Why everyone hates Sharknado — and why they're missing the point
There's a real difference between a film that is bad and a film that has decided to be bad. The first is a failure. The second is a craft.
Asylum, the production house behind Sharknado (2013), is not a film studio in the traditional sense. It is a mockbuster factory. Its business model — uniquely — depends on being mistaken for someone else's film at the rental rack. When Pacific Rim opened, Asylum released Atlantic Rim. When Transformers opened, Asylum released Transmorphers. Sharknado was supposed to be one of those — a shark disaster film released the same week as the Discovery Channel's Shark Week.
It wasn't supposed to be funny. It was supposed to be cheap.
The accidental authorship
What happened next is documented in the Syfy network's own marketing post-mortem. The film aired on July 11, 2013, to a modest 1.4 million viewers. But on Twitter — and 2013 was the high-water mark of live-television Twitter — something else happened. Patton Oswalt, Damon Lindelof, Mia Farrow, Wil Wheaton, and a rolling cast of comedians live-tweeted the film as it aired. The tweets were funny because the film, taken seriously, was absurd: tornadoes carrying live sharks into Los Angeles, attacking people who then chainsaw their way out from inside the sharks.
The phenomenon was so unexpected that Syfy aired the film again the following week. The replay drew higher ratings than the premiere. The sequel was greenlit within a month. Six sequels followed. The franchise's defining mode — the network and the film itself leaning into the joke that the audience had already invented — was set before Sharknado 2 shot a single frame.
The two kinds of bad film
The cinephile distinction worth drawing is the one between a sincere failure and a knowing one. The Room (2003), Tommy Wiseau's well-known catastrophe, is a sincere failure. Wiseau wanted to make a serious drama about betrayal. He failed at every level — performance, writing, cinematography, pacing. The film's enduring life comes from the gap between intention and outcome.
Sharknado is not a sincere failure. By Sharknado 3 at the latest (and arguably from the original), everyone involved knew exactly what they were making. The CGI was bad on purpose. The cameos (Mark Cuban as the U.S. President, Anthony Weiner as the Speaker of the House) were nominations to a joke everyone was already in on. The film is bad with intent. That intent has a name, and it has been around longer than Sharknado has: camp.
Susan Sontag defined camp in 1964 as "a love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration." She listed Bellini operas and Tiffany lamps and 1933 sci-fi B-movies as exemplary. She specifically distinguished camp from genuine kitsch: camp knows. Camp is the deliberate cultivation of failure as an aesthetic. The audience is invited not to be fooled but to play along.
What Sharknado actually inherits
The lineage is not subtle once you go looking. The 1950s American B-monster movies — The Giant Claw (1957), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) — were made cheap and fast, exploiting the drive-in audience's appetite for monster-attacks-city plots. The sincere ones (Them!, 1954, which is genuinely great) sit on the shelf next to the gleefully ridiculous ones (The Killer Shrews, 1959). Italian giallo absorbed and twisted this energy. Roger Corman built a career on it. By the time we get to Piranha (1978) and Alligator (1980), the genre has fully internalized that the joke is the joke. Sharknado is the streamed-via-cable, social-media-era endpoint of that exact line.
This matters because the easy criticism of Sharknado — that it is poorly made, that the CGI is laughable, that the plot is incoherent — is also true of films that share its DNA and that the cinephile canon takes seriously. The difference between Sharknado and, say, The Mighty Peking Man (Shaw Brothers, 1977) is two decades of distance. Given another twenty years, Sharknado will be in academic film studies texts. It already is, in fact — there are peer-reviewed papers on its place in the post-2010 mockbuster economy.
How to actually watch it
The mistake is watching Sharknado alone, in silence, looking for craft in the conventional places. The film is not a private object. It is a public one. It demands a room with at least three other people in it, ideally with phones, ideally with a running group chat. It is the closest thing American film culture has produced to a sporting event you can attend from the couch.
Watched that way, it works. The film is engineered for that mode of consumption. Every fifteen minutes there is a sequence absurd enough to break the silence in your living room. The cameos are timed for the rewind-and-show-someone reaction. The chainsaw scene exists exactly so you can show it to a person who has not seen the film and watch them try to process it.
This is a real aesthetic accomplishment, and dismissing it as garbage is — as much as the term gets misused — actually a category error. Sharknado is doing something. The thing it is doing is not the thing prestige cinema is doing. But it is closer in spirit to a Méliès trick film of 1902 than to anything Asylum's parent companies (Sony, MGM, Universal) have released in the same window. There's a craft in confecting the right kind of bad. The craft has a long history. Sharknado, against the odds, is part of it.
Sources & further reading
- Sontag, Susan. Notes on Camp (1964) — the foundational essay on the aesthetic.
- Hellekson, K. — Sharknado and the Asylum: B-Movie Mockbusters in the Streaming Era (Cinema Journal, 2018)
- The Atlantic — The Rise of the Mockbuster (2013)
- Pinedo, Isabel. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (SUNY Press, 1997) — chapter on camp and the slasher.