The Creature-Restraint Principle: Why Less Monster Is More

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The most influential creature effect in horror history was a mechanical shark that did not work. During the Jaws shoot in 1974, the pneumatic shark the crew nicknamed Bruce kept failing in the salt water off Martha’s Vineyard, and Steven Spielberg, twenty-seven and terrified for his career, was forced to shoot around it. He suggested the shark with a floating yellow barrel, a dorsal fin, a subjective camera gliding under swimmers, and John Williams’s two-note pulse standing in for a body he could not show. The film became the highest-grossing picture ever made to that point, and it invented a rule that filmmakers have been half-remembering and half-forgetting ever since: the monster you cannot quite see is doing more work than the monster you can.

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The Creature-Restraint Principle: Why Less Monster Is More