It seems that there is a horror film for every holiday. Halloween has, well, Halloween, along with many others. Thanksgiving has the strange ThanksKilling movies, and soon, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving. Christmas has Black Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Gremlins, and more. There’s also a New Year’s Evil, Valentine, and April Fool’s Day. The list goes on and on. But as we celebrate the birth of America, what about horror films set on the Fourth of July?

There was a little slasher called Uncle Sam several years back, and Independence Day is horror adjacent, but one horror movie stands out above the rest for July 4th viewing. That, of course, is Jaws. We all know the story about a killer great white terrorizing a community during the Fourth of July holiday weekend in Steven Spielberg’s classic. It’s a perfect movie. Still, it’s not the scariest movie to watch on the Fourth of July. That award goes to the gross-out found footage horror film from 2012, The Bay.

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‘Jaws’ Is a Horror Film for the Whole Family
Image via Universal Pictures

There is nothing wrong with thinking Jaws is the scariest Fourth of July movie. It is scary. It’s an iconic movie, the first-ever summer blockbuster, and it forever changed how movies are made. It’s filled with on-the-edge-of-your-seat suspense and a scary-as-hell villain. It’s frightening enough when we see the great white shark attack, but what’s even more chilling are the scenes, like the opening attack, when we don’t see the shark at all. It exists only in our mind as a conjured nightmare, its call being John Williams’ score, a horrific soundtrack that rivals the fear brought up by Harry Manfredini’s work on Friday the 13th or John Carpenter’s on the score for Halloween. Jaws also has two of the best jump scares ever put to film. Not cheap ones either. The slow build dread builds so well that it earns those jump scares of the decapitated head popping out from under the boat and the shark’s head surfacing from the water.

Still, Jaws is a safe horror film. It’s scary but in a PG way. There’s adventurous fun to be had amidst the mayhem. There’s also a barrier. Stay out of the water and you’ll be fine. Plus, with Jaws’ popularity, we know all the backstories about how the music was made or how the shark never worked. It’s Hollywood. It doesn’t even have to be July 4th or summer to watch it. We can watch Jaws anytime we want. It’s a comfort movie, one we can play for nostalgia or proudly introduce to our children. Kids might be scared of it, that great white might give them nightmares, and bath time might even become a bit tense for a few days after, but Jaws has become a fun memory for multiple generations.

No Child Should Ever Be Allowed to Watch ‘The Bay’
Image via Lionsgate

There is no fun to be found in Barry Levinson’s The Bay. That’s right, that Barry Levinson, the man behind The Natural and Good Morning, Vietnam, the man who won an Oscar for Best Director for Rain Man, is responsible for creating one of the sickest, most messed up horror movies. It’s understandable if you’ve never even heard of The Bay. Unless you’re a horror fan, there’s a good chance you’re unfamiliar with it. While Jaws is an all-time classic that, for a time, was the biggest box office draw ever, The Bay barely made a blip when it was released in 2012. It was only put in 23 theaters and made a measly $30,668 at the U.S. box office. It found its life on DVD, but even then, it’s not like it was a huge hit there either. It deserves to be though.

The Bay tells the story of a Maryland shore town dealing with the controversy surrounding a chicken farm dumping its animal waste into the Chesapeake Bay. Donna (Kether Donohue), a young reporter, is in town to cover the story and the local Fourth of July celebrations. We barely get to know the residents when all hell breaks loose. An outbreak hits the town, with all that chicken poop in the bay having created lice-like isopods which grow at a tremendous rate. And why are these disgusting things taking off so rapidly? Because of all the steroids we feed factory farm chickens. The isopods take over the town, starting by eating the tongues of their victims, then devouring from the inside out, causing lesions to form on the skins of the townsfolk before they go completely mad.

The Bay is a zombie film of sorts, with people infected and it quickly spreads throughout the whole town. For the most part, The Bay doesn’t hide its monster like Jaws does, though one hair-raising scene has a police dash cam lingering on a home while a cop walks inside. Then, on his radio, we hear people scream while he shouts, “What is crawling on those people?! They’re eating their flesh! It’s coming out of them. Oh my God, it’s coming out of their bodies!” We can only imagine what’s happening in that house, but it’s not something that has to stay in our minds. No, Barry Levinson shows us a close-up of every imaginable body horror. We see a crying, infected cop come out of the house, his body already covered in legions, right before he shoots himself in the head. We see the skin ripped off of a person’s face, eaten down to the bone, while eyes still move. We see the isopods crawling out of people’s intestines. A mechanical shark biting off a leg has got nothing on that.

‘The Bay’s Horror Comes From Its Bleak, Disgusting Realism
Image via Lionsgate

Jaws has a happy ending for the most part. Yes, poor Quint (Robert Shaw) perishes, but he went down swinging like a hero. The shark is dead and will kill no more. It’s now safe to go back in the water, at least until a sequel comes out. The Bay has no final shot of heroes swimming off into the sunset. The government eventually gets involved, dumping chlorine into the bay to stop the outbreak, then covering up the whole incident. Years later though, people are seen out on the bay, where a forgotten horror might still lurk, waiting to happen again.

What makes The Bay so truly frightening is its realism. Jaws had grand, awe-inspiring cinematography. The Bay is not Hollywood. It’s dark and gritty, filmed in a variety of clever ways, from news cameras, police dash cam footage, hospital security cameras, and cell phone cameras. The Bay looks real, so it feels real. In a way, it is. Barry Levinson didn’t start out to make a horror film. That’s not his genre. As he told Yahoo in 2012,

“I was asked at one point about doing a documentary about the Chesapeake Bay, which is 40 percent dead. I looked into it, gathered the facts, and thought, it’s pretty scary. But at the end of the day, a lot of that falls on deaf ears. The facts, in and of themselves, don’t penetrate. So I was thinking, I’m a storyteller. Maybe if I apply a lot of this factual information into a story, I can end up with a piece that’s suspenseful, scary, unnerving, and that’s backed up with 80 percent factual information.”

Levinson went on to say that one scene with an isopod pulled up between a pair of tweezers was not CGI but a real creature they plucked out of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Bay is horrific due to how frustratingly real it could be. Chicken waste runoff from farms exists. Isopods exist. Organisms that take over bodies exist. That realness has only become more tense after living through the real-life horrors of the recent pandemic. So while Jaws might be scary, it’s safe. It’s a roller coaster ride. The Bay is something else. The Bay is an ecological nightmare on the edge of reality, waiting to grab you and eat you from the inside out, starting with your tongue. Happy Fourth of July!