Jaume Collet-Serra's 2016 creature-thriller, The Shallows, brought the summer blockbuster and shark movie back to audiences in a big way, but the director honored the film's PG-13 rating by avoiding gratuitous blood and gore for very specific reasons.
Starring Blake Lively, The Shallows is a cinematically gorgeous tale of woman vs. shark. After Lively takes a trip to a secluded beach in Mexico to honor her late mother, who passed away from cancer, she ends up in the fight of her life after she gets stranded beyond the break. Nancy (Lively), a med student and talented surfer, stumbles upon a dead whale carcass while searching for the perfect wave and inadvertently crosses paths with the shark who was feasting on it as a midday snack. There's no "man-eater" aspects here; Collet-Serra, who began his career with teen slasher, House of Wax, aimed for realism over the concept of sharks that hunger for human flesh as has been done - and overdone - many times before.
A lot of criticisms have fallen onto the shoulders of horror films that stand by their PG-13 rating, which The Shallows does, but its director had his reasons for avoiding excessive blood and guts in the film. Shark movies have seen a significant evolution since their inception with Jaws, and The Shallows pays homage to its predecessors while maintaining its own identity and Collet-Serra's vision, which wasn't the traditional mindset for films of this type.
In an interview with Matt Donato, Collet-Serra explained some of his motivations behind The Shallows and how it's meant to be more of a survival film than a killer shark movie or creature feature. The focus is more on Lively's character, on how Nancy must fight the elements and engage her iron will to not succumb to injury or the shark - who is truly more of an opportunist than antagonist - to get back to shore safely. While there are other victims claimed by the apex predator, the focus is on Nancy as she remembers her mother, who first visited the island when she was pregnant with Nancy, thinks about her family, and uses her budding medical skills to keep herself alive.
Collet-Serra pointed out that a film's inclusion of a shark as a primary element doesn't dictate that it must follow a formulaic pattern as a "shark movie". Instead, the director was inspired by stories of survival and the human will, such as 127 Hours and Gravity. Said Collet-Serra, "... this isn’t a creature movie – it’s a movie about isolation, and survival." While it was certainly gruesome to see James Franco cut off his own arm in 127 Hours, the film was relatively bloodless, as was The Shallows. Horror movies have gotten a lot of heat in the past for clinging to PG-13 ratings, but when it makes sense - as it did with The Shallows - there's no reason to add excess just to prove a point, which was Collet-Serra's vision for the film.
Of PG-13 ratings - and his experience working with R rated horror - Collet-Serra said, "I think that you have to deliver what you promised to the audience, but it can’t be gratuitous. It can’t just cross that line." Beyond that, the director's reason for only including some violence and gore - particularly in the scene where Nancy has to stitch up her own leg - was due to the choice not to lean on VFX and use prosthetics instead. According to the director, Lively was in charge of stitching up the prosthetic on her leg, and water didn't mix particularly well with the different types of make-up, so anything done had to be minimal in order to achieve the desired effect. Again, Collet-Serra employed realism and lengthy sequences of the camera focusing in on Nancy's leg injury instead of CGI-fueled sequences of sharks tearing people apart. In The Shallows, the 'less is more' mindset really paid off.
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