James Cameron’s subversive aquatic horror, The Abyss, is now streaming on Tubi

“It’s no secret that as an ocean explorer now, as an avid scuba diver for many years before that, and as a fan of ocean exploration when I was a kid, I’ve had this romance with the ocean my entire life,” James Cameron once told National Geographic while explaining the inspiration for Avatar: The Way of Water. The 2022 Avatar sequel isn’t the only Cameron film about water; Titanicmakes effective use of the element, and Cameron also helmed an aquatic monster flick for his feature debut in Piranha II: The Spawning, whose production was infamously fraught. But the film that best exemplifies Cameron’s lifelong fascination with water is The Abyss, the 1989 science-fiction horror that breaks genre conventions in unexpected ways.