10 Things You Definitely Googled After Watching These Horror Films
8. The Reef - Did This Actually Happen?
For so long, the shark movie subgenre had been laughed at, poked fun at, and written off as a vast ocean of dross when it came to genuinely quality films. And to be fair, that derision was often completely warranted.
Jaws had obviously set the benchmark for any and all shark movies, and the likes of Jaws 2 and Deep Blue Sea had plenty of charm, but it took until 2010 for shark pictures to really get taken seriously again. The reason for that? That was largely down to the sheer impressiveness of Andrew Traucki's The Reef.
Opening up by informing the audience that its tale was based on true events, The Reef gave the shark subgenre a major shot in the arm. A gripping, terrifying story of survival, the film centres on a group of friends whose ship ends in the coral reef and leaves them stranded in the middle of the ocean.
Presented with the choice of staying with the sinking vessel or making the 12-mile swim to safety, these friends soon find themselves being stalked by an extremely calculated great white shark - and by the time all's said and done, only one of the group makes it to safety.
Heading to Google to see just how true the 'based on true events' label was here, something shockingly similar to The Reef happened back in 1983.
In the real world, it was Ray Boundy who was the sole survivor of a situation that saw a fishing boat capsize and leave him and two friends in shark-infested waters. Rather than a great white shark, it was a 15-foot tiger shark that did the damage - with that shark killing both of Ray's friends and attacking him.