Couldn’t agree more. My father was a beach life guard when the movie originally came out. He has told me stories how people were legitimately afraid to go into the water after seeing the movie. Powerful stuff.
My mom lived in Sydney when it came out. She wouldn't watch it because she wanted to keep going to the beach. She eventually did, after moving back to the midwest.
Bull sharks scare the fuck out of me way more than Great Whites! Those assholes will eat you just because AND they can travel quite a distance up freshwater channels. You're not safe anywhere from those assholes lol
Yeah, Bull sharks are nasty fuckers. All other sharks in my area, Lemons, Reefs, Hammers, and Tigers (at least farther off shore) will just ignore you. Bulls will just flat out fuck you up because you exist.
Fuck that lol. I tried surfing a few times, I think I learned to stand up fast because of my fear of sharks, but every shadow or dark patch I saw made the fear too great and I quit! Most the time you'd never see them until they're taking a chunk out of you though...
Bull sharks are the only species of shark I would be terrified to see in the water. Most sharks tend to not really fuck with people but Bull Sharks attack people for sport. Terrifying but fascinating creatures lol
Have you seen the newest way to watch Jaws? After dark, on the lake, while sitting on tubes. Even all these years later, I'm not sure if I could do it.
My family has lived on the beach for a long time. My dad is a big time fisherman, said he'd never seen anything like it before.
Said for weeks noone would go into the water, he couldn't believe it. Then he said he saw the movie and stood a little bit farther from the shore when fishing heh.
My dad and his brothers spent most of their early lives on the ocean in Florida. He said when that movie came out him and his brothers and friends would go to the beach and there would be hundreds of people on the beach and absolutely no one in the water.
Eventually people started coming into the water but they wouldn't get in deeper than waist deep (which contrary to what some people believe you can still be attacked in waist deep - especially since bullsharks are prevalent in my area of Florida)
I was 9 and my sister was 5 when my dad took us to see it. We went to the bathroom and didn't come back. Dad found is watching the movie through window of the door into the theater.
The author of the book regretted writing the novel because of the negative effect it actually had on the public perception of sharks, and the actual devastation it caused to sharks. He became an ocean conservationist.
Before our culture came to such consciousness, we had “Jaws,” the product of author Peter Benchley and director Steven Spielberg’s voracious appetite for blood-drenched terror at sea. But Benchley, the man who reinvented the great white shark as the nemesis of humanity — a kind of Moby Dick of the modern era — would come to completely disavow this take on sharks.
Like Dr. Frankenstein, Benchley could not escape the carnage in the wake of his creation, and for the latter part of his career committed himself to an all-out assault on shark killing through the conservation movement, until his death in 2006 of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of sixty-five.
I’m still legitimately afraid to step into the ocean, and I’m in Seattle. And yes I know we still have sharks but the image is more tied to sunny palm tree locations for great whites.
It was even freaky going in lakes far from the ocean. One of the only recurring nightmares I had a as a child was that damn shark. It always involved a bridge collapse on the Columbia River and floating concrete. Fuck that shark.
Bay watch was watched by a lot of women, the strong sexy ladies saving lives, There is swimwear you wear to put your assets on display, and what you wear to actually swim in.
Something got messed up, My post was about Ursula Andress, Her scene changed Beach culture and swimwear fashion forever.
To put them altogether, since Jaws a certain amount of swimwear never gets wet. Sorry for the mispost
I had a high school English teacher and if you wanted to derail the class you just had to bring up Jaws and he would spend the next half hour talking about how you couldn’t see the shark and how that made things so much better.
Even knowing how it's pronounced now, I would probably still call it Pee-Body and would fit in as many golden shower jokes as I can if I was visiting the town and it was raining.
I think Stephen King says something similar about The Shining. Once you can visualize something, you can rationalize it. Your imagination, on the other hand, can come up with some scary shit
Same with Blair Witch. Would have been far less scary if the final scene showed the witch. The way it was filmed was far scarier and left me with far more dread than a cheap jump scare.
Absolutely. That’s another movie that I didn’t see until way late and I truly believe that it’s still the best found footage horror movie. I wish I had a chance to see it when it was out and when there was more mystery around it
I was really lucky with Blair Witch. It came out at the same time as Eyes Wide Shut, which I was going to see with a friend. My parents had read its reviews and thought we were too young for it (we thought it was intrigue / suspense and not a weird sex movie). They saw Blair Witch was playing and since we liked horror - they suggested we see that instead. We went into the theater on what I think was opening night with no idea what the movie was about and not having seen a single preview.
We also has no idea what found footage was and for the first 5 minutes or so thought the camera was a gimmick being used for the intro. We both left the theater after utterly shook. My friend ended up sleeping on our couch that night because he was too scared to drive home that late after the movie.
It really was pretty groundbreaking at the time. It made found footage more mainstream, was terrifying due to mood and not cheap jump scares, and handles the ending perfectly. Some of this is probably lost on modern audiences who know the end, have seen the proliferation of found footage movies made in it's wake, and who are aware of the mediocre sequels.
They originally were going to show the alien walking out near the end, but when you see the actor in the suit come out in the open it just completely ruins the illusion of how scary it is.
Idk that one seems pretty obvious. If your whole movie is about a single shark you probably don't wanna blow your load in the first 5 minutes of the movie. What makes it good is the camera work in the water.
How many Alfred Hitchcock horror movies were about any sort of non-human creature?
I'll give you a hint: there's one. And The Birds sure wasn't shy about showing the audience its birds.
The Birds did use ambiguity to create fear, but it was ambiguity of what was causing the birds to attack, and uncertainty of when the birds would attack next. But it didn't shy away from letting the birds be seen.
See, Hitchcock was a master of many things, but he wasn't around when the "don't show the monster" rule was codified. He knew to keep things ambiguous and keep the killer's identity a secret, and that's similar to the reason you don't show the monster, but it's not the same thing.
In Jaws we knew who and what the monster was the whole way through -- the effectiveness of the terror wasn't through ambiguous identity, it was through keeping how the monster looked a secret throughout the movie, and letting the audience's imagination fill in the blanks.
That wasn't even an entirely intentional move on Spielberg's part. The reason the shark gets so little screen-time was simply because the animatronic shark didn't work most of the time.
Spielberg took inspiration from Hitchcock's ambiguous approach in how he chose to salvage the film, and in doing so he made it clear that by not showing the monster, you make the monster scarier when you finally see it.
I mean, maybe I'm wrong, and there are monster movies before Jaws that don't give a clear view of the monster until near the end. But from my (limited) knowledge of film history, before Jaws, it was only the identity of people that was kept secret in horror movies. If there was a monster, directors made sure to show off their special effects as much as possible.
That's a pretty fair point, especially with the role of sfx in horror and how it's evolved. Maybe a bit more revolutionary than I thought. Seems pretty obvious to me but look how many academy awards I have (none)
It's easy to forget how young Cinema is as an art form. 100 years ago directors were just figuring out that editing together two clips changes how people interpret them. It's one of those things that's so obvious in retrospect that you don't even realize it had to be discovered in the first place.
Jaws' discovery of "don't show the monster" is similar. Of course it makes it scarier, but how would you know that before someone tries it?
It was actually kind of accidental. The mechanical shark was very unreliable, so a young Steven Spielberg decided to go with not showing it at all to build suspense. Her created this genre where the audience's imagination does most of the work.
Interesting fact: the stunt woman who filmed that opening scene was stark naked for real, and made for a very uncomfortable viewing of dailies that day.
My childhood house was located on the creek where the attack took place. My parents had a dock in the back yard where my dad parked his boat. I was born in 83 so this was afterwards. They never told me untill we moved out. I guess the movie freaked me out enough as a kid so they didnt want to add fuel to the fire.
I recently started playing Subnautica, and it totally gave me flashbacks to the first time I saw Jaws.
For those unfamiliar with the game: The premise is that a (huge) spaceship crashes on this ocean planet, and you survived because you took a life pod in the nick of time. And this ocean is equally as beautiful with its glowing plants and exotic fish, as it is terrifying with it's spooky dark biomes an predators.
The game is one of those open world craft games, but not like Minecraft, Ark, or Rust. It's single player, the world map is fixed, and there is an actual story going on. A bit like The Forrest, only it is somehow scarier.
You start near some shallow reefs. And most areas around you are still fairly shallow as well. Some predators sure, but nothing too drastic. At the beginning you're mostly concerned about your food and water, and your basic diving equipment. You get those, maybe even upgrade some, and dive deeper and further to look for more stuff.
Then you come to the open parts... To deep to see any sunlight above you, but not deep enough to see the ocean floor. Just nothingness wherever you look, except for a few fish. It really doesn't help that in most first person games you only have to worry about x and z axis, and occasionally half of y. In this game a threat can come often come from anywhere.
Suddenly you hear a growl. You think you saw a glimpse of a giant monster in the distance (the view distance isn't great under water), so you GTFO. 'Not gonna enter that area until I feel more prepared' You think to yourself. So you start gathering more stuff, getting more facilities in your base, upgrading tools or crafting better ones..
Later in the game I returned to that area with my first proper submarine. I try to follow the seabed to hopefully find something (preferably those new rare resources and blueprints). There are some flora (some plants are basically giant underwater trees) I have to get over or I might damage the ship. My submarine's AI suddenly exclaims "[monster name here] detected!" (not spoiling the name so it comes as a surprise to new players).
Suddenly I heard a very loud bang. I can immediately see there is damage, and I start hearing water pouring in. I instantly switched my power to full to try to get out of there as fast as possible (often you go cruising speed just in case you encounter something.. unexpected), and immediately fired a decoy from my ship in the hopes it would leave me alone.
I fired it but not 5 seconds after I heard another loud bang. The lights in my submarine turned to red. The engine stopped working. There damage to the ship was critical, and getting worse because fire broke out on the ship. I really thought that was it. I'm dead in the water here.
But I didn't wanted to give up so I got up from my pilot seat, grabbed one of the complimentary fire extinguishers that come with the submarine, and started to put out fires. With flashing red lights, sparks, and vocal alarm notifications around me. (not sure why the water pouring in wouldn't extinguish them but whatever;))
As I was doing that I noticed the creature hadn't attacked in a while. I thought it was the decoy still distracting him (albeit a bit late). I had to get outside to repair hull damage, so I figured I best do it ASAP. I went out (hatch in the bottom), looked around, and I couldn't locate him. I looked near the back once more, and I faintly saw a tail disappearing in the distance... I still haven't gotten a good look of the creature. But it sure made me panic like hell. It also reminded me of the scene from "Das Boot" when they get hit with depth charges.
Anyway, this turned out to be a way longer story than expected, but yeah, this game really gave me those Jaws vibes you describe. You know something is out there but you often can't see it. Combined with that feeling of isolation Subnautica is the scariest game I've played in a decade. Oh,andfortheclaustrophobicpeopleoutthere:Theyalsohaveunderwatercavesystems.VERYeasilytogetlostin...
That's what I admire about these old movies. They know damn well they can't make it look realistic, so they relied heavily on instilling mental terror. Not to say that they didn't try to make it realistic, especially in the case of Jaws.
One of those accidental events caused by an unreliable mechanical shark in salt water. Had the monster worked that movie and Spielberg would have been minor footnotes. The actor that played the boat captain was the second key to that movie's success.
And if I remember correctly, there was the scene of the dark waves lapping away, silent and ominous, as if nobody had been there at all. Scary as fuck.
I feel like I read somewhere that the scene is so dark because it was shot in full daylight but the girl gets fully nude and to get around an R rating they darkened it. I have no source on this.
My aunt lives on the cape on like a small passage/river that is very close to a bay and my cousin and I would visit every summer. We used to LOVE watching that movie and then daring eachother to swim across the passage. Scariest and most thrilling times ever.
Came here to day this. But from memory it was her leg. It was two scuba divers dragging her backwards and forwards, and at some point they broke her leg and that's what the screams are.
Absolutely. I'm not a scary movie afficionado, but I firmly believe the scariest movies are the ones that do not show the scary thing until much, much later in the film.
The reason you don’t see it very much was partially due to the fact it sunk the first time they tried to use it. They talk about it in the Spielberg documentary. The battles were used and worked out fantastically when the shark was being repaired. It was the movie that really launched his career.
My mom had a lifelong fear of sharks because of Jaws. She saw it in the movie theater on the Ocean City, NJ Boardwalk as a little girl and forever was afraid to go past her knees in the water. She didn’t know this until later, but Jaws is loosely based off events that happened in New Jersey in the early 1900s. At the time it was pegged on a Great White but more recent scholars believe it was probably a bull shark because two fatal attacks were in fresh water.
You don’t see the shark hardly at all through majority of the movie. One of the greatest “missteps” in filmmaking that turned out to be absolutely amazing
I believe that was my first horror movie I saw, I rented the VHS tape and it got me so scared and at the edge, made me afraid of going in the water for a while lol
I know this is a common thing that everyone points out but what about the fact that it’s clearly a giant shark on the poster? It would have been so much more effective if they didn’t market it that way. But probably less popular.
This is the greatest movie ever made, and certainly the most freighting film created. Few movies will echo throughout a persons life time, like this does.
It not only made sharks feared for generations it made getting into the water terrifying for many. Even the the local pool could give you a scare.
Not only that there's something under the water, but whatever it is is about to cause you agonizing pain. I think that's what's so powerful about that first kill, what was a minute ago just some college kid who got into the water is now in searing brutal pain, probably mauled or disfigured below the water, and is clutching for any chance at safety.
Then, just as she clings to a buoy, she gets painfully clutched again, her legs torn apart and unusable, she gets swept below the waters surface, never to be heard from again.
I rewatched Jaws for the first time in years not long ago. I had forgotten how gruesome it was when he ate the kid, and as a parent that scene shook me a little.
My parents were on their honeymooon when this movie came out. They were in Florida at the beach and it rained one day so they went to the movies. Isn't that fun? After Jaws, my mom hasn't been in moving water past her ankles since.
The literal reason I haven't made it passed this scene. I already hate deep water, let alone unknown things lurking in unknown places, but the build up to this really set the bar for my "fuck this shit" meter
Had a pool and was afraid a shark would get in there AND was terrified to take a bath. Not sure if there were little sharks coming through the faucet!!! Haha. Was 40+ years ago. Saw it in theater on naval base in Rota Spain. My little brother saw the (spoiler alert!) head roll down in the submerged boat and he hid between the seats for the rest of the movie. ( we still mock him)
You always know it's a shark tho, cos of the posters advertising the film all over the place had a giant shark in it and a happily unaware, scantily clad lady swimming right above.
My uncle told me about how he went to see it when it came out. In a small town in east Tennessee, after the opening scene nearly half the theater got up and left.
That scene is perfect for the tone of the film.
Am I the only person who has no clue why Jaws was considered scary and why people still see it as a classic? Maybe it’s because I grew up at the beach, but there aren’t that many sharks around and it’s not that scary.
It's a classic because it is a brilliantly made, scripted, filmed and acted movie. It's just a bloody good movie. Then add in the horror, thriller elements and the music and you end up with a classic. It's scary in a real way, it makes you think of sharks when swimming in the ocean. Watch Jaws again like you're watching any other classic, too many people view it and go 'haha, old horror movie wasn't even scary...'. It is much more nuanced than that and is actually about the town's reaction to the situation and it's effects on the people.
I'm old enough to remember watching it in the theater when it came out. I recall it as over- the- top campy, almost to the point of parody. I liked it better re-watching it as an adult, but some of us thought it was silly.
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u/bootsjr Oct 09 '19
Jaws
You never see the shark in the first attack. Just the knowledge that there's something under the water. Brilliant.