When 2017’s The Shape of Water won the Academy Award for Best Picture, people were quick to label it fantasy, romance, drama—basically anything but horror. But the fact of the matter is that Guillermo del Toro’s hauntingly beautiful film about a woman who falls in love with a captive, humanoid river god is, without a doubt, a monster movie. Hollywood is always quick to dismiss the horror genre—how can the grotesque hold any real value?—but the fact of the matter is that horror, and monster movies in particular, have been influencing filmmaking for decades. Before The Shape of Water’s Best Picture win, the only other horror film to be awarded the same accolade was Jonathan Demme’s 1991 psychological masterpiece, The Silence of the Lambs—an epic gulf of nearly 30 years exists between these two films—but what Hollywood always seems to ignore is the fact that without horror, the concept of the modern day blockbuster—the industry’s bread and butter—might have taken a lot longer for us to invent.
Steven Spielberg set out to direct Jaws in 1974. He was only 26 years old, fresh off the set of his first feature length film, The Sugarland Express. Prior to Sugarland, he had worked on the made-for-tv movie Duel, and his directorial expertise was only just beginning to coalesce. Making Jaws would go on to test both Spielberg’s cast and crew and Spielberg, himself, since the rookie director was only just beginning to get his sea legs. It’s widely known that the production for Jaws was a complete nightmare—it should be noted that this was the first major film to ever be filmed at sea—and yet the challenges that Spielberg’s sophomore effort threw at him would go on to help him create one of the greatest films, horror or otherwise, ever made, ultimately launching his entire career.
Based on Peter Benchley’s book of the same name, Jaws tells the story of Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), a newly hired police chief who finds himself in the unique situation of having to hunt down a murderous great white shark that suddenly begins attacking innocent beachgoers right before the Fourth of July. With the help of marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and a local shark nut named Quint (Robert Shaw), the unlikely trio set out to take the shark on firsthand. On paper, the plot presents itself as a fairly simplistic premise, but on the screen, the movie transforms into a suspenseful and terrifying portrayal of man vs. nature vs. self.
There are many memorable things about Jaws—John Williams’ iconic, two-note score (baa-dum), “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” that final torpedo shot straight into ol’ Bruce’s (IYKYK) mouth—but perhaps the most memorable thing about the film is its sparseness. This is to say that Jaws makes its money off a whole lot of action never actually being seen on screen. The shark is rarely visible, its presence usually conveyed through other clever means. This decision was born out of necessity rather than brilliance, but it is the one thing that helped catapult Jaws to the top of the food chain. Faced with malfunctioning animatronic sharks and an uncooperative mother nature, Spielberg had to find other ways to incorporate the film’s most important cast member into the shots, and the results gave way to total suspense and raw terror.
The penultimate battle between the three men and the shark in which the creature’s presence can only be deduced by the floating barrels attached to it is one of the most iconic scenes in the whole film simply because it feeds on our worst fear of not being able to see the location of the things that haunt us. Taking a page from Alfred Hitchcock, Spielberg leaned into this discomfort, keeping the scariest things hidden from his audience in order to let our minds do the work of imagining the absolute worst. Because of this, Jaws becomes a psychological slasher that positions a terrifyingly massive shark in the role of the killer. When we see the shark’s first victim swimming in the water at the start of the film, we watch her from below as if we are inhabiting the shark’s point of view. He is a murderer stalking his prey from the safety of the ocean floor. The fact that the shark is an animal and not a human doesn’t matter, and because we so rarely see the actual shark on screen, it eventually ends up transcending both animal and human to become something otherworldly and entirely supernatural. Evil personified in the body of a great white shark.
But that’s what all great horror movies do. They position their monsters in roles that remind us of other even more terrifying things. Are Brody, Quint and Hooper really battling a great white shark, or does the shark merely represent the uniquely individual things that haunt them? For Brody, perhaps the shark represents an attack on his pride, so new to his role as police chief that he’s afraid of mishandling the shark attacks and falling out of the good graces of his town before he even has a chance to prove himself. For Quint, killing the shark would be equivalent to killing the demons that haunt him from his time serving in World War II aboard the ship that aided in the delivery of the atomic bomb used to destroy Hiroshima and that was eventually sunk by the Japanese. And for Hooper, the shark is merely representative of his desperate quest for rational, scientific order in a world in which there rarely seems to be any. Each of these men are battling something other than the shark itself when they are out at sea aboard the Orca, and just like they must face their true fears out on that water, the audience must also see their own fears reflected in the presence—or absence—of the shark, as well.
When Jaws finally released in theaters during the summer of 1975, it caused a frenzy. People flocked to see it, desperate to feel the fear and suspense presented on screen. During that year, Spielberg’s film became the highest grossing movie ever, and today, it is still considered to be the film that paved the way for the entire blockbuster concept. To think that this precariously made creature feature that has its roots deeply sunk into the world of horror is the one film that would open the door for other major motion picture hits is incredible. Spielberg’s amateur directing skills worked out in that he didn’t get too caught up in the details, thus allowing himself to make risky and unique decision that ended up paying off in the end. And even though, in true horror fashion, Jaws didn’t win Best Picture the year it was nominated, it still managed to make its mark, sinking its teeth into cinematic history by making a splash that is still incredibly hard to forget.
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