Everybody knows that Jaws is the best shark movie. Hell, for a lot of folks, it ranks as the best movie of all time. So it’s not exactly a surprise that, when Steven Spielberg set the template for the modern blockbuster with his 1975 masterpiece, he also set a bar for aquatic terrors so high that no shark movie has managed to top it in the decades since. In fact, there aren't many people who have even tried. Until recent years, shark cinema was pretty dormant, but the subgenre has slowly carved out a comeback over the last twenty years, culminating in the public furor for Shark Week, Sharknado, and the recent string of bigger-budget shark movies.

The genre is still pretty slight, especially if you're looking for scary over silly, but filmmakers have managed to turn out a few anxiety-inducing thrillers between every six Syfy movies or so. For the purposes of this list, all Jaws movies are out. Not just the Oscar-winning original, but also the 100% Oscar-free sequels. So with the Greatest White Shark in movie history out of the equation, let's take a look at the other shark movies to turn to when you're looking for a good scare.

(Editor's Note: We originally published this list tied to the release of The Meg, but with 47 Meters Down: Uncaged now in theaters, we're delivering a fresh update.)

Bait, aka Bait 3D

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Image via Paramount Pictures

This Australia/Singapore co-production brings some welcome novelty to the genre by taking the action out of the ocean and moving it to a super market, where a catastrophic tsunami sends a Great White prowling through the flooded aisles. You know what you’re getting into when a movie’s titled Bait 3D (the film was originally released with the 3D gimmick, though there’s mercifully little evidence of that in the 2D home video release), and as a campy B-movie, it delivers. The characters are thin and familiar, but their archetypal backstories do a serviceable job establishing stakes when the toothy beasts come out to hunt.

Staged between the supermarket and attached parking structure, Bait trots out some great-looking sharks when it sticks to practical effects (every instance of CGI in the film is truly egregious) and a set of characters that are (mostly) smart enough to make you root for them. It helps that the actors do good work with what they’re given, led by Xavier Samuels, Julian McMahon and Phoebe Tonkin, Bait gets away with a lot on charm alone and leans more towards funny than scary, but with enough solid shark action to bring the thrills.

The Meg

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Image via Warner Bros.

Adapted from the beloved book of the same name by Steve Alten, The Meg recruits Jason Statham as a deep-sea rescue diver with a tragic past, who's called to action to save a team of underwater explorers when they accidentally unleash a megalodon. Yup, that's right, the ancient, bus-sized monster shark believed to be extinct for millions of years. That's it. That's the movie. And it's a cheesy camp-fest that features some truly outlandish moments, and while director Jon Turtletaub would have benefited from leaning even harder on the bonkers appeal, there's enough blockbuster action and sea-faring thrills to make the cut. It doesn't hurt that Statham is made for this kind of role -- an ex-champion diver who was born to make grumpy faces at killer sea creatures. The studio ultimately pulled too many punches (and not just because Statham never punches a shark in the face) -- Statham himself has said he wished the film was bloodier and more brutal, but if you're looking for a crowd-pleaser that still manages to wrack up some tension, The Meg is a good bet.

The Reef

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Image via Lightning Entertainment

The Reef is an impressive exercise in tension that does a lot with a little. The film follows four friends who set out to take in the sights of the Great Barrier Reef and find themselves stranded at sea when their boat capsizes. With the few supplies they salvage, they make the hard choice to swim out through shark-infested waters rather than wait around for the slim chance of rescue on their sinking ship. But once they’re in the water, a particularly blood-thirsty Great White catches their scent and hunts them down, one-by-one.

Writer/director Andrew Traucki takes just enough time to lay some dramatic groundwork before he unleashes sickening tension with the crash and never lets up, staging a slow-sinking nightmare leading up to the shark’s reveal, which is liable to take your breath away. The Reef was filmed with real sharks, and the first attack is a stunning, intensely anxious experience that will have you curling up your toes in fear. (No small thanks to the actors, who sell the terror with every guttural scream and ashen grimace.) There’s one egregiously foolish character and the ending is a bit abrupt and cruel, but overall, The Reef is a tense, technically accomplished survival thriller with one seriously scary shark.

47 Meters Down

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Image via Sony

You can talk all you want about the script weaknesses of 47 Meters Down, and there are plenty, but no amount of forced dialogue can undermine the fact that Johannes Roberts’ Thalassophobia-triggering nightmare is a lean, mean underwater panic attack. Mandy Moore and Claire Holt star as sisters vacationing in Mexico, where they venture out for some super sketchy diving and wind up trapped in a shark cage on the ocean floor. It’s hard to make underwater action look good — it’s dark and everything moves too slow — but Roberts pulls it off with splashes of vibrant color and clever camerawork, including moments of panic-inducing first-person perspective that feel like a cinematic anxiety attack.

And it’s not just about the sharks, though they are fearsome in this one; 47 Meters Down takes care to layer a growing set of impossible obstacles and primal fears for the sisters to overcome - they're locked in a cage, their oxygen supply is dwindling, and they're staring down a nasty case of the bends. The film ultimately falls prey to an ending that’s too clever by half, but if you want to thoroughly be put through the wringer of subaquatic scares, you can’t do much better. If that flare scene doesn't get to you, I don't know what will.

Open Water

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Image via Lions Gate Films

So micro-budget it almost looks found footage at first, Open Water ultimately manages to tap into the kind of pure visceral terror money just can't buy. Inspired by the true story of two tourists who went missing after their diving boat accidentally left them behind, Open Water imagines a horrifying end to their story as the married duo floats along to their doom with little more than a knife and some hastily packed snacks to hold them over while they wait for their rescue to come.

There's just enough boats traveling through the area to keep that hope alive, and writer/director Chris Kentis balances that optimism with the growing sense of impending doom as the night dawns and a school of sharks draws closer and closer. Open Water works because it's so believable, filled with naturalistic dialogue and honest, understated performances from leads Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis, and their utter lack of preparedness gives credence to their shit-out-of-luck nightmare scenario. Filmed with real sharks in the middle of actual open water, the film has a surprising calm and quiet that somehow makes the climactic attacks hit even harder and it's easy to see why the surprise hit spawned a low-budget franchise of shark-infested fear.

Deep Blue Sea

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Image via Warner Bros.

A delightfully campy undersea adventure/disaster movie with some iconic WTF moments, Deep Blue Sea delivers genetically modified giant, super-intelligent sharks who decide they’re done being experiments and unleash a macropredatory feeding frenzy in a flooded research facility. Director Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger) embraces a gleefully goofy tone while his actors, for the most part, embrace the action with utmost seriousness. Thomas Jane takes the lead as Carter Blake, a bleach blonde everyman shark wrangler caught up in the insanity of Dr. Susan McAlester’s (Saffron Burrows) mad scientist shenanigans. Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rapaport and LL Cool J all lean in on the fun, and Harlin serves up non-stop spectacle and special effects-fueled set-pieces crafted around the terror of being trapped with a monster. It’s a fun, full-on blockbuster shark movie and those are a gem in too rare supply.

The Shallows

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Image via Columbia Pictures

For my money, the second-best shark movie ever made (sorry Deep Blue Sea stans), The Shallows is a tightly constructed, damn good-looking tale of survival, neatly laced into a woman's journey to come out on the other side of grief. Don't worry, director Jaume Collet-Serra wisely side-steps sidesteps anything too emotionally draining (you need to save your strength for the anxiety endurance test about to unfold), but the film stars Blake Lively as a woman who returns to her deceased mother's favorite beach in an act of mourning, and Collet-Serra uses that grief as the all-too-relatable backdrop for her trial of human strength. Lively gives one hell of a physical performance in the role, and she’s put through it as a woman stranded on a tiny island in the shallows, with nothing but a few hundred feet of water and one giant, killer shark between her and the land. The Shallows is a sharp, smart piece of popcorn cinema that knows exactly how much pressure to apply and when to build a series of cascading scares and set-pieces, culminating in a banger of a human-vs-shark finale to bring it all home.