It is true that the shark is still abundantly represented in cinema, and in particular in horror films, as further evidence the output of the year of the shark In theaters this Wednesday, August 3. But from turnip to nanar, the shark has sunk in recent years in the troubled waters of parody and exploitation cinema. On the contrary, rarer but more effective, and probably taken more seriously by filmmakers, screenwriters and even the public, the crocodile has simultaneously taken its place in genre films. To the point perhaps of taking the one previously occupied by his marine rival.
How to explain that now the lizard takes the rumps from the shark and relegates it to the bottom of the sea?
The shark is always the star.
It is a duel that begins as a paradox. Because on paper, it’s always the shark that’s the star and the crocodile the outsider. “The Shark Movie has a gigantic production run. It increased its production volume even further in the 2010s!” points Stéphane Bouley – creator of the podcast movie super battle and author of The Works of John Carpenter: Masks of the Master of Horror – who notices that things go wrong immediately: “But with the nanar, the meta-nanar as the main axis”. While a “nanar” is a film that attracts the tenderness of its audience with its involuntary and paralyzing flaws, the “metananar” seeks to skip the stage and become a cult film by brazenly playing the card of mediocrity. A record that now sticks to the fins of the shark, and Stéphane Bouley to quote the “shark swimming (six film franchise, since 2013, Ed), Mega Shark (four films since 2009, editor’s note) etc.”
The crocodile had a very different fortune. “The production of crocodile films is less important but, although there are also nanars, it presents more recent pearls”, continues Stéphane Bouley. Quentin Tarantino had even done of Crawl by Alejandro Ajain which a father and daughter fight alligators in a Florida house flooded by a hurricane, his favorite movie of 2019.
From piranha to crocodile
Despite this contrast, it is very difficult to cut the cord between the two creatures. Crocodiles, alligators or alligators, they all have the same movie godfather: teeth of the sea terrorizing American screenings in June 1975. The $260 million grossed at the time by Steven Spielberg’s hit will inspire three sequels, a series of films that exploit the vein on the high seas and beyond, a new genre that promotes the fury of wild animals.
But artistically, the shark quickly flaps its fin and Spielberg’s masterpiece remains an only child. “People had the feeling that they had done the trick”, approves Stéphane Bouley.
Hence the almost immediate temptation to step aside. The industry is quickly looking for an alternative solution. In 1978, Joe Dante tried piranha. But the little predator is quickly swamped by a newcomer. “The crocodile has a double advantage: its amphibious nature -since it walks both in water and on land, the threat is everywhere- and the fact that it is more common to the public”, analyzes Stéphane Bouley. Really more common? “When we talk about the Western public, it is the American prism that prevails, and the crocodile or the alligator speaks a lot to the people of Florida.”
“This monstrosity that is in all of us”
However, it is in Texas that we come face to face with the crocodile of death Directed by Tobe Hooper chainsaw massacre and released in the United States in October 1976. “Inadvertently, Tobe Hooper shot what many consider to be the first horror film starring a crocodile”, tells us Lionel Grenier, author in particular of Tobe Hooper: The Chaotic Journey of a Maverick.
But in the gloomy atmosphere of this rural motel, the crocodile is only the agent of the will of the disturbing and psychopathic Judd, the owner. “Hooper develops the character of Judd, loosely inspired by Joseph D. Ball, a Texan veteran of World War I, who would have fed his alligators with the corpses of his victims. The animal is literally relegated to the background”, Lionel Grenier entrusts us again.
The technical difficulties in moving the mechanics involved in embodying the beast partly explains the animal’s modesty. The filmmaker’s philosophy takes care of the rest. “At the heart of Hooper’s work is this monstrosity that is in each of us,” launches Lionel Grenier.
worrying stillness
But the crocodile is a boogeyman in transition, and to that inner evil he will add an even more lugubrious patina in the films that feature him later. For our interlocutor, he even makes a sign to the Devil: “The crocodile is part of the bestiary associated with the Devil, in particular because of its green color that was for a long time that of Satan.” According to Lionel Grenier, anxiety owes a lot to the reptile’s abilities: “It frightens by its disturbing immobility, it knows how to be forgotten in order to better emerge with its huge jaw that is used not so much to chew its prey but to catch it to swallow it” .
The habitat plays to the full with this crocodile’s ability to hide and once again complicates the comparison with the shark. Indeed, when the latter forces the plot to settle on the high seas, the crocodile is, by definition, a freshwater animal, be it a river, swamps, or, in a pinch, a basin. In other words, you have to love him anyway to get caught in the teeth of the “Great White” and move on his land, the distant ocean. The crocodile embodies danger next to.
“Fantastic Object of the Cinema”
A physical geography that is also a mental geography. Reflecting on the swamps that shelter the crocodile of death, Lionel Grenier generalizes: “The swamp, with its calm waters, is both what Gaston Bachelard calls ‘a substance of death’ and the character’s unconscious in which the crocodile embodies his Id, his frustrated libido because the reptile, unlike the shark, it takes on a sexual character if only by its shape.” Longer than wide, the crocodile would therefore be phallic.
Describing the morphology of this “fantastic object of the cinema”, Stéphane Bouley rather praises “his flattened and muscular physique, this enormous jaw” and the “impression of immense power” that emanates from it. As for the sexual side of him, the podcaster incites mistrust.
Because from the Nile crocodile to its Asian cousins passing through the alligators of Louisiana, there are as many lizards as there are rivers in the world or almost, and its rhythm varies at the same time as the connotations that can be attributed to it. according to him, to that “primary and primitive” animal that is both a dinosaur and a snake. “There is a wider variety of crocodile species compared to sharks. As the crocodile can intervene in more varied environments, it depends less on its environment. So we can make it take on different loads,” says Stéphane Bouley.
Australia at the forefront of crocodile film
In all this diversity, one country in particular promotes its national reptile: Australia, the country of Crocodile Dundee, whose cinema is today one of the main pillars supporting the rise of the crocodile in these terrifying fictions. “Australia is at the forefront of the crocodile movie, and particularly from a qualitative point of view,” notes Stéphane Bouley, who does the illustrating:
“With movies like Snape Where black water (both produced in 2007), Australians make crocodile movies with more suspense present, less in the blood and more on the oppressive side of the animal. We get to this pinnacle of the genre where we make the crocodile menace very tangible, much more believable, finally reconnecting with the spirit of Spielberg and the sea teeth“.
Un souci de réalisme que le separe du requin et s’explique là aussi par sa provenance: “I faut dire que les Australiens ont souvent ce genre de faits-divers, et plein de légendes urbaines: les crocodiles que remontent les égouts, viennent chez you”.
crocodile skyline
The crocodile may have set off to conquer the world, but his yellow eyes reflect the imagination of national cinemas and the societies that inspire and entertain them. Also, the reptile can still consider new outlets. Stéphane Bouley even assigns a precise horizon to it:
“If Africa had a bigger film industry, it could embrace the theme. I dream of seeing an African film around this figure of a crocodile that serves, for example, to denounce colonialism”.
And given what the crocodile did to his previous adversary in the movies, we don’t give much of the skin of colonialism.
Source: BFM TV
