Jaws
A quiet theme begins to play. At first the notes consist of just short staccato. They’re low and ominous and somehow manage to resonate deep within you. The tempo increases and with it, your heartbeat. Something is coming. It’s big but you can’t see its face. The tune gets louder and begins to reach its crescendo. The water turns a shade of crimson; a killer shark has claimed its next victim.
When it was released 40 years ago, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws became the quintessential and premier summer blockbuster. More than 67 million Americans saw the movie in the summer of 1975 and it forever changed the way people look at the ocean.
The plot is rather simple. A massive great white shark is terrorizing Amity Island, a fictional beach resort town that anyone who frequents the shore could relate to. Eventually, three brave men board a small vessel to kill the murderous creature. By the end of the film, the viewer finally sees the animal’s face — well, mostly its mouth — as it flops on board the ship in an attempt to swallow any human.
Jaws revolutionized horror films because it had a killer that one never fully views until the very end. The film capitalizes on the assumption that it’s easy to be scared of something you can’t see. Until the film’s completion, the viewer can’t be sure of the monster’s size or appearance, making its debut at the end even more horrific. Interestingly, this strategy of hiding the killer throughout the movie occurred in part because of a mistake. The large animatronic shark was supposed to be used in many of the scenes throughout the beginning of the film, but it experienced technical difficulties during filming. Spielberg decided to embrace the issue and save the problematic mechanical fish until the end, thus creating the mysterious horror one feels when viewing the deaths of characters plagued by the unseen denizen of the deep.
The blockbuster not only set the tone for horror and action movies to come, it instilled a very real fear into the lives of beachgoers. Even though the odds of getting attacked by a shark while at the beach were and are incredibly slim — about 1 in 3.7 million- — when the film debuted, many people who once entered the ocean without hesitation began to spend more time on land.
Today, Jaws remains a summer classic. Through the eyes of anyone existing today, the shark in the movie is obviously fake; it moves in a mechanical way and has the lifelike qualities of a high-tech rubber duck. Yet, even with incredible advances in CGI and 3-D, Jaws, with its now archaic special effects, remains a classic feat of action and horror rather than the butt of every special effects joke.
If one thing is for sure, it’s that Jaws hasn’t stopped its storied tradition of putting fear into the hearts of innocent vacationers. As beachgoers continue to flock to the shore this summer, many will have to repress that nagging feeling after watching Jaws and convince themselves there isn’t anything dangerous lurking under the waves.
Or is there?
