The 1970s were filled with disaster films. Movies like Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, and The Towering Inferno thrilled audiences as they watched an ensemble cast of characters navigate a disaster and hope to survive by the time the ending credits rolled. The trend came back in the 1990s with volcanoes (Volcano and Dante’s Peak), meteors/asteroids (Deep Impact and Armageddon), and other natural disasters.
Deep Water, the new film by Renny Harlin, whose 1999 cult classic Deep Blue Sea involved sharks shredding through characters, combines the horrors of being eaten by a shark with the thrills of an impending plane crash and the drama of a diverse cast coming together to survive, or not.
Like many of the disaster films that preceded it, Deep Water focuses on character first, so the audience has someone to root for as they fight to survive. It also doesn’t have a truly defined genre; in fact, it’s a mash-up of genres. Learn how Deep Water achieves this and how you can apply these lessons to your own genre mash-up script.
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