Jaws: The Monster You Barely See

The great secret of Jaws, the film that invented the summer blockbuster in June 1975 and taught a generation to fear the water, is that its monster does not work. The mechanical shark — three of them, actually, nicknamed Bruce after Steven Spielberg’s lawyer — was a pneumatic nightmare that sank, seized, corroded in salt water, and refused to look convincing when it did run. A twenty-seven-year-old director watched his central special effect fail, day after day, on a chaotic ocean shoot that ran wildly over budget and schedule, and out of that disaster he was forced to make the decision that saved the film: if you cannot show the shark, imply it. The malfunction became the method, and the method is the oldest and best idea in horror.

Jaws is usually filed as an adventure or a thriller, and it is those things, but its DNA is pure creature-feature horror, and its craft lessons belong to the genre. Spielberg, adapting Peter Benchley’s bestseller with the writer Carl Gottlieb, delivers ninety minutes of one of the purest suspense engines ever assembled before the beast is ever clearly seen, and by then he has trained the audience to supply the terror themselves.

The horror of the withheld

Consider the opening, which is among the most efficient in any horror film. A young woman swims alone at night off Amity Island. We never see what takes her. We see her jerked sideways, dragged, pulled under and up and under again, screaming, while John Williams’s two-note motif saws underneath — a low, primitive figure that stands in for the animal we are not being shown. The camera stays at the surface, at her level, so we share her ignorance of what is below. The absence of the shark is the entire scene. Spielberg understood, or was forced to understand, that an audience’s imagination will always build a worse monster than a foam-and-latex prop can supply.

The film sustains this for reel after reel through a vocabulary of suggestion the horror genre had known for decades but rarely deployed with such discipline. There are the yellow barrels, harpooned into the shark so that its movement is rendered as three floating drums cutting across the water — the creature translated into a legible, terrifying abstraction. There is the underwater point-of-view, the low gliding shot from beneath swimming legs, which puts us inside the predator without ever cutting to it. There is Williams’s theme, which does the monster’s acting. Verna Fields’s editing, which won an Oscar, is the unsung hero: the film’s shocks are timed to the frame, the water suddenly full of blood, a head lolling out of a sunken hull in one of cinema’s great jolts. Every one of these choices is a way of not showing the shark, and every one is more frightening than the shark.

Three men in a boat

The film’s second half narrows to a chamber piece, and this is where its greatness as drama, separate from its greatness as suspense, becomes clear. Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), a water-fearing New York cop marooned on an island; Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), a wealthy young oceanographer; and Quint (Robert Shaw), a grizzled, hard-drinking professional hunter, put out to sea in Quint’s boat, the Orca, to kill the thing. Confined to a small deck on open water, the film becomes a study of three kinds of masculinity forced into the same tiny space, and Spielberg lets it breathe — the scar-comparing scene, the drunken singing, the sudden hush.

The centre of it is Shaw’s monologue about the USS Indianapolis, the true story of the ship sunk in 1945 after delivering the Hiroshima bomb, whose crew was left in the water for days and picked off by sharks. Shaw delivers the speech — reworked by several hands, including the actor himself — in a low, cracked, mesmerising register, and it retroactively explains Quint’s suicidal obsession while giving the shark a mythic weight no prop could carry. It is the film pausing to let a man describe, in words, the horror it has spent an hour refusing to show. When the shark finally appears in full daylight in the last act, it works partly because the film has waited so long, and partly because we are now braced by a ghost story about real water and real teeth.

Where it comes from, and what it fathered

The direct ancestor of Jaws is Spielberg’s own earlier film. In 1971 he made Duel, a television movie in which a mild businessman is pursued across empty highways by a filthy tanker truck whose driver we never see. The truck is the shark: an implacable predator rendered almost entirely through suggestion, its menace located in the withholding of the human being at the wheel. Spielberg brought the exact same grammar to the ocean — the unseen driver becomes the unseen fish — and it is no accident that both films turn a simple pursuit into an existential ordeal by refusing to explain or fully reveal the thing doing the pursuing.

Behind Duel stands the whole Val Lewton tradition of the 1940s, the horror of the walk, the pool, the thing at the edge of the frame that the budget could not afford and the imagination supplied for free. And the deepest root is Melville — Quint is Ahab, the Orca is the Pequod, and the shark is the white whale, an animal inflated into a cosmic antagonist by a man who needs it to be one. What Jaws fathered is more obvious: an entire industry of “the monster you barely see,” from the creature discipline of The Thing, which similarly saves its full reveals and trusts atmosphere to carry the dread, to the entire modern debate about restraint that I traced in The Death of the Man in the Suit, where the lesson of Bruce — that a suggested monster beats a fully rendered one — keeps having to be relearned every time technology makes total visibility cheap and tempting.

The verdict

Jaws is often discussed as the film that broke Hollywood, the birth of the wide-release, saturation-marketed summer event, and that history has slightly obscured how good the thing itself is. Strip away the cultural weight and it remains a masterclass in suspense construction, a film whose every famous scare is an object lesson in the power of the unseen, delivered by a young director who found genius by being denied his own special effect. The shark that would not work forced Spielberg to make a horror film instead of a monster movie, and the horror film is immortal.

Watch it for the first hour, where the terror is entirely a matter of what is kept off-screen, and for Shaw’s monologue, which is the finest four minutes of the actor’s career. Then follow the discipline of the withheld monster into The Thing and into the larger argument about creature design in The Death of the Man in the Suit. The moment the film abandons restraint, and why it earns the right to, is below the line.

Spoilers below

The climax is where Jaws finally lets you see the shark, and the interesting thing is how it manages the switch from suggestion to spectacle without collapsing.

Quint, the man who has hunted the shark out of a private need to master the thing that ate his shipmates, is killed by it — the Orca swamped and sinking, the hunter sliding down the tilting deck into the animal’s jaws in a death that is both grotesque and, given his Ahab-like fixation, inevitable. It is the film honouring its Melville debt: the obsessive is destroyed by the object of his obsession, dragged down with the wreck. Hooper, the scientist, vanishes underwater in a shark cage that is torn apart, and the film lets us believe for a stretch that he is dead too, leaving Brody — the man who feared the water most, the outsider with no professional reason to be there — alone on the sinking boat with the creature.

And then the spectacle arrives, earned. Brody, jamming a pressurised scuba tank into the shark’s mouth, climbs the collapsing mast and fires at the tank with a rifle, and the shark explodes in a spray that is pure catharsis. Purists sometimes flinch at the effect — the exploding shark is the one moment the film fully commits to showing, and it looks like what it is. But the choice is correct. Having withheld the monster for two hours, having built its terror entirely from suggestion, the film has bought itself a single enormous release, and it spends it all at once. Brody, the drowning-averse landlubber, paddles back to shore on the wreckage beside Hooper, who has survived after all. The man who could not swim beats the thing the professionals could not. It is a happy ending that the preceding hours of dread have made feel almost transgressive, and it works because the film spent so long teaching us to fear a shark we could barely see.