The trivia section here mentioned how the zombie was the sharks trainer. That's a better question, how do you train a *beep* shark?!
shareThe shark was fed and sedated before the scene. The question I have is….where the hell did the trainer keep a tiger shark? Those suckers are big. You would need a Sea World size tank.
Well feed sharks won't bite. Especially if their feeding is on a routine - same time same place. I swim with sharks offen alrough not as big as the tiger shark in this movie.
shareEven after all these years I still wonder if the shark turned into a zombie after getting bit?
shareThe shark was fed a chunk of meat laced with sedative. And also the actor who was supposed to play the underwater zombie got sick at the last minute and had to be replaced with the shark's trainer - but most fans of this film probably know this information already.
"That's it. It bit into his arm-pit. Like It wanted to eat him, man. Like It wanted to eat his heart." shareMore importantly, why doesn't the film or one of its unofficial sequels come back around to the fact that there is a zombie shark swimming around out there? The zombie bit the shark....
shareThat underwater sequence is still amazing to me. Love it! And that they pulled it off back then when you had to actually do it, and didn't use a fake shark or other trickery like a glass barrier - impressive!
shareThe sequence is excellent though apparently Fulci wanted nothing to do it and played no part in the filming of it. The sequence was directed by Ramon Bravo, who had done most of the underwater filming for the Mexican shark movie TINTORERA a few years prior. He also supposedly "trained" the shark AND acted as the zombie in the sequence. Oddly enough, Rene Cardona Jr., who directed Tintorera, was originally slated to be the underwater zombie (at least to my understanding).
There are a lot of very impressive shots in this sequence especially if you consider that Bravo was holding his breath the whole time. That means that they had to line up shots with actor and shark, film them, and get Bravo up to the surface to breathe each time in under a couple minutes. Also the best "money shot" in the whole sequence has Bravo crouching on the sea floor with the shark coming toward him, an "over the shoulder" shot from the Shark's perspective. He must have had weights on his legs to stay down like he is and not float up. The weights would have complicated the breathing situation even further!
All in all there's a lot of technical wizardry on display which isn't all easily able to articulate. Notice that nobody has done anything like it before or since, with CGI stupidity filling the gaps since.