4. Open Water (2003)
It’s one of those scenarios your subconscious always seems to generate just as your moments away from drifting off to sleep: wouldn’t it absolutely suck to go scuba diving and end up stranded in the middle of the ocean? Americans Tom and Eileen Lonergan lived that nightmare in 1998, when the boat taking tourists out to explore the Great Barrier Reef accidentally departed without them. Whoops! How long they actually ‘lived’ is unclear – their bodies were never found.
But filmmaker Chris Kentis has an idea of what happened to them, and it involves a horde of hungry sharks. Watching a helpless couple on the verge of becoming bobbing meat snacks doesn’t sound like much of a movie premise, but Kentis – who shot in the actual ocean, using real-live sharks – lends the incident a severely anxious realism that keeps your stomach sufficiently tied for 80 minutes.