10 Horror Movie Scenes That Broke The Camera

Piranha II: The Spawning is best remembered for being James Cameron's directorial debut, albeit one which he only reluctantly acknowledges due to its troubled production and the executive meddling he faced during editing.

But long before Cameron got to the editing room, he faced a major problem on the low-budget shoot when filming a climactic sequence where heroic cop Steve Kimbrough (Lance Henriksen) leaps out of a chopper to rescue his drowning family.

During shooting, Cameron was aboard the helicopter and operating the camera himself, but when the chopper suddenly banked upwards to let a boat pass underneath it, the jolt caused Cameron to drop the camera into the sea.

Worse still, given the low-budget nature of the shoot, they didn't exactly have the means to send deep-sea divers down to the ocean depths to recover the camera and footage, ensuring that both were lost forever, in turn forcing Cameron to source a new camera.

And so, somewhere off the coast of Jamaica, a camera containing waterlogged footage from Piranha II has been swimming around for more than 40 years.