Sharks and serial killers are probably pretty high up on many people's list of worst fears, and this new survival thriller from The Loved Ones and The Devil’s Candy director Sean Byrne and screenwriter Nick Lepard combines them for one seriously messed-up premise.
Dangerous Animals stars Aussie actor Jai Courtney (Captain Boomerang in The Suicide Squad) as a deranged killer who takes tourists out on his fishing boat, before brutally murdering them and using the ocean's array of sharks to dispose of the bodies.
Oh yeah, he also just straight up ritually sacrifices people to the ravenous fish when the mood takes him.
“The shark isn’t the indiscriminate killer," Byrne tells Bloody Disgusting. "I think, in a way, as incredible as Jaws is, it kind of did a disservice to the shark. Ever since that film, everyone thinks that they’re just going to attack you, which isn’t true at all. Pretty much every film after Jaws just took that lead. We wanted to correct that misconception that, yes, it can happen. But in Dangerous Animals, the sharks only turn up if the waters are chummed."
“This is actually a real problem with shark cage diving at the moment where, even though it’s illegal, it’s a competitive business. If you chum the waters, their customers will actually get to see sharks, but now sharks associate boats with food. But yet, they’re not turning up trying to hurt us. Sharks kill less than 10 people per year, and usually, it’s in a case of mistaken identity. Sorry, this is a long-winded way of answering it. But Nick’s wife, I think, is a marine biologist. They really wanted to correct that misconception and have sort of a shark conservation element that this is not what sharks do. Man is the true monster, and even the shark mayhem in the film is by the hand of man.”
Check out the trailer below along with a new poster, and let us know what you think in the comments section.
When Zephyr, a rebellious surfer, is abducted by a shark-obsessed serial killer and held captive on his boat, she must figure out how to escape before he carries out a ritualistic feeding to the sharks below.
Dangerous Animals is set to release in theaters on June 6.