#3 - JAWS - Horror Countdown to Halloween

This October we here at Dark of the Matinee are counting down our 31 favorite horror films. Join us daily as we countdown from #31 starting on October 1, 2012 leading up to #1 on Halloween!

#3– JAWS (1975)

Dir. Steven Spielberg

In 1975 a young director by the name of Steven Spielberg changed the landscape of filmmaking forever. There's game changers and then there's game changers. The number three film on our countdown is part of the latter. That film is Jaws.

Based on the Peter Benchley novel, Jaws terrified audiences across the country all at once in the summer of '75. The key here being all at once. Jaws opened in North America on June 20, 1975 on 464 screens, 409 of them in the United States, the rest in Canada. This was virtually unheard of at the time, particularly for a film with a big studio release.

Now-a-days of course, this is commonplace. Basically every film released by major studios, whether it be a summer blockbuster or not, opens every where at once. Jaws is responsible for this. We can argue whether or not it has turned out to be a good thing or not, but regardless it's quite the impact for one film to make.

Jaws didn't just influence studios either. If you wanted to get in the water, you thought long and hard about getting in, and odds are you didn't. Why? Because of Jaws of course.

We had a bit of debate about whether or not Jaws truly belongs on a top horror film list. If you search around you'll see it's often there, but the debate is one worth noting. Some people believe the film is more of an adventure/thriller. And they have a fair point. But I argue this is horror all the way.

Not only has this film scared more people than most other films (in fact, if you ask us only two more films are scarier) but it also falls into one of the classic horror sub-genres: monster flicks. The great white, known as Bruce, is clearly a monster. He ranks up there with all the Universal classics: Dracula, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein's monster. Thus, Jaws is undoubtedly a horror flick, falling into the monster sub-genre.

Few moments are in cinema history are more frightening than when Brody is laying chum and Bruce emerges behind him. Eep!

Due to the mechanical shark causing nothing but trouble, Spielberg would refer to it as the great white turd, the shark is only hinted at throughout most of the movie rather than seen. This makes the film much more suspenseful and tense than the initial script had called for.

"The film went from a Japanese Saturday matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock, the less-you-see-the-more-you-get-thriller," Spielberg said in an interview. "The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen."

Backed by stellar performances from Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Matty's personal favorite Richard Dreyfuss, Jaws is not only one of the greatest horror films of all time, but one of the greatest films of any genre ever. Period. It put the fear of water into a nation and put Steven Spielberg on the map. 

Jaws is the ultimate in terror. Fear lies just beneath the surface. I could on and one, but I think I'm gonna need a bigger blog.



written by Christopher Coffel