History Main / SubStory

* ''Series/TheUnit'' has an episode involving a rather trippy dream and the women of the series getting action-y in said dream, plus a South Korean submarine.
* And of course, a submarine is the best place for a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-dkBf-T9I certain kind of sandwich]].

* The episode "The Last Voyage of the ''Jimmy Carter''" of ''Series/TerminatorTheSarahConnorChronicles'', is a [[TimeTravelTenseTrouble flashforward/flashback]] set on humanity's last working military submarine, on a secret mission in the war with the Machines.

* The ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'' episode "D minus 0" is also a sub story RecycledInSpace.

* ''Series/LastResort'' is about a US Navy submarine that goes rogue after becoming {{Unwitting Pawn}}s in a GovernmentConspiracy's FalseFlagOperation.
* ''Series/DoctorWho'': "Cold War" is set on a crippled Soviet sub beneath the arctic ice, with something very nasty loose on board.

* ''Series/{{Das Boot|2018}}'', sequel series to the [[Film/DasBoot 1981 film]]. Contrary to the latter, it adds some land-based subplots.
* ''Series/TheLastShip'': Sean Ramsey, the BigBad of Season 2, is a former Royal Navy officer who was stationed aboard a submarine, the HMS ''Achilles'', during the [[ThePlague Red Flu plague]]; being one of the only survivors among the crew, he took command of the sub and now uses it as a mobile headquarters of his cult. It gets into several battles with the ''Nathan James'' over the course of the season, with their FinalBattle in particular involving the battleship ending up right on top of where the submarine is submerged and the two jockeying to get into position to attack each other without collateral damage.
* ''Series/FearTheWalkingDead'': The webisode miniseries ''[[WebVideo/FearTheWalkingDeadDeadInTheWater Dead in the Water]]'' is set aboard the USS ''Pennsylvania'', which was found beached ashore in Texas in Season 6, revealing how that came to be -- the sub was doing maneuvers in the Gulf of Mexico when the ZombieApocalypse began, with the crew [[DwindlingParty slowly being picked off]] as the virus spreads among them. After [[AntiMutiny refusing orders to nuke Chicago]] in a senseless attempt to contain the outbreak, the surviving crew members beach the ship and scatter. Unfortunately, one of them would later get seduced into [[DarkMessiah Teddy's]] ApocalypseCult and lead him to the ''Pennsylvania'' in order to [[spoiler: launch its payload across Texas]].

* Music/IronMaiden's "Run Silent Run Deep".

* ''Deep Trouble'', a BBC radio series, is a comedy set on a Royal Navy nuclear submarine with an [[ArmedFarces incompetent crew]].

* ''688 Attack Sub''

* ''Sub Rebellion''
* ''Subwar 2050''
* ''UBOAT''

* The titular ''Literature/TheMagicSchoolBus'' transformed into a submarine several times outside the underwater episode.

* ''Manga/ArpeggioOfBlueSteel''

[[folder:Films -- Animation]]

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]

* ''Film/{{U 571}}'', one of the ''least'' historically accurate movies (at least concerning the Enigma code and who exactly captured it), it still is also incredibly gripping.

* ''Film/{{Below}}'' by David Twohy (of [[Franchise/TheChroniclesOfRiddick Riddick]] fame) plays the "bringing worst in humans" part for all the scares it can get out of it.
* ''Film/WeDiveAtDawn''- British film made during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, involving a British sub of the P-class being sent to the Baltic to sink a new German battleship. Despite being a propaganda film, it's still pretty good.
* ''Film/OperationPetticoat'' - a comedy about evacuating nurses from the Philipines to Australia in December 1941.
* ''Film/DestinationTokyo'' - a drama made during the war based on a recon patrol into Tokyo Harbor. The effects were so good that the Navy used it as a training film.
* ''Film/RunSilentRunDeep'' - surprisingly realistic take on sub warfare around the Japanese home islands.

* ''Film/MorningDeparture'' - actually set just post WWII, but plays much more like a WWII story than a Cold War one.
* ''Film/HellcatsOfTheNavy'' - which won the Golden Turkey Award for the worst UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan film of all time.
* ''Film/TheBedfordIncident'' - a loose retelling of ''Literature/MobyDick'' [[SettingUpdate using a Soviet Submarine in place of the whale.]]
* ''Film/TheHuntForRedOctober'' -- what happens when an entire submarine tries to defect from the Soviet Union.
* ''Film/TheSpyWhoLovedMe'' features multiple submarines. Among its more notable aspects is a movie featuring Main/PageThreeStunna pics somehow getting a PG when the BBFC reclassified the thing and Barbara Bach's shower. On naval ships, water is at somewhat at a premium (no, you can't get it directly from the sea; that's salt water and you need to desalinate it first) and sailors take a "Navy Shower" (rinse, lather, rinse off). Bach has the shower running. The captain clearly liked her; "Hollywood Showers" are only permitted if you've done something special.
* ''Film/DownPeriscope'' - a comedy about a RagtagBunchOfMisfits being given a UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo-era diesel sub as part of a naval exercise and pitted against the modern US Navy, including a nuclear sub. Despite it being a comedy, there are still some tense moments.
* ''Film/K19TheWidowmaker''
* ''Film/IceStationZebra''
* ''Film/CrimsonTide''
* ''Film/TheWolfsCall''

* ''Film/VoyageToTheBottomOfTheSea''
* ''Film/OperationPacific''. The WWII exploits of the fictional USS ''Thunderfish'' are culled from actual wartime submarine incidents. The Technical Advisor for the film was ADM Charles Lockwood, COMSUBPAC during the war.
** CDR Perry is wounded on the bridge and gives the order to "take her down", sacrificing himself to save his ship. This scene is based on the actual incident that earned CDR Howard Gilmore of USS ''Growler'' the Medal of Honor.
* ''Film/{{The Damned|1947}}'' is about a group of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who attempt to flee to South America aboard a U-boat as the war is ending.
* ''Film/GrayLadyDown'' features two submarines: the USS ''Neptune'' and the experimental mini sub ''The Snark''
* ''Film/BlackSea'', in which two separate groups of Brits and Russian crews are hired together to search for a sunken WWII sub carrying Nazi gold. And then things started to get worse...
* The 1985 Soviet two-part film ''Attention All Hands'' (rough translation of ''Слушать в отсеках'') starts with a Soviet sub sneaking into Bagryanaya Bay and sinking a German transport ship during UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo, before being lost with all hands. Forty years later, the sub commander's son (also a sub commander) is participating in a war game, pitted against his academy friend, who is in command of a destroyer. In the second part of the game, the sub commander has to sneak into the very same bay as his late father and "sink" a target. Instead of trying to sneak past the waiting destroyer at the bay entrance, the sub locates an underwater passage under a mountain that leads straight into the bay and takes the incredibly risky dive in order to get in that way. They succeed and win the war game. In the process, the commander finally realizes how his father managed to perform his heroic feat.
* In ''Film/AssaultOnAQueen'', a group of treasure hunters salvage a German U-boat and decide to become SubmarinePirates.
* ''Film/CrashDive'', another movie filmed during WWII, about an American submarine attacking German commerce raiders in the North Atlantic.
* ''Film/HostileWaters'', a film about an accident aboard a Soviet ballistic missile submarine.
* ''Film/VoyageToTheBottomOfTheSea'', the 1961 scifi film by Creator/IrwinAllen that led to a [[Series/VoyageToTheBottomOfTheSea TV series of the same name]].

* One of Robert Fulton's early submarines plays an important role in ''Ratcatcher''; the first Literature/MatthewHawkwood novel.
* ''Literature/TheHuntForRedOctober'' is all about the Red October submarine, and the above-water forces hounding it.
** Additional books in the Ryanverse generally include submarine operations as a b-plot or additional actions, including ''Literature/TheCardinalOfTheKremlin''[[note]]A ''Los Angeles''-class submarine attempts to extract two people from the Soviet Union through the Barents Sea[[/note]], ''Literature/TheSumOfAllFears''[[note]]The ''USS Maine'', an ''Ohio''-class submarine with a particularly nasty captain, is part of a b-plot involving the attempted tracking of the sub by a Soviet hunter-killer submarine, and eventually ends up as one of the casualties in the climax[[/note]], and ''Literature/DebtOfHonor''[[note]]Due to a greatly reduced Navy, the ''Ohio''-class missile submarines get a new lease on life as special operations support platforms[[/note]].
** The non-Ryanverse novel ''Literature/RedStormRising'' features the captains of both a sub and a sub-hunting frigate as significant POV characters.

* ''Das Boot'' (1973) by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, a novel about a German submarine in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. Better known via its film adaptation ''Film/DasBoot'' (1981).
* Edward Beach's ''Run Silent, Run Deep'' and its sequels, made into a Clark Gable film. Also his book ''Submarine!'', a memoir/history of the WWII Silent Service.
* Two novel series by submarine historian Edwyn Gray, one about a British S-Boat and one about a German U-Boat, both in WWII.
* Creator/GlenCook's "Passage at Arms" follows the story of a Climber ship, a type of spaceship that can under very specific circumstances essentially drop out of conventional space and fly almost undetectable except for a "pseudo-Hawking black hole" several millimeters wide. The primary danger is that while in climber space the ship cannot release the heat buildup from any of their systems.
** The book is actually more-or-less a remake of ''Literature/DasBoot'' [[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE]]!
* The "spider drive" vessels in ''Literature/HonorHarrington'' series are basically submarines [[RecycledInSpace In Space!]]
* ''The Dragon in the Sea'' (AKA ''Under Pressure'') by Creator/FrankHerbert depicts tense underwater combat TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture between nuclear submarines. Despite being published in 1956 it has survived the ravages of ScienceMarchesOn and ZeeRust remarkable well.
* ''Kishin Corps'', set in WWII, plus an alien invasion, one of the protagonist mecha is an amphibious type with an underwater mode.
* ''Literature/OurWivesUnderTheSea'': Leah's half of the plot consists of her and two crewmates on a submarine that's stuck at the bottom of the ocean. They [[spoiler:don't see anything until the end]], but they do wind up slightly losing their minds.

* The 1999 MadeForTV movie ''The Hunley'' is centered around the experimental Confederate submarine ''Hunley'', which had thus far claimed the lives of two of its crews while being tested. A new crew is put together, and they must find a way to use their submarine against the [[NavalBlockade Union Navy blockade]] of Charleston. [[spoiler: The sub sinks, and takes its third crew with it, but not before destroying a Union warship by [[RammingAlwaysWorks lancing it]] with a large explosive device.]]

* ''Deep Fighter''

* ''WesternAnimation/AtlantisTheLostEmpire'' starts off as this. The journey begins with the explorers entering the Atlantic Ocean via a submarine called the ''Ulysses'', but the submarine is then destroyed by a giant robotic lobster called the Leviathan, who kills off most of the background crew. The main characters then escape into an underwater cave via several smaller subs, and then after that is a TravelMontage through said caves leading to Atlantis.

[[folder:Web Comics]]
* ''Webcomic/DeepDiveDaredevils'': Set in TheThirties, a DieselPunk story about a CoolBoat and its' BadassCrew.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheDeep2015'': The series follows the Nekton family, a family of daring underwater explorers who live aboard a state-of-the-art submarine, the ''Aronnax'', and explore uncharted areas of the earth’s oceans to unravel the mysteries of the deep.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheDeep2005'': The series follows the Nekton family, a family of daring underwater explorers who live aboard a state-of-the-art submarine, the ''Aronnax'', and explore uncharted areas of the earth’s oceans to unravel the mysteries of the deep.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheDeep'': The series follows the Nekton family, a family of daring underwater explorers who live aboard a state-of-the-art submarine, The Aronnax, and explore uncharted areas of the earth’s oceans to unravel the mysteries of the deep.

* Literature/{{Discworld}}'s [[Creator/LeonardoDaVinci Leonard of Quirm]] builds a reconnaissance submarine in ''Literature/{{Jingo}}''. He calls it a '[[GiverOfLameNames Going-Under-The-Water-Safely Device]]'. ''Literature/ASeriesOfUnfortunateEvents'' novel ''The Grim Grotto''.

* ''Film/TheAtomicSubmarine'', a 1951 BMovie where the eponymous nuclear submarine fights an [[FlyingSaucer Unidentified Submerged Object]] beneath the North Pole.

* There is gobs and gobs of TechnologyPorn and made-up {{Technobabble}}. "Adjust bow plane yaw level by 20 degrees! Maintain aft compression vortex!"[[note]]Naval submarine phraseology for radio commands is TruthInTelevision, because when you're deep under the ocean ''and'' the enemy is trying to blow you up, it's stressful, so you need a clear, unambiguous way to communicate commands and messages. As such, if a WWII sub captain got an urgent warning of an enemy torpedo plane, they shout "Dive, Dive, Dive". The crew have no confusion over what they need to do. [[/note]]

* There is gobs and gobs of TechnologyPorn and made-up {{Technobabble}}. "Adjust bow plane yaw level by 20 degrees! Maintain aft compression vortex!"

* There is gobs and gobs of TechnologyPorn and made-up {{Technobabble}}. "Adjust bow planes 20 degrees! Maintain aft compression vortex!"

* There is gobs and gobs of TechnologyPorn and made-up {{Techbobabble}}. "Adjust bow planes 20 degrees! Maintain aft compression vortex!"

* You don't need to spend lots of money on sets or StockFootage. You can create plenty of suspense with [[SensorSuspense just a scanner and a pinging sonar]].
* You can justify a ShirtlessScene (Old submarines like German U-boats had no air conditioning and were very cramped and very hot).
* [[CabinFever Confined spaces tend to bring out the worst in people]] and are good for horror movies.
* There's the added danger that if the sub goes to the bottom involuntarily, the chances of everyone dying are pretty high.
* Nuclear power plant in an isolated submarine? Asking for dramatic trouble.
* Torpedoes can run for a good ten or fifteen minutes.
* SilentRunningMode is an excellent source of suspense.
* HotSubOnSubAction is [[RuleOfCool just plain cool]].
* The whole thing is a contest of wits with plenty of scope for a GuileHero.
* There is gobs and gobs of TechnologyPorn.
* Both sides are to some degree blindfolded and depend on hearing each other making for an interesting combat situation.
* The stakes are all or nothing. If a sub survives an engagement likely everyone aboard will survive while if it is sunk it will be so far underwater that everyone will die.

* They tend to be RatedMForManly which may be a good thing for some. Submarines have been historically and exclusively a male only environment and with this comes a few expectations with regard to storytelling. Female characters are often either minimized (often no spoken lines), or even totally absent.

* ''Literature/TwentyThousandLeaguesUnderTheSea'' - the Main/TropeMaker. Three men are kept captive on a rogue submarine run as its own country by the mysterious Captain Nemo... before actual submarines became a thing.

* ''Literature/TwentyThousandLeaguesUnderTheSea'' - the Main/TropeMaker.
* Literature/{{Discworld}}'s [[Creator/LeonardoDaVinci Leonard of Quirm]] builds a reconnaissance submarine in ''Literature/{{Jingo}}''.
* ''Literature/ASeriesOfUnfortunateEvents'' novel ''The Grim Grotto''.

* ''Series/FearTheWalkingDead'': The webisode miniseries ''Dead in the Water'' is set aboard the USS ''Pennsylvania'', which was found beached ashore in Texas in Season 6, revealing how that came to be -- the sub was doing maneuvers in the Gulf of Mexico when the ZombieApocalypse began, with the crew [[DwindlingParty slowly being picked off]] as the virus spreads among them. After [[AntiMutiny refusing orders to nuke Chicago]] in a senseless attempt to contain the outbreak, the surviving crew members beach the ship and scatter. Unfortunately, one of them would later get seduced into [[DarkMessiah Teddy's]] ApocalypseCult and lead him to the ''Pennsylvania'' in order to [[spoiler: launch its payload across Texas]].

* ''Series/LastResort''