'Sharknado': How a Man Named Thunder Spawned Syfy's Flying-Shark Phenomenon

Who can we credit (and/or blame) with unleashing the phenomenon that is Sharknado upon the world? Try Thunder Levin, a New York-born screenwriter who parlayed a crazy idea about a shark-filled tornado into a massively successful TV franchise, one that’s reaped big rewards for Syfy and The Asylum, the production company known for making genre movies on the cheap. The third installment in the series, Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, airs on July 22 and ups the ante by sending the sharks into space in pursuit of chainsaw-wielding hero, Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) and introduces David Hasselhoff as Papa Shepard. In this as-told-to account, Levin traces his evolution from a monster movie-loving kid to one of the driving creative forces behind Sharknado, with all the benefits and challenges that come with that lofty position.  

My mother went into labor during a thunderstorm, and my father said, “Maybe we should name him Thunder.” She took him seriously, and the rest is history. My grandparents refused to talk to them, because they couldn’t have a grandson named Thunder. Growing up with a name like that was interesting, because to me, it’s just my name. I don’t really think about how odd it must be. Anytime I meet somebody new I have to hear the same old jokes. The number of times I’ve been asked if I have a brother named Lightning would be impossible to count.

I grew up in New York in the late ‘60s and the ‘70s, and it was an interesting time. I was taking the bus to school on my own by the third grade at a time when everyone seemed to think that the city was going to Hell in a handbasket. But I loved it. There was no better place on Earth, period, than New York. I remember that friends and family in the suburbs would say, “How can you raise a child in New York City? There’s no backyard.” But for me, the whole city was my backyard! It was a great way to grow up. You learn survival skills early on.

When I was a little kid, I loved the Godzilla movies that were on television Saturday afternoons all the time. They weren’t really horror films per se, which are about people walking backwards into dark rooms, and things jumping out at you, and making the audience scream. That’s never particularly appealed to me. But giant monster movies I loved, and I loved Jaws. That’s probably one of the greatest movie ever made. It’s about suspense rather than scares. There are a few scary moments, but it’s mostly about building this unbearable tension and suspense, and creating really great characters — which of course happened because the shark didn’t work!

Growing up, I mainly wanted to be a director. But you get to Hollywood with your student film under your arm, you knock on doors, you get meetings, and you ask people, “Well, what should I do?” And they say, “Well, if you want to direct, write something that somebody wants to produce and then attach yourself.” So I started doing that. And no, those early scripts were not monster movies. When I first got started out here, the erotic thriller was the thing that was getting made left and right, to the extent that the audience got tired of them, and that’s why no one has made an erotic thriller in the last 20 years! So I wrote one of those, and then I wrote a science fiction film about cloning which sort of has a Blade Runner feel to it. I also wrote an action adventure script about two women on the run in Mexico trying to get back to the border after their boyfriends have been killed, and they’re being chased by this Mexican gang.

The first monster movie I wrote is really Sharknado, if you think of Sharknado as a monster movie and I’m not sure it is. Previously, I wrote and directed 2012’s American Warships, which has an alien bad guy. And I’ve done a zombie film, 2008’s Mutant Vampire Zombies From the ‘Hood, but I think of those as war movies or action movies. I’m not sure I’ve done a monster movie unless you count 2013’s Atlantic Rim, which was a film that I co-wrote the first draft of for The Asylum and stepped away from, and then it was re-written five times after I stepped away. If you see the final film there isn’t a single line of my script in there, but it is a giant monster movie.

My first jobs in Hollywood were on Roger Corman films, and The Asylum is a good proving ground if you can survive and make a decent movie. It’s a good way to learn and see how people deal with the challenges of very short schedules and low budgets. The schedules we had on Corman films would be luxurious for an Asylum film. Asylum films are shot in 15 to 18 days and they’re always going to look cheap to a certain extent. That’s just inevitable when you’re trying to make these blockbuster-type movies on tiny budgets. But your objective is to make the film as good as you can with the resources you have. I have yet to really have a proper budget, but hopefully I will soon.

My first draft of the original Sharknado was funnier and more self-aware, and that got cut down by the producers. And then Twitter embraced it, and those were the elements they seemed to like, so we got to do more of that in the second one. I always felt like in Sharknado 2, we were following the audience’s lead as to what they wanted the franchise to be. The question always is, how do we escalate and top what we did before? That was especially true of the big moment in the first Sharknado: How do you top Fin Shepard diving into the shark with a chainsaw and cutting his way out? People kept saying, “What’s the moment going to be?” and I kept saying, “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.” We already knew that Fin was going to surf a shark through the sky and land on the spire of the Empire State Building, but they felt that wasn’t enough of a moment. And so I came up with the idea of the shark biting off April’s hand on the plane, and he would pull the hand out, take the ring off and propose to her.

The process of pounding out the story outline has become very collaborative, and it’s not just me and director Anthony C. Ferrante. The execs at Syfy get involved, and the partners at The Asylum get involved. So the broad-stroke outline becomes very much a “by committee” kind of thing, mainly as to what the set pieces are going to be. And then it becomes a matter of, “OK, what are the characters doing?” the core dramatic things that you think of for any script. That’s the stuff that I get into, and often Anthony and I will talk about that. Then I’ll go off and write it. It usually takes me about a month to do the first draft.

With the first movie, I just wrote it, I got some notes, I addressed them, and that was it. The second one, it was a more laborious process, the third one even more so, because everybody’s paying attention to it, and everybody has their own ideas. And you get the comments from the first group of people, and you try and address those, and you make those changes, and then it goes to the next level of people, and they say, “OK, we don’t like these things, change them.” So it’s a whole process, and the politics of that, honestly, I find very frustrating, and I don’t know that it necessarily results in the best movie possible. But, of course, if you were to ask those people, they’d tell you that if I were just allowed to do what I want, the movie would suck, and it’s only their input that saves it. So everybody has an opinion.

Every time I think I’m done with the franchise, we start throwing around ideas for the next one, and I start to get caught up in it. For a long time I was trying not to think about a fourth one, because I didn’t want to get too excited about it before we knew if a) It was going to happen, and b) They were finally going to pay me a living wage to do this. Because somebody’s getting rich off Sharknado, but it’s not me! Except for doing press, and communicating with fans on Twitter, and maybe getting some meetings with some producers that I couldn’t have gotten to before, my life really hasn’t changed at all. No new car, still in the same rent controlled apartment I’ve been in since 1990. So I’ve been holding off from getting too emotionally invested. But just in the last week or so as the excitement has been starting to build, I’ve been throwing out some ideas that were in the back of my head, and they’re all pretty off the wall. I’m imagining that they’ll want us to stick closer to the formula, whereas I’ve been trying to take a hard right turn and do something unexpected and different. The cast and Anthony and I would like to see it go global. I mean, I’d love to see a shark hitting the Eiffel Tower! And I would love to see Fin battling sharks in the Coliseum in Rome. I think that would be incredible. Or maybe the Sydney Opera House or something. Or all of those! But there have been no official conversations yet.

There’s this sense that Sharknado’s success means the downfall of Western civilization. I’ve actually been making the argument recently that it’s exactly the opposite, and here’s why: From the beginning of human society we have had a need for shared communal experiences through storytelling. From cavemen around a campfire to the commoners watching Shakespeare. For a generation everybody watched Johnny Carson before they went to bed, and that’s what you would talk about the next morning and this gave our society a cohesiveness, a shared “language.” In the last 10 to 15 years, the way we consume media has been so shattered. People aren’t seeing the same thing at the same time, they’re not sharing the experience, and as a result, I think our society is breaking down. So when Sharknado blew up that first night, and it became this Twitter event, it became a shared communal storytelling experience. As a result I would say with great certainty that Sharknado has saved human civilization as we know it!

I get upset when people say, “It’s so bad it’s good,” instead of, “It’s good.” To claim that the content of the movies are any less than what big-budget Hollywood blockbusters are doing these days, I think, is unfair. I saw San Andreas a few weeks back, and I don’t see how that’s any different from any of the movies that we’ve made except for budget. If you gave us $200 million, we would make a Sharknado film that would be as good or as bad as any big Hollywood blockbuster. One of the things I like about Sharknado is that there’s a certain amount of heart to it. These characters have grown a lot over the course of these movies. Fin goes from this broken man who’s lost everything that was important to him to gradually resurrecting himself as a man, and as a father, and as a husband. Now in the third one he’s basically got a chance to start his life all over again. I think that heart is part of what has drawn people to it. If it weren’t for that, and it were just sharks falling from the sky, it might not have caught on the way it has.

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! premieres July 22 at 9 p.m. on Syfy.