underwater nightmares.
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