50 Years Later: Yes, JAWS Is Still A Horror Movie
By Fangoria.com
13 min readBruce the shark belongs in the same conversation as our favorite iconic movie monsters.
Bruce the shark belongs in the same conversation as our favorite iconic movie monsters.
How about my own relationship to the movie? There isn't anything unique about my fandom other than I made a documentary about shark movies with my buddy Stephen Scarlata (Sharksploitation, available on Shudder, hint hint). I don't expect you to give a shit about my extremely typical love of the film. I love it for all the same reasons everyone else does. No hot takes here.
This is all a rambling wind up to say that, just when I was regretting agreeing to write this piece, my friend Henry suggested – “Why don't you weigh in on whether or not Jaws is a horror movie.” To which I said – Huh??? Are there really people who still don't think Jaws is a horror movie? Turns out, yes there is.
Now, this is not as hotly contested as the perennial “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” debate. You probably already agree with me. But for a movie that film fans love talking about as much as Jaws, it doesn't get talked about a lot, specifically as a horror film. You don't really see Bruce the shark brought up as an iconic movie monster with likes of Freddy or Candyman, or even other creatures like Godzilla, the Xenomorph, or the Graboids from Tremors (even though the Tremors poster is a Jaws homage!). So let's celebrate Bruce's big five-oh by discussing why he most certainly is a horror icon!
First things first — if the movie isn't horror, then what is it? “Adventure Thriller” is what the deniers usually say. But I think the keyword here is — Thriller. They think it is a Thriller, not a horror movie.
If someone truly has strong academic feelings about the distinction between a thriller and a horror movie, that's one thing. But I don't believe the average person who thinks Jaws is a Thriller-not-a-horror, is actually thinking that hard about genre definition.
I believe the distinction is more insidious — which is the idea that Jaws is TOO GOOD to be a horror movie. No one usually says this out loud, they might not even realize they're implying this, but the sentiment is there. You read Fango, you know what I mean, and I know this pisses you off too. The sentiment is that, sure, Horror is popular, but it is trash. A guilty pleasure. It's the Taco Bell of genres. Even when filmmakers like del Toro or Peele win an Oscar for a horror flick, people feel the need to trot out that rage-inducing distinguisher: elevated horror.
I quoted Tarantino before. That came from an episode of the ReelBlend podcast, where Quentin Tarantino said of Jaws :
“I think Jaws is the greatest movie ever made. Maybe not the greatest film. But it's the greatest movie ever made… there's no making it better than Jaws. There's no ‘better' than Jaws. It is the best movie ever made. And it shows how badly timed most movies made before Jaws were.”
This has the whiff of a backhanded compliment, making the distinction between a “movie” and a “film.” I'm not trying to drag Tarantino here; if you listen to the whole bit in context, he very clearly loves Jaws and Spielberg. And I get what this distinction means to him. All creative mediums fall on a spectrum of creator intent, with what you could say is “art“ on one end and “entertainment“ on the other end.
Personally, I think the most iconic and impactful things, especially with movies, fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I also don't think there is anything bad about striving for entertainment. But it is clear a lot of people do, and a lot of people feel that horror inherently falls on the pure entertainment end. And if a movie starts to creep towards the other end — well, then it stops being horror and becomes something else. It becomes “suspense“ or a “thriller.”
Just look at Jaws the novel. Peter Benchley's book was not a win with critics. Time magazine called it a “crude literary calculation.“ It was viewed as a lurid summer beach-read. You could call it a horror novel and no one would think twice. This is why the actors were initially somewhat embarrassed to do it. They were slumming for easy money on a schlocky killer fish movie. But then Jaws was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars! Surely, it was no mere horror movie. Silence of the Lambs has been subjected to this same thing.
If you need a crystal clear example of this mentality, all you gotta do is look at the franchise on Wikipedia. I know each of the sequels has its defenders, but I assume we can accept that the general perception is that the franchise gets worse as it goes along. With that in mind, Wikipedia's page for Jaws states that it is a “thriller film.“ For Jaws 2, “horror thriller film.“ And Jaws 3-D and Jaws: The Revenge, just plain ol' “horror film.“ Jaws 2 was apparently still good enough that it managed to partially retain its thriller status.
This is the weirdest part. No one denies that the Jaws sequels are horror movies. Or basically, ANY other shark movie for that matter; a subgenre Jaws created. Not just shark movies — Jaws launched the entire “killer animal“ subgenre. They were all imitating Jaws. How can a movie that isn't horror beget a zillion horror movies?
But, okay, for argument's sake — let's say you're a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan (dyed black, presumably). You aren't disparaging the genre, you just don't think Jaws is a horror movie. You think it is a Thriller. There's a difference, you say!
If I'm playing devil's advocate, and I wanted you to trip up my argument, I would point out that if you ask my favorite movie, I'll say Jaws. But if you ask my favorite horror movie, I'll likely say something else – Evil Dead 2 or Re-Animator. “Ah ha!“ you might rightly point and yell.
Jaws is mutli-genre, or a genre blend, or whatever you want to call it. Jaws has elements of horror, thriller, adventure, drama, comedy. Hell, technically, Robert Shaw sings not one but two songs in the movie. So is it also kind of a musical? At the video store I most frequented as a kid, I remember they kept all the Jaws movies in the Action section.
Does having its fingers in so many pots make it NOT a horror movie? If you asked me my favorite adventure movie, I ALSO wouldn't say Jaws. I'd probably say Raider of the Lost Ark. And if you asked my favorite Thriller I'd probably say Rear Window. Saying Jaws isn't a horror movie isn't as lunatic as saying Halloween isn't a horror movie. So let's humor ourselves for a moment and try to figure this out…
A quick internet search brings up recurring characteristics for each genre. The common elements of a thriller being suspense, tension, and excitement, often focusing on mystery, adventure, or action.
Okay, yes, Jaws has all those things, minus the mystery.
The recurring horror movie attributes included the intent to evoke fear, dread, and/or terror in the audience, as well as dark subject matter, supernatural elements, or disturbing imagery.
Dark subject matter? A shark eating people. Check. Disturbing imagery. Ben Gardner's head. That reveal of the severed leg. Check. Supernatural elements? Well, horror obviously does not require supernatural elements, but Jaws takes the tactic many killer animal movies do, where our animal is larger than normal, unnatural in some way.
I shouldn't even need to talk about the “evoke fear, dread, terror.“ The movie created worldwide anxiety about swimming, impacting beach tourism and ultimately negatively impacting sharks as a species now that Americans viewed them as a deadly menace determined to eat all of us. Yet this is another area that the deniers have dug into.
Some deniers try to negate this point by noting that non-horror movies can make people afraid of things, too. A good disaster movie could make you particularly paranoid about that disaster – Twister giving you tornado anxiety, for example. I think that is a different kind of fear, though. Earthquake movies make me paranoid about earthquakes because I live in Los Angeles. I'm writing this piece while visiting my parents in Minnesota.
You know what I'm not worried about right now? Earthquakes. But Jaws made me, and countless other Minnesotans of a certain age, afraid to go swimming in LAKES. Even swimming pools. A movie like Twister is tapping into rational fears, since tornados come every year and fuck shit up for thousands of people. Jaws tapped into something primal, irrational, lizard-brain fears.
And frankly, part of the fun and success of Twister is the way it cribbed from the horror genre to boost its impact — the way the tornados in the movie will actually sneak up on our heroes, and filmmakers used animal noises in the sound mix for the tornados to portray them as no mere weather system, but as a monster. Speaking of natural disaster monsters. Quick sidebar…
The Car (1977) gets talked about a lot as a Jaws clone that doesn't feature a killer animal (it's an evil car, if the title doesn't give that away). I'd add to this very niche conversation 1997's volcano movie Dante's Peak, which is not a horror movie, but almost feels like it wants to be because it mirrors Jaws in its attempts to monsterize the volcano. Linda Hamilton is basically Brody, the local official of a small mountain vacation town who must partner with an out-of-town volcano scientist, Pierce Brosnan.
The powers that be don't want to listen to our scientist, cause ya know, tourism. The movie even finds a way to pay homage to that famous opening scene of Jaws. The volcano kills two skinny dippers in Act One before it has even erupted! I tip my hat to you, Dante's Peak.
Anyway, where were we? Horror vs Thriller. Jaws clearly meets the criteria for either. So how do you really separate them, then? Similarly, how does one separate adventure and action? Subject matter? A super-cop movie is usually just action, and a treasure hunt movie is usually just adventure. I guess you'd say the same thing about horror and thriller. A movie about an attorney who suspects their sexy client might be a killer, that sounds like a thriller.
And a movie about a monster eating teenagers, that sounds like horror. This is the IMDb description of Jaws “When a massive killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community off Long Island, it's up to a local sheriff, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down.“
Even more than subject matter, I think we can look at the story structure of Jaws. The film adaptation of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is also about an old seafarer's Ahabian battle with a big-ass fish. It is definitely NOT a horror movie. Why? Because the massive marlin doesn't go around killing innocent people every ten minutes. The first half of Jaws is structured like a slasher movie — with our unseen POV killer stalking victims one by one. Bruce just needed leather gloves and a knife and he'd be a giallo killer.
Jaws' opening scene kill is one of the most endlessly ripped-off and homaged ways to open your horror movie. Clown in a Cornfield just homaged it, and it felt right at home in a slasher movie. Then, in the second half, Jaws becomes a Night of the Living Dead-esque trapped in a house movie, with our isolated heroes besieged in their flimsy safe space. Until Brody is left as our final boy, and then concluding with our happy “I'm not dead“ reveal for Hooper like he's Brandy stumbling back in at the end of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.
Just look at the goddamn poster! Does that look like the poster for an adventure movie? You know what the poster for Raiders of the Lost Ark didn't have? A giant snake taking up most of the frame as it is about to devour a tiny, naked Indiana Jones.
Maybe at the end of the day, the most obvious indicator is simply the film's title. It's called fucking Jaws. Not Terror on the Sea or Dark Waters or something a thriller would be called. Jaws is a horror movie title.
Bruce is a movie monster. A horror icon!
In our documentary, Sharksploitation (cough cough on Shudder cough cough), the legendary Roger Corman relates how he knew his career was in trouble when Jaws came out because the studios had started making his kind of movie — B movies, but with A movie budgets. I still think that's what this all comes down to. Some people just think a movie as good as Jaws doesn't belong in the horror ghetto. And to that I say…
