Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Murray Hamilton, Lorraine Gary. Dir. Steven Spielberg, Universal, 1975
Jobeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Zelda Rubenstein, James Karen. Dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982
I stood on a downtown Cincinnati street, watching a car such as I had never imagined cruise toward me. In my memory it's a convertible '59 Caddy, with the insane fins, but it must have been a flatbed truck, because where would the shark have fit otherwise?
On, or in, its back a huge fiberglass shark burst from huge fiberglass waves, its toothsome mouth open and swallowing a huge fiberglass pair of women's legs, the rest of her further inside, presumably.
That is not a hallucination. Look it up. In spring of '75, ahead of the release of Steven Spielberg's JAWS, Universal Studios hired out vehicles to drive the streets of various markets and promote the movie with displays such as I have described. I was seven years old. Already a movie fan, I remember thinking, "Whatever JAWS is, I bet I don't get to see it."
A year later, I stood on a line stretching down Ludlow Avenue in one direction and up Ludlow and around the corner onto Telford in the other, waiting to buy tickets to JAWS. which, after an unheard-of yearlong stint in first-run theaters, arrived at the second-run houses like our local theater, The Esquire, in June of '76. I was eight years old.
My parents decided I, not my younger brother, was mature enough to see JAWS. As I stood there with them, worried we wouldn't get in, I wanted to burst. A full year after playing the multiplexes in the 'burbs, JAWS still commanded lines around the block.
I had been half-right: I didn't get to see the movie in its debut season, but a year later it remained a box office phenomenon and my parents relented. By then, JAWS had become a movie I knew as if I'd seen it, just from the conversation it generated among friends, as well as the constant media coverage of the film, the pictures of packed beaches with empty oceans, the way every network and channel suddenly aired any old special or movie involving shark attacks and promoted them as tied-in to JAWS, even from the song parody "Mr. Jaws" by Dickie Goodman, which a friend and I thought the height of comedy. JAWS permeated the culture in a way no movie had. It felt known before it was seen.
As STAR WARS would be two summers later, JAWS was ubiquitous in its season, and inescapable cuts closer. 1975 marks the point where my childhood memories gel into a linear, ongoing narrative, so I could have missed something, but as far as I could tell nothing like JAWS had ever happened. Movies could be popular, they could make lots of money, and be the subject of water cooler talk and cocktail chatter, but eventually they went back to Hollywood and the conversations changed. A big movie might play theatres again the next year, or a few years later as part of a studio's rerelease schedule, but it was done. The talk died down, the money stopped rolling in, the filmmakers and stars got their turns on the red carpet. Next.
JAWS changed that, and two years later STAR WARS made good on the change and wrote a new playbook for Hollywood blockbusters. Some have since convinced themselves these two movies prefigure every bad Hollywood trend of the next 45 years, culminating in the MCU, DCEU, and alleged death of the mid-budget movie. I don't not have an opinion, but remembering JAWS from the perspective of an 8 year-old isn't the time. I only know that movies, their promotion, their success, and their durability in the culture changed following STAR WARS and JAWS. Irwin Allen's TOWERING INFERNO was the busted the block in '74, but kids didn't have William Holden and Paul Newman action figures in their toybox. It'd be a better world if they did, but that ship has sailed.
I knew JAWS was different when I stood on line with Mom&Dad that night, but the questions in my mind had nothing to do with whether Lucas and Spielberg destroyed the cinema their New Hollywood movement set out to save. I wanted to know if it could live up to my friends' hype. I wanted to know if it was all bloody and gross. Most of all, I wanted to know if it would scare me so much I had nightmares.
If anyone ever wonders why people retreat into nostalgia, the above pretty much answers the question. At 8, I worried JAWS would give me bad dreams. At 53, I wonder if my writeup of JAWS will get trolled on twitter. The 8 year-old life sure looks simpler.
Eight year-old Russ went home that night and slept the sleep of champions, as any 8 year-old American boy in 1976 should have done. JAWS had a rep as a scary movie, but what I remember of that night is my parents, the audience, and I LAUGHING through much of it, particularly the jump scares. Maybe it was the embarrassed laughter of UC professors ashamed they squealed when Ben Gardener's head pops out of the hull, but I only know we laughed a lot, and cheered when Roy Scheider said, "Smile you son of a b-"
I went home jazzed, excited by what I responded to as a great action-adventure movie, THE SEA HAWK but with sharks and Robert Shaw. I don't recall a single nightmare. They came later.
As STAR WARS would be two summers later, JAWS was ubiquitous in its season, and inescapable cuts closer. 1975 marks the point where my childhood memories gel into a linear, ongoing narrative, so I could have missed something, but as far as I could tell nothing like JAWS had ever happened. Movies could be popular, they could make lots of money, and be the subject of water cooler talk and cocktail chatter, but eventually they went back to Hollywood and the conversations changed. A big movie might play theatres again the next year, or a few years later as part of a studio's rerelease schedule, but it was done. The talk died down, the money stopped rolling in, the filmmakers and stars got their turns on the red carpet. Next.
JAWS changed that, and two years later STAR WARS made good on the change and wrote a new playbook for Hollywood blockbusters. Some have since convinced themselves these two movies prefigure every bad Hollywood trend of the next 45 years, culminating in the MCU, DCEU, and alleged death of the mid-budget movie. I don't not have an opinion, but remembering JAWS from the perspective of an 8 year-old isn't the time. I only know that movies, their promotion, their success, and their durability in the culture changed following STAR WARS and JAWS. Irwin Allen's TOWERING INFERNO was the busted the block in '74, but kids didn't have William Holden and Paul Newman action figures in their toybox. It'd be a better world if they did, but that ship has sailed.
I knew JAWS was different when I stood on line with Mom&Dad that night, but the questions in my mind had nothing to do with whether Lucas and Spielberg destroyed the cinema their New Hollywood movement set out to save. I wanted to know if it could live up to my friends' hype. I wanted to know if it was all bloody and gross. Most of all, I wanted to know if it would scare me so much I had nightmares.
If anyone ever wonders why people retreat into nostalgia, the above pretty much answers the question. At 8, I worried JAWS would give me bad dreams. At 53, I wonder if my writeup of JAWS will get trolled on twitter. The 8 year-old life sure looks simpler.
Eight year-old Russ went home that night and slept the sleep of champions, as any 8 year-old American boy in 1976 should have done. JAWS had a rep as a scary movie, but what I remember of that night is my parents, the audience, and I LAUGHING through much of it, particularly the jump scares. Maybe it was the embarrassed laughter of UC professors ashamed they squealed when Ben Gardener's head pops out of the hull, but I only know we laughed a lot, and cheered when Roy Scheider said, "Smile you son of a b-"
I went home jazzed, excited by what I responded to as a great action-adventure movie, THE SEA HAWK but with sharks and Robert Shaw. I don't recall a single nightmare. They came later.
JAWS reappeared every summer thereafter in rerelease, or on double and triple bills at the drive-ins, and eventually on TV. Or so it looks in memory. I know I saw it any number of times in theaters before cable and VHS REALLY changed the moviegoing landscape. One of those viewings, when I was 11, triggered the nightmare.
I woke up in my bed that night convinced I lay in a boat, a small rowboat, out at sea. I felt the water lapping against the sides. I heard a far-off bell, like a channel marker. I smelled salt in the air. I knew, beyond doubt, the shark circled the boat. Sometimes, in huge circles so it seemed far from me, but more often in narrow ones, right around the boat.
I woke up in my bed that night convinced I lay in a boat, a small rowboat, out at sea. I felt the water lapping against the sides. I heard a far-off bell, like a channel marker. I smelled salt in the air. I knew, beyond doubt, the shark circled the boat. Sometimes, in huge circles so it seemed far from me, but more often in narrow ones, right around the boat.
I somehow got up, out of bed, walked to my parents' bedroom door, to ask if I could sleep on their floor the rest of the night, and yet still knew the water, and the shark, surrounded me. The darkness of my bedroom was the ocean, the shark & certain death.
As far as I know that's my first waking-dream, so no, JAWS didn't scare me into bad dreams and yes, it terrified me out of conscious reality. Both at different times, when I've been different Russes.
As I know I've mentioned, I've seen a handful of movies over a thousand times and still love them as I did the first time. THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES & STAR WARS: EPISODE 4 are two. JAWS completes the '70s trifecta. That doesn't surprise me, considering the wildly different responses it has elicited over the years.
The movie has excited me, terrified me, traumatized me, delighted me, made me laugh myself silly, and it has lulled me to sleep on any number of fitful nights. It's a comfort movie, the cinematic equivalent of Mom's mac'n'cheese. It's a hangout movie to watch and goof on with friends. It's a movie I'll watch the last 30, or 10, minutes of on cable when I'm channel surfing and bored. It's one of the great, legendary blockbuster movies of the 1970s, a decade I'm increasingly convinced I hallucinated after a really good bowl of Honeycombs one morning. It's less a movie than a touchstone, a life marker, and an old friend.
Not a horror movie, though. I never considered JAWS a horror film. I responded to it as one, the night of my waking-dream and any number of times thereafter, but it did not slot in as a horror movie, in my mind. I know that's peculiar, but it's my experience.
Not a horror movie, though. I never considered JAWS a horror film. I responded to it as one, the night of my waking-dream and any number of times thereafter, but it did not slot in as a horror movie, in my mind. I know that's peculiar, but it's my experience.
I understood JAWS as a great adventure and action movie, more akin to MOBY DICK or Jack London or Huck Finn. Survival at sea. Man vs. Nature, one of the Great Themes, as we learned in 6th grade English. Over decades, I saw JAWS called a horror movie, and eventually even a "classic, iconic" horror movie. I see Linda Blair or Gregory Peck or Mia Farrow's faces when I think of those words as applied to the era, but people keep on using them, so on this re-watch, as I pair horror movies to write about, I tried to watch it specifically through that lens.
I didn't fail, though I'm not sure I succeeded. I saw all the expected elements and structure of a great horror movie. The slow build, the monster unseen, the first atrocity followed by the fake-outs and jump-scares, keeping a viewer unsettled, the next atrocities, the decision to fight the monster, confronting it, the reveal, and so on. JAWS is absolutely, in structure and conception and payoff, a classic horror movie.
It's also, though, a classic. At a certain point, what makes most movies classic is not that they so perfectly embody a specific genre or style or moment but that they appear to embody them all. Classic movies are mirrors, reflecting at us what we bring to them. You say JAWS is a great horror film and it is, because that's your relationship with it. I say it's a great high-seas adventure, with scary-ass moments, and it is that, also. Though I watched it this time as a horror movie, at a certain point I realized that, as ever, I belonged to story, characters, dialogue, and action. I wasn't thinking, analyzing, contextualizing, or comparing. I was on a small boat with three men I've come to like a lot over 46 years, being menaced by a very large, very angry shark, wondering what the hell to do.
As it should be. Movies inspire me and move me in myriad different ways. Some movies get me thinking so much I miss the point, or lose whole scenes to my imagination. Movies do much for me, can be much TO me, but they have to be stories I want to be told, repeatedly, or they're nothing. I've seen JAWS over 1,000 times. It's one of those stories, and this time, as most times, that's what I left with. It's a damn good story, uncommonly well told.
I didn't fail, though I'm not sure I succeeded. I saw all the expected elements and structure of a great horror movie. The slow build, the monster unseen, the first atrocity followed by the fake-outs and jump-scares, keeping a viewer unsettled, the next atrocities, the decision to fight the monster, confronting it, the reveal, and so on. JAWS is absolutely, in structure and conception and payoff, a classic horror movie.
It's also, though, a classic. At a certain point, what makes most movies classic is not that they so perfectly embody a specific genre or style or moment but that they appear to embody them all. Classic movies are mirrors, reflecting at us what we bring to them. You say JAWS is a great horror film and it is, because that's your relationship with it. I say it's a great high-seas adventure, with scary-ass moments, and it is that, also. Though I watched it this time as a horror movie, at a certain point I realized that, as ever, I belonged to story, characters, dialogue, and action. I wasn't thinking, analyzing, contextualizing, or comparing. I was on a small boat with three men I've come to like a lot over 46 years, being menaced by a very large, very angry shark, wondering what the hell to do.
As it should be. Movies inspire me and move me in myriad different ways. Some movies get me thinking so much I miss the point, or lose whole scenes to my imagination. Movies do much for me, can be much TO me, but they have to be stories I want to be told, repeatedly, or they're nothing. I've seen JAWS over 1,000 times. It's one of those stories, and this time, as most times, that's what I left with. It's a damn good story, uncommonly well told.
Tobe Hooper's 1982 POLTERGEIST, exec produced (and maybe also directed, there's debate) by Spielberg, works in conception, structure, and payoff like a great horror movie, and it is. And that's all. It doesn't call to mind Jack London. It's not a rollicking high seas adventure comparable to MOBY DICK. Nor is it meant to be.
It's a haunted house movie where the house isn't a crumbling gothic manse or a menacing and decrepit Victorian behind an elaborate wrought iron fence but a tract home in a planned suburban community full of identical homes. It's an iteration and exploration of the "bad place" horror trope, in which some houses or old mental hospitals or schools or golf courses act as psychic batteries, storing up all the horrific things that happened in them and releasing their toxic energy in more concentrated form. Robert Wise's film of Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE defines the great "bad place" subgenre in either medium.
As horror movies go, whether concerning bad places or possessed teenagers, POLTERGEIST qualifies as a classic and iconic entry. Released one week after E.T., it helped define the "Summer of Spielberg," one of the vanguard of what we look back on as "'80s MOVIES." Hooper, the director TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, fashioned a great movie thrill ride replete with evil trees, menacing clown dolls, child-eating TVs, and horrific bathroom mirrors, the scares and grossouts and action moments coming in ever more intense bursts, until the final payoff, 15 screaming minutes sure to make homeowners think twice about inground swimming pools.
Or maybe Spielberg fashioned it. He gets screenplay credit, and many people say the POLTERGEIST shoot more closely resembled a TV show, where the writer/exec producer defines the vision and a director follows his orders. If he does deserve more credit than Hooper, he also earns more blame. POLTERGEIST may be a classic horror and '80s movie, but it's not a classic film as JAWS is a classic film.
Which is to say that, while I can look at POLTERGEIST's bones, as I can at JAWS's, and identify all the elements, the story beats and plot twists and jump scares and set pieces which go into making a great horror movie, but I no longer respond to it. Some movies stand up to better than a thousand viewings. Some movies do not.
Though POLTERGEIST comes with plenty of Spielbergian moments and little details it doesn't endlessly reward and satisfy me as JAWS continues to. I watched POLTERGEIST dozens of times on cable after seeing it in the theater at 14. As happens with some films, familiarity bred contempt. I knew every scare, every twist, every beat, damn near every line. I saw it too often, and too much. It couldn't stand up to the scrutiny of a teenage movie fan. Nor does it stand up to the 53 year-old version.
Today, when I watch POLTERGEIST, my response is intellectual. I appreciate the suburban subdivision esthetic Spielberg understood and captured with both sympathy and a deadly eye for detail. I appreciate the setup, the way Craig T. Nelson and Jobeth Williams play sometime-hippies metastasizing into pot-smoking Republicans, the way their practical, pragmatic nature leaves them completely defenseless against supernatural forces. I appreciate the way the early jump scares evolve into sustained horror, the way our prosaic surroundings, the everyday objects we hardly even see, turn into vectors of terror. I appreciate Spielberg/Hooper's details, like Nelson reading about Reagan while smoking a joint, or engaging in a remote-control war with his neighbor, or the way Dominique Dunn sasses back the catcalling construction workers. They feel true.
I don't appreciate, however, that most of those beats never add up to anything. Being a fan of Reagan, or pro football, or perving on high schoolers has nothing to do with the family, their neighborhood, or the horrors lurking within their house. They're nice color, and so what?
What matters is the horror, and I just don't feel any anymore. The scenes of horror show terrific imagination. I totally get why a plastic Hulk figure riding a plastic horse through the air freaks people out. I understand why a spontaneously erupting steak on a kitchen counter makes us shudder with revulsion, and how a mirror can show us what we never want to see, but none of it moves me today. None of it resonates as JAWS resonates. It's a movie I've seen too often to love as I once did.
It may still be a classic and iconic horror movie for others. Milage varies. Some of the visual effects aged poorly, but I can easily see a 2021 teen inspecting his chicken closely after a first watch. If some visual effects look tattered, they generally hold up, particularly the climactic set piece, which hurtles along with the same relentlessness Hooper applied to MASSACRE.
Today, when I watch POLTERGEIST, my response is intellectual. I appreciate the suburban subdivision esthetic Spielberg understood and captured with both sympathy and a deadly eye for detail. I appreciate the setup, the way Craig T. Nelson and Jobeth Williams play sometime-hippies metastasizing into pot-smoking Republicans, the way their practical, pragmatic nature leaves them completely defenseless against supernatural forces. I appreciate the way the early jump scares evolve into sustained horror, the way our prosaic surroundings, the everyday objects we hardly even see, turn into vectors of terror. I appreciate Spielberg/Hooper's details, like Nelson reading about Reagan while smoking a joint, or engaging in a remote-control war with his neighbor, or the way Dominique Dunn sasses back the catcalling construction workers. They feel true.
I don't appreciate, however, that most of those beats never add up to anything. Being a fan of Reagan, or pro football, or perving on high schoolers has nothing to do with the family, their neighborhood, or the horrors lurking within their house. They're nice color, and so what?
What matters is the horror, and I just don't feel any anymore. The scenes of horror show terrific imagination. I totally get why a plastic Hulk figure riding a plastic horse through the air freaks people out. I understand why a spontaneously erupting steak on a kitchen counter makes us shudder with revulsion, and how a mirror can show us what we never want to see, but none of it moves me today. None of it resonates as JAWS resonates. It's a movie I've seen too often to love as I once did.
It may still be a classic and iconic horror movie for others. Milage varies. Some of the visual effects aged poorly, but I can easily see a 2021 teen inspecting his chicken closely after a first watch. If some visual effects look tattered, they generally hold up, particularly the climactic set piece, which hurtles along with the same relentlessness Hooper applied to MASSACRE.
Every beat I want and look for in a horror movie appears in POLTERGEIST. It's a well-constructed, well-made piece of work I enthusiastically recommend to those who haven't seen it.
It just isn't JAWS. POLTERGEIST is a good horror movie, even classic in some regards, but it's only a horror movie. JAWS is a horror movie and it's MOBY DICK and it's man vs. himself in the guise of a man vs. nature yarn. It has police procedural moments and romantic moments and an antiestablishment tone popular to 1975 movies, particularly those with young directors. It has, and is, all kinds of stories in the service of a killer-shark story.
It just isn't JAWS. POLTERGEIST is a good horror movie, even classic in some regards, but it's only a horror movie. JAWS is a horror movie and it's MOBY DICK and it's man vs. himself in the guise of a man vs. nature yarn. It has police procedural moments and romantic moments and an antiestablishment tone popular to 1975 movies, particularly those with young directors. It has, and is, all kinds of stories in the service of a killer-shark story.
POLTERGEIST is one story, with some nice bits of color, and that's it. It has no moments not tied directly to the A-story, because there is no B-story. It's all The Things That Happened to That Nice Family in That Bad Place for 90 minutes, and then it's time to go play Asteroids in the lobby.
If the other movie from the Summer of Spielberg has a message for posterity, it's to make one movie at a time. Spielberg may or may not have ghost-directed POLTERGEIST, but it has his fingerprints all over it, possibly to its detriment. The story builds in a number of great details and character beats that it throws away. It's hard to believe Spielberg would do that on a picture which had his full focus.
At one time, I preferred POLTERGEIST as the darker, less sentimental Spielberg production of that summer. It remains dark and unsentimental, comparatively, but if we're talking about a classic, iconic Steven Spielberg movie, we're not talking about POLTERGEIST. Not in any summer.
It's a fun movie, it's a good thrillride, it's a more traditionally structured and told horror movie, but it's not JAWS. It is not a damn good movie which just happens to be horror. JAWS is.
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