Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  CHAPTER 9

  Never Go Swimming Again

  Jaws (1975)

  A young woman, Chrissie Watkins, is attacked and killed by what appears to be a big shark off the coast of the peaceful New England island of Amity. Local authorities are quick to sweep her death under the rug and pronounce it the result of a boating accident. The recently appointed chief of police, Martin Brody, a city cop terrified of the water, sees the attack for what it is. He wants to shut down the beaches until the shark is caught, but as Amity’s mayor Larry Vaughn says, Amity is “a summer town. We need summer dollars.” News of a big shark killing beachgoers would scare tourists away from the island. Brody complies, but then a young boy, Alex Kintner, is attacked and killed by the shark in broad daylight and with plenty of eyewitnesses. Brody calls in a shark expert, Matt Hooper, and hires a seasoned local shark hunter, Quint, to find and kill the shark. Brody, Hooper, and Quint set out in Quint’s boat. After some hunting they find the great white shark and try to kill it. But the shark is bigger, stronger, and cleverer than the men had expected. It eats Quint and almost gets Hooper, but Brody manages to kill it by shooting a rifle bullet into a tank of compressed air that the shark is swallowing. The shark explodes, the boat sinks, and Brody and Hooper paddle toward safety (Spielberg 1975).

  Released in June 1975 and based on Peter Benchley’s novel of the same name (1974), Jaws quickly became the highest-grossing film up until then—a film that, famously, “filled the theaters and emptied the beaches” (Salisbury and Nathan 1995). Jaws didn’t just lure people away from beaches and into the darkness of the multiplex, it caused a substantial drop-off in North American beach tourism (Andrews 1999, 121) and made generations of moviegoers wary of the water and terrified of the monstrous creatures that roam its dark depths. When media psychologists ask people about fright-inducing media presentations, media content that had long-term negative psychological and behavioral effects on viewers, Jaws invariably swims into a short list of reliably terrifying, even traumatizing movies (Cantor 2002, 2004, Harrison and Cantor 1999, Hoekstra, Harris, and Helmick 1999). In a recent study (Cantor 2004), 4 percent of a large sample of college students reported “lingering effects” of Jaws. Most prominent among those effects were sleep disturbances—mainly nightmares—and “interference with swimming . . . not just in the ocean, but also in lakes and pools.” Even years after seeing the film, many viewers still felt uneasy about swimming. As one respondent put it, “to this very day, when floating in a body of deep water, I still occasionally have that feeling that something could come up and grab me” (Cantor 2004, 292). What made Jaws so effective that it managed not just to engage and terrify audiences for two hours, but to awaken in hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of viewers an abiding, profound terror of the sea?

  Jaws gets its peculiar power from successfully immersing its audience in a primal scenario of predation by a malevolent animistic agent, the shark, and by aligning audiences with the perspective of an alert and heroically altruistic character, Martin Brody. He is the first major character to take the threat of the shark seriously, and his conscientiousness and determination help him banish the threat to his community. The audience is encouraged to form a sympathetic bond with Brody. Several scenes depict Brody’s life with his family, showing him to be a caring father and a loving husband, one unselfishly concerned with the welfare of his kin. He is crippled by his own intense fear of the water as well as by political forces determined to downplay the danger for financial reasons, but he altruistically rises above these constraints and successfully fights back against the shark. Jaws provides audiences with a jolting, visceral reminder of a biological truth that most of us ignore or repress most of the time: the fact that we are, to some apex predators, “small, edible animal[s]‌”—in a word, meat (Plumwood 2012, 13, Quammen 2003). The film conveys that idea most powerfully by showing us ourselves from the predatory perspective of the shark, and it embeds the idea in a highly suspenseful story. We never know exactly when the shark will strike, though we are alerted to its presence before the characters via nondiegetic music and camera shots from the shark’s point-of-view. The idea of people as meat produces acute anxiety, and the film ultimately resolves that anxiety, in the short term, with the spectacular obliteration of the man-eating shark. Human ingenuity and perseverance annihilate the monstrous threat. Even small, edible primates can fight back against giant monsters—provided they are willing to face it head-on, like Brody, and unlike the cowardly politicians of Amity. The film both creates and eases short-term anxiety, thus offering immediate emotional relief and satisfaction, and also leaves behind a lasting trace of dread, thus giving viewers a half-conscious feeling that Spielberg’s film is not only transient entertainment but also somehow profound, something that enters permanently into the fibers of their nervous systems.

  The great white shark is the engine that drives Jaws. It structures the story by setting the plot in motion and motivating its characters. The most vividly memorable scenes involve the shark, either directly or as suggested by the on-screen effects of its predatory activities. The shark has also been the focal point of most academic criticism. Most such criticism invests the shark with symbolic significance derived from a theoretical system such as psychoanalysis. Peter Biskind suggests that the shark should be read as “a greatly enlarged, marauding penis” (1975). Jane Caputi also invests the shark with genital symbolism but, in a surprise twist, interprets it as a giant vagina with teeth, a “vagina dentata” (1978, 314). According to Caputi, the shark “represents the primordial female in her most dreaded aspects” (307–308). Investing the shark with symbolic psychosexual significance does not get us closer to the causal underpinnings of the film’s power to transfix and terrify audiences. Jaws made people terrified of the water and sharks, not of genitals, sexual difference, the patriarchy, or the “vengeful mother” (Rubey 1976). Kingsley Amis resisted such interpretations, claiming that Jaws is about “being bloody scared of being eaten by a bloody big fish” (qtd. in Quirke 2002, 36). But that’s not quite right either. The shark in Jaws is more than just a bloody big fish. Over the course of the film it “develops from a mindless eating-machine into a malevolent force—intelligent, vengeful, unnaturally powerful, perhaps thousands of years old” (Rubey 1976). To humans, sharks—whether real or fictional—are rarely just “big fish.” They tend to be perceived as monsters or deities, demons or demigods. They “inspire terror out of all proportion to their actual threat” (Crawford 2008, 7)—not because the shark bears a remote resemblance to human reproductive organs, but because of an evolved psychological disposition to regard such a powerful, elusive, and elegant predator with awe-tinged horror. The shark is extremely dangerous yet utterly indifferent toward human affairs. Our reflection in the dead black eye of a great white shark shows us a weak, cowering little ape out of its element.

  Sharks make good horror movie monsters. They have existed with little evolutionary change for hundreds of millions of years. They roamed the oceans before the appearance of birds, reptiles, and mammals. Sharks are, in Hooper’s words, a “miracle of evolution”—well-engineered by natural selection to fulfill their purpose of survival and reproduction. The now-extinct megalodon grew up to about fifty feet long. It is an ancestor of today’s great whites, and it may have survived into the Holocene and thus coexisted with prehistoric humans. As Crawford writes: “We can imagine how the terror of sighting a two-metre dorsal fin might send shock waves down through our hereditary DNA” (2008, 28). Nobody knows the extent to which sharks have preyed on human and hominin ancestors over evolutionary time, but even if very few individuals—in prehistory as today—have been killed by sharks, the shark amply meets the input specifications of evolved anti-predatory mechanisms in the human mind. The shark is very clearly dangerous and predatory. Its mouth brims with sharp teeth. Its eyes are black, “lifeless . . . like a doll’s eyes,” in Quint’s words—deeply unsettling to us, as is its immobile, expressionless face. The sleek elegan
ce with which the great white moves suggests awesome power. There is an aesthetically pleasing convergence between its form and function; it looks like it was designed to kill. Its element, the ocean, is alien and inhospitable to us. We are vulnerable at sea, vulnerable when swimming with our vital organs exposed to threats from below. The original trailer for Jaws, narrated by Orson Welles, described the shark as a “mindless eating machine,” one that “lives to kill . . . It will attack and devour anything.” It is an evocative description, but unfair on several counts. Any carnivore “lives to kill,” badgers no less than sharks. Real sharks do not attack and devour “anything,” and the shark in Jaws is not merely a swimming chainsaw, an indiscriminate machine of destruction. It has agency—malicious, homicidal intent, as its behavior and the optical point-of-view shots from the shark’s perspective suggest. It appears to foster mammalian emotions of vengefulness, even primate powers of ingenuity. It is behaviorally unrealistic but dramatically explosive.

  The shark in Jaws is elevated to the stuff of myth, carefully built up to awesome proportions in the audience’s minds throughout the film as it is described and suggested but rarely shown. It is elusive, clearly extremely powerful, and very, very dangerous. The shark’s on-screen presence is restricted to a few minutes, all told—partly as a result of a creative decision by the filmmakers, partly because of the recurrent problems caused by the mechanical sharks constructed for the film (Andrews 1999, Gottlieb 2005, Quirke 2002). We don’t actually get a glimpse of the shark until more than halfway through the film, but characters tell us about it—it is twenty-five feet long and weighs about three tons—and we see the effects of its violent feeding. The first scene shows us the nighttime swimmer Chrissie Watkins being attacked by something in the water, some massively powerful creature that violently tears her to and fro before dragging her under; we witness as her severed arm is discovered on the beach the following morning, being snacked on by crabs. And we witness a pair of hapless islanders try to catch the shark with a roast on a hook tied to a wooden pier, which is torn apart and dragged out to sea by the beast. When we finally do see the shark, it looks very convincing (see Figure 9.1). Even shark experts have trouble telling the mechanical shark from the real ones used in Jaws footage shot off the coast of Australia (Gottlieb 2005, 90). By telling us that the shark is around while predominantly withholding it from view, Jaws provides a double assault on the audience, amalgamating the evolved fear of predation with the evolved fear of the unknown, of uncertainty. The audience knows that something dangerous is out there, but not where it is, exactly, or when it will strike—but we know before the characters do.

  Figure 9.1: The great white shark in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) has very little screen time, but when it finally does show up, it looks pretty realistic. It’s a terrifying predator with a great many teeth and absolutely no regard for human sensibilities. From the perspective of the shark, Chief Brody is meat—nothing more, nothing less.

  The fear provoked by the shark and provoked by the uncertainty surrounding it is compounded by sympathetic anxiety for vulnerable characters in peril. Jaws positions us as vicarious victims as well as helpless observers. Spielberg uses a great number of water-level shots designed to make us feel as though we were treading water along with the potential victims (Bouzereau 1995), but he also uses a “privileged warning system,” in Bowles’s phrase (1976, 203)—consisting of music and underwater point-of-view shots—to alert us to the shark’s presence and approach ahead of characters. Sympathetic anxiety is stronger when we realize that the characters don’t know that they are in danger, because their ignorance makes them more vulnerable. The film’s first scene, which took first place in a 2004 list of the “100 Scariest Movie Moments” (Kaufman 2004), employs this strategy of using relatively unrestricted narration to alert the audience ahead of the characters. In this scene, underwater point-of-view shots as well as composer John Williams’s famous two-tone musical motif—duh-dun, duh-dun—alert us to a menacing underwater presence before showing us a young woman jumping into the sea, blissfully unaware of this menace. We know that something nasty is out there, and that she doesn’t know. When she is attacked, our fears are confirmed. Williams’s motif—by now a cultural shorthand for impending danger, instantaneously recognizable in implication if not reference—uses minor chords to evoke negative emotion (Pallesen et al. 2005) and low pitch to imply aggression and threat (Huron, Kinney, and Precoda 2006). The motif reverberates through the spectator’s nervous system and stirs up a sense of profound unease. Moreover, its accelerating rhythm functions as a “countdown” (Biancorosso 2010, 320) to suggest the approach of the menace—the menace is there, now, and getting closer. The motif, in short, targets evolved emotional dispositions to serve as a signal of impending danger and thus build suspense and sympathetic anxiety.

  These various dramatic elements come together in the film’s most effective scene, the so-called “beach scene” which starts about fifteen minutes in. Chrissie Watkins has been killed, Brody suspects a shark and wants to close the beaches, but the coroner in collusion with the mayor claims her death the result of a boating accident. We know better because we saw what happened to Chrissie. We’re on the beach. People are chattering, swimming, enjoying themselves—but not Brody. He is in a chair, anxiously looking out toward the water, trying to keep track of what is happening. Spielberg aligns our perspective with his, alternating eye-line shots with reaction shots. A corpulent woman is floating in the water. A guy is playing fetch with a wooden stick and his dog. A young couple fools around. A kid is paddling around on an inflatable raft. People keep walking in front of Brody, obscuring his (and the audience’s) view of the bathers. Then a black shape breaches the water and approaches the corpulent woman. It’s a false alarm—no dorsal fin, just the bathing cap of an elderly swimmer. Brody is rattled, as is the audience. Then a man comes along to complain to Brody about parking violations, again obstructing his view. As the man is talking, the young woman in the water starts screaming. Brody starts to rise. It’s another false alarm, she’s just having fun with her boyfriend. More children go into the water. Brody is sweating, “uptight” in his wife’s phrase. The audience is beginning to relax a little—it’s all false alarms and a city cop out of his element, overly anxious—when the man with the dog starts calling the dog’s name. A close-up shows us its stick floating on the water; the dog itself is nowhere to be seen. The next shot is an underwater point-of-view, accompanied by Williams’s ostinato—the first nondiegetic sound in this scene. We know this is it. The menace whose point-of-view the audience now shares, and which we haven’t yet seen, approaches the bathers’ legs kicking underwater and zeroes in on the kid on the raft while the music intensifies. Cut, and we are just above water, some distance away from the kid on the raft. It’s hard to see exactly what is happening, but a deep bass rumble—suggesting great size and awesome power—accompanies a brief frenzy of circular motion around the kid’s raft. He is dragged down amid a fountain of bloody water (Figure 9.2). People start screaming. Spielberg zooms in on Brody while pulling the camera away, producing in the audience the sense of nausea and vertigo that rush through Brody as his worst fears are realized. Panic ensues and people scramble to get out of the water.

  Figure 9.2: The infamous “beach scene” in Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) is utterly disturbing as it builds up to the climax of a violent shark attack. Here, a small boy is attacked by the great white and dragged underwater in a spray of blood and seawater, evoking a primal nightmare scenario.

  The beach scene is a marvel of cinematic construction, extremely effective in building up to an utterly unsettling climax. Alex Kintner’s death is simultaneously understated—we see no teeth entering flesh, no overt violence—and wildly graphic, with the geyser of blood. The scene conveys to us the terrible menace of the shark, it lets us share Brody’s increasing apprehension and the vindication of his paranoia, and it allows us to feel the terror of the bathers themselves when they realize the d
anger they are in. Spielberg recounts how, at an early screening of the film, the scene caused a man to run into the theater lobby to vomit. “He came back after throwing up and went right back to his seat. That’s when I knew we had a hit” (qtd. in Andrews 1999, 114). They had a hit because they so effectively and compellingly evoked the anxiety accompanying uncertainty coupled with danger as well as the terror of the primal encounter between animal predator and human prey.

  The great white shark—an ancient monster from the depths of time, the ocean, and the human mind—tears through the busy trivialities of day-to-day life on Amity, much as the screeching sound of Quint’s fingernails raking across a blackboard tears through the chaotic babble of the excited citizens gathered in the town hall to discuss the shark attacks. Like that screeching sound which inexplicably, atavistically grates on the nervous system, the shark appears out of prehistoric depths to disrupt yet also provide focus to Brody’s world. Brody, who has transferred from crime-ridden New York City to peaceful Amity, has his hands full fending off islanders’ complaints about kids from the local karate school “karateing” their picket fences, with petty traffic violations and zoning restrictions. The menace of the shark peels away all concerns but the most basic one: survival. Brody, however, is concerned not just with his own, or even his family’s, survival; his strong sense of civic duty—his desire to protect all the people of Amity—marks him as the protagonist of the film. He is animated by a prosocial and unselfish desire to protect his fellow men; he is willing to go against blindly stubborn politicians as well as his own phobia of the water to keep the citizens of Amity safe. That is why the ending is so morally satisfying. Brody, the everyman protagonist, saves the day from a terrifying threat in the face of bleak odds (Bowles 1976). The other two members of the shark-hunting trio fail. Quint is killed, but he is animated by a crazed and selfish desire for revenge over an entire set of species (sharks ate many of his soldier comrades after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, we learn). Hooper is almost killed, but he is motivated more by scientific curiosity than by altruism. Only Brody rises above himself. He is clear-sighted, resilient, and cunning enough to match the ancient threat that endangers the livelihood of his community.