SHOCK WAVES 1977
Shock Waves (1977) is one of the most distinctively atmospheric horror films of the late 1970s, which left a lasting impression on me in no small part due to its quiet, sun-bleached nightmarish fugue that blends the folklore of “Nazi zombies” with the slow-dawning dread of being isolated in a place with no escape and an impending threat of the undead variety. Written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn (Eyes of the Stranger 1981, Return of the Living Dead II 1988) in his feature debut, the film’s low-budget ingenuity and eerie, aquatic visuals have definitely secured its reputation as a cult favorite among us fans of horror, especially for those singular, offbeat gems the horror cinema of the 1970s conjured.
Incidentally, Alan Ormsby is credited for special makeup design on Shock Waves. He had already built a reputation in cult horror with his work on films such as Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deathdream, and the biopic horror film based on Ed Gein, Deranged. Ormsby’s contributions in makeup and effects were influential within the genre, and he later went on to work as a horror writer and director, though not as an art director.
The film opens on a strange note: Rose, played by Brooke Adams (before her later fame in The Dead Zone in 1983 and a decade later in the 1993 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers), is discovered drifting alone in a small rowboat, traumatized and unable to account for the events that led her to such desolation. From here, we’re led back in time to witness a group of hapless tourists traveling aboard a dilapidated boat captained by the grizzled, world-weary Ben Morris (John Carradine), a brief scene-chewing presence who sets the film’s tone with his weary pronouncements and doomful air.
The journey takes a sinister turn when the boat is battered by a mysterious collision near an abandoned, rusting freighter. As the navigation system and engine fail amid a surreal orange haze on the water, the group, including Rose; Norman (Jack Davidson), a cantankerous skeptic; Keith (Luke Halpin), a young novice sailor; Chuck (Fred Buch), and Beverly (D.J. Sidney), awakens one morning to find the captain vanished and their vessel slowly sinking.
Forced to abandon ship, the survivors row to a nearby, overgrown island dominated by the skeletal hulk of the wrecked ship. Investigating their surroundings, the group stumbles upon an eerie, deserted hotel, only to find it inhabited by a reclusive old man (Peter Cushing, in a role of chilling restraint and the charisma of a Gestapo executioner) who eventually reveals himself as a former SS commander. Cushing’s haunted, hollow-eyed performance brings to Shock Waves a sense of decaying aristocracy. In stark contrast to his usual British eloquence and gentility, Cushing’s portrayal of a Nazi officer is a jarring departure marked by cold severity and a chilling absence of humanity.
With gradual, dread-soaked pacing, the survivors come to realize that the island harbors something far worse: a squad of aquatic Nazi zombies—“Death Corps” soldiers, bred by the Third Reich to be unstoppable, amphibious weapons, now risen from the ocean’s depths. Wiederhorn’s direction wrings tension from long, silent shots, figures moving, almost unnoticed, beneath the waterline; the oppressive, tropical brightness only making the horror more disorienting.
The zombie’s dark goggles are more than mere costumes; they are portals of absence, blank and unreflective, turning each Nazi corpse into a faceless sentinel adrift between worlds. The black lenses swallow every trace of humanity, erasing eyes and with them, the possibility of reason, like any good zombie. Moving in eerie procession beneath sunlit water and among the bleached palms, these goggles create a chilling contradiction. The power of Shock Waves is these faceless terrors gliding through the radiant day, with their unknowable gaze. The effect is hypnotic and deeply unsettling, as if every soldier were a living war wound, their personality stripped away, nothing left but purpose and void, haunting the film’s sunlit landscape like a procession of silent, searching death.
Their emergence one by one from the dim ocean floor is no aimless shamble but a chilling pageant. Each undead figure rises in unison, forming a procession whose unnatural order only deepens the sense of dread. The Nazi zombies ascend in eerie, deliberate silence, each figure slowly rising as if summoned from another realm. This procession along the seabed traces a grotesque choreography, their movements uncanny and synchronized, turning the underwater world into a stage for a weird, hypnotic spectral ballet. The measured, dreamlike quality of their march in their storm trooper boots magnifies their otherworldliness, making every step both hauntingly graceful and deeply unnerving as they advance through the sunlit water, phantoms in a dance that belongs to neither life nor death. It’s one of those creepy effects in 70s horror that have made this horror film so memorable for me.
As they glide along the seabed in unwavering formation, their synchronized march becomes an eerie ritual that transforms the watery depths into an impressionist painting of pure terror. This disciplined advance strips them of any lingering humanity, turning their collective movement into the true engine of horror: a relentless, silent parade that suggests not only death, but a purpose and will that refuses to rest.
Captain Ben Morris is found dead underwater. After the boat runs aground, the survivors later discover his body floating beneath the water as they approach the shore in a dinghy. This moment is noted explicitly in production details, which mention that the underwater discovery of Carradine’s character was deliberately filmed and included in the movie’s final cut.
The body count unfolds in sequences of mounting suspense. Dobbs, the ship’s hard-drinking cook, is the first to get it, cornered in the water and meeting his end in a cluster of sea urchins.
The group’s desperate attempts to barricade themselves inside the crumbling hotel don’t provide them with much safety, and as the Nazi dead close in on them, there’s a sense of real claustrophobic panic. Of course, infighting erupts, accidents blind Beverly, and the zombies begin their inexorable assault. But the threat isn’t one of gore, the slow ballet of death, and their uncanny procession summons the fear in us.
The scenes play out with a sickly, slow inevitability, victims silently dragged into pools, streams, and aquariums, drowned by the goggle-clad revenants. The cinematography, with its 16mm graininess and sun-bleached exteriors (shot in the waters and swampland of rural Florida), crafts a unique, dreamlike tension; even daylight feels uncanny and unsafe, and underwater sequences of zombies marching in formation remain the key aspect of the film that haunts you.
The climax finds Rose and Keith (Halpin) among the last standing, attempting to escape in a glass-bottomed tourist dinghy. But the Death Corps numbers are relentless. As the boat finally drifts to safety, Keith is pulled off and dragged into the ocean while Rose witnesses the spectral visage of his corpse pressed against the glass, a ghastly inversion of the vacation goer’s sightseeing experience. The film’s coda is crushing in its melancholy: Rose is rescued but utterly broken, her sanity shattered as she endlessly repeats nonsensical phrases in her hospital bed, a damning memorial to the movie’s ambiguous, unshakable horror.
First, Jaws 1975 ruined the ocean for me—now every trip to the beach has me scanning for goggle-wearing storm troopers goose-stepping through the surf. At this point, I can’t go ankle-deep without expecting a chorus line of undead in jackboots lurking under the waves.
The electronic score by Richard Einhorn, who crafted one of the earliest fully electronic horror scores using analog synthesizers, amplifies the film’s surreal, aquatic mood. Wiederhorn’s resourceful use of his limited resources, distributing screen time between veteran stars in the film’s two halves, embracing long takes, and focusing on unsettling visuals, has earned Shock Waves continued admiration for its atmosphere and ingenuity.
Not since The Frozen Dead 1966, a wonderfully ludicrous British horror offering, starring Dana Andrews as a deranged scientist determined to revive frozen Nazi officers, resulting in a houseful of brain-dead zombies, a telepathic severed head, and even a wall of animated arms, has the subject of undead Nazis surfaced. It’s an early and surreal take on the Nazi zombie mythos.
While some might find the premise of Shock Waves outlandish on its surface, the deeper horror of the film comes from its refusal to sanitize or humanize its villains. By resurrecting Nazi soldiers as emotionless, relentless undead, the film draws on the very real inhumanity of Nazi ideology, using the zombie metaphor to make their inescapable evil literal. This chilling fusion blurs historical brutality with supernatural terror, making the movie all the more disturbing, not because it’s ludicrous, but because it invokes a horror that feels both impossibly monstrous and at the same time uncomfortably real. The result is a haunting film that doesn’t just play with pulp tropes but amplifies the terror by reminding us how frightening, true, and dehumanized evil can be when brought back to life on screen.
Ultimately, Shock Waves remains a distinctively eerie shocker for many of us: at once somber, sunlit, and morbidly aquatic, its nightmare imagery of Nazi zombies rising spectrally from warm ocean waters is what resonates, and is truly haunting.
