This book project traces how sharks have been imagined as monsters across media, from early modern sea monsters and the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks to Jaws, megalodon mockumentaries, and shark videogames. It examines how shark representations reflect cultural anxieties around extinction, extraction, climate crisis, and control. Alongside Hollywood predators and oil-rig revenge fantasies, the book also considers non-Western traditions in which sharks are sacred, not monstrous, as well as cute and awe-inspiring to offer vital counterpoints to the traditional Western deployment of sharks as embodiments of the fear of the deep.

This special issue of Film International, co-edited with Christian Quendler and Daniel Winkler, explores how European silent cinema captured and shaped modernity through its portrayal of landscapes, bodies, and technologies. The issue specifically focuses on rural and non-urban spaces as dynamic sites of cinematic transformation. Through diverse case studies, it examines how silent film negotiated tensions between nature and technology, gender and geography, progress and loss. From animated fantasies of petroleum-powered futures to mountain dramas and Transylvanian nationalist allegories, these essays reveal cinema’s role in visualizing the spatial, cultural, and political shifts of early modern Europe.