I Saw Jaws at the Movies 50 Years Ago and, Yes, It Ruined the Beach for Me Forever

My friend Raymond and I saw Jaws in a South Jersey movie theater, possibly outside Cherry Hill, on its opening weekend 50 years ago.

It was a sold-out weekend show — the film had opened the day before, June 20, 1975. Raymond and I had both read the Peter Benchley bestseller the new movie was based on, and I’d rather lazily pooh-poohed it as not much more than Moby Dick reconfigured as an airport paperback, only with a great white shark instead of a great white whale.

But the buzz over the movie was tremendous (both good and bad), and its director, 26-year-old Steven Spielberg, had already delivered one superb nail-biter, 1971’s Duel, one of the few network TV movies you could call a classic.

Well, I had a wonderful time at Jaws. Scary, shocking, suspenseful and frequently funny, it proved to be (and remains) one of the most entertaining nights I’ve ever had at the movies. Raymond agreed, if I recall, and so did millions of other people, then and in the half-century since. Jaws was an epochal hit: It went on to change Hollywood and audience expectations, introducing the age of the summer blockbuster.

Jaws changed me, too, in an unexpected and — I’m not going to kid myself — undeniably irrational way. In the five decades since that Saturday, I’ve been afraid to venture into the ocean much farther than my knees. My mind whispers to me: “How can you be sure that there isn’t some thing just below the surface? Who’s to say it doesn’t have several rows of sharp teeth and a healthy appetite? And what if it’s on a trajectory to take a chomp of flesh, tissue and muscle out of your leg?”

Would this be described as a heightened, sudden sense of danger? No. In that case I would think I’d experience a spike of adrenaline. The fear is more like a soft surge of dread, as if my synapses had been been rewired to the thrusting strings of John Williams’ famous theme.

I’ll tell you something even more irrational: Swimming pools scare me. The empty blue water inevitably reminds me of a shot, late in the film, when that killer shark, approaching from a distance, is swimming straight toward the camera. (It’s presumably intent on eating Richard Dreyfuss’ shark expert Matt Hooper.)

I don’t remember feeling this way while watching the movie or immediately afterward. If anything, I was exhilarated. But at some point resistance to the ocean set in and stuck. I know it’s unlikely that a shark will kill me — one estimate puts the risk of a fatal attack at 1 in 4.3 million. This doesn’t really reassure me, oddly enough, even though I can tell you that I have plenty of other phobias, all of them more intrusive and stubborn than a fear of sharks (also known as galeophobia). Peas, for instance — and I come in contact with peas, which are wrinkled and green and vile, much more frequently than I do sharks.

Yet, because of Jaws, I’ve been permanently traumatized on some level. The thought of entering the open water erects a barrier of unarticulated anxiety that I don’t want to breach. And since 1975 I’ve obeyed that strange, nagging instinct. I’m content to sit on a blanket in the sand, reading novels that aren’t written by Peter Benchley.

I’ve spoken with colleagues who had a similar reaction — but there must be thousands of other people, maybe hundreds of thousands, who haven’t been able to shake those shark thoughts from their minds. 

Here’s an extreme case: In 1975, two Wichita neurologists wrote to The New England Journal of Medicine concerning a patient, a 17-year-old girl who had seen the film several days earlier. She was brought to them because of “[neck] rigidity, jerking of the limbs and hallucinations of being attacked by sharks.” Over the course of three days “she had a total of five episodes of terror in which she repeatedly screamed ‘sharks, sharks.’ ” Yet, as she herself admitted to the doctors, “the risks of shark attack in western Kansas were indeed remote!” But, no, I don’t know how she may have responded in the long term.

I doubt Spielberg had any intention other than to make a smashing movie with his already prodigious wizardry: It would be the hit that put him on the map. But Spielberg isn’t you or me watching in the audience. I suspect my memories of Jaws are partly, perhaps even largely, a deep-rooted response to the inchoate, unsettling awfulness of the film’s theme: the unseen predator lurking in the vast darkness.

Jaws is about what could be called the Fear That Eats You, most likely death — which, last time I checked, will devour us all. But it could be life, perhaps fear itself. Maybe Nobel laureate Peter Handke was onto something when he described horror as “perfectly natural: the mind’s emptiness.” This is from a book about his mother, but I suspect he was thinking about Jaws.

This sense of a force that’s shadowy, overwhelming and inescapable shapes the original Moby Dick, although there the threat has a primal, enigmatic magnitude that borders on the Biblical. It’s a dorsal fin of doom, and it slashes its way throughout literature. You can find it in Lewis Carroll’s mock-epic The Hunting of the Snark — “snark,” one letter away from “shark” — where the most fatal variety of the species is the mysterious Boojum:

“But if ever I meet with a Boojum, that day / In a moment (of this I am sure) / I shall softly and suddenly vanish away—/ And the notion I cannot endure!”

Even a pulpy thriller like James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity can give you those bone-chilling shivers. In the last page, the narrator and his lover prepare to throw themselves into shark-infested waters: “I tried not to look, but couldn’t help it. I saw a flash of dirty white down in the green.”

That’s exactly what the Jaws audience sees when Spielberg, in an unforgettable overhead shot, reveals the full length of the shark. It’s a flash of dirty white down in the green.

Movies, with their ability to enthrall on an almost dream-like level, have been especially good at suggesting the awesome terribleness of the killer beast at sea: Moby Dick (1956), with Gregory Peck’s Ahab lashed to his quarry and dragged down under; the Disney cartoon Pinocchio (1940), which features the puppet-swallowing whale Monstro; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), still memorable for its giant squid; and Open Water (2003), a queasy B-movie about a couple abandoned by their boat on a snorkeling expedition. They begin to feel nibbles from below….

Jaws, though, surpasses all those films, leaving them behind like so much spray.

Spielberg is too canny a director to worry about whether the shark or its ocean habitat have any symbolic meaning, but his movie somehow serves as a framework that contains them, rather brilliantly. The storytelling mechanics couldn’t be more ruthless. Spielberg picks off his victims like a sniper. The opening scene — the death of the sexy skinny-dipper — impresses you most as a brutal piece of choreography: You’re so gripped by the action you can’t work up much pity for the swimmer. (If she lived, after all, you wouldn’t have a movie.)

Spielberg certainly hasn’t been a stranger to sentimentality over his long career, but not in Jaws. You don’t even feel for the poor boy who’s gobbled up close to shore: You’re too busy gasping at the red geyser of blood that shoots up into the air. (You also hear him screaming for help as he’s dragged below. Nice!)

In other words, the audience feels — keenly — the impending attack, and then the attack itself. The humans? Chum. The shark? That which eats the chum.

Jaws is really about just you and that Fear That Eats You.

The film is a trap, and Spielberg has built it with something like love. He stokes your unease in a number of clever, inspired ways: The climactic hunt for the shark by the Orca, the ratty boat bearing Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody, Dreyfuss’ Matt Hooper and Robert Shaw’s Quint, was filmed without a trace of land on the horizon, Spielberg has said, to prevent an audience from having any visual suggestion of safety or escape. And Brody, it so happens, is a character whom all potential phobics in the audience can identify with: He’s afraid of the ocean. When the shark attacks in broad daylight, he scampers sidewise, like a distressed crab, without ever venturing into the surf. (The film ends with him telling Hooper, “I used to hate the water.” Hooper: “I can’t imagine why.”)

Most importantly, Spielberg’s deployment of the shark is just about perfect: For most of the film’s two-hour running time, the creature is more presence than anything. At first Spielberg gives you elusive but evocative shots of fins, as well as the shark’s own underwater perspective of potential human meals swimming above (to the shark, those legs must look like hams hanging in a butcher’s shop).

Perhaps the film’s single greatest scare comes when the shark’s wide, massive head looms up from the water, close to the Orca, for just an instant before turning away and sinking out of sight. It seems almost to smile with those immense teeth, as if it were an aquatic Hannibal Lecter, putting on a teasing display of its own lethal power.

The PEOPLE App is now available in the Apple App Store! Download it now for the most binge-worthy celeb content, exclusive video clips, astrology updates and more!

When the shark practically flings itself onto the Orca’s deck at the end, you may feel a twinge of disappointment. It looks like something that broke loose from a carnival ride. But those few seconds don’t erase all the fleeting, sinister impressions that came before — and that turn out not to have been fleeting, after all.

Enjoy your summer at the shore, everyone!

I feel, though, I should end with a coda. When I began writing this article, I planned to reach out to Raymond, that friend mentioned at the outset, and see how (or whether) he felt haunted by Jaws all these years later. He was a lifeguard in high school and a strong swimmer, so his reaction was probably different from mine. I knew, also, he’d know exactly where we saw the film — which multiplex. I only recall that we drove there in his olive-brown Duster on Interstate 295. (Everyone I knew was always driving somewhere on 295.)

I was going to message Raymond about all this on Facebook — we hadn’t been in touch for years — but then I saw someone had posted his photograph in my feed. A month before, he’d been killed during a storm. He was in his yard, heading for the front door, when a tree fell on him. I wonder, now, what Raymond’s great fear might have been, or if he’d confronted and defeated it long ago, or if he ever even had one. He was always physically braver than I was. You might think his death poses the question: Why worry about never-seen sharks instead of those branches overhead, soughing violently in the wind? I’d say, instead, the question is this: Why should you worry about sharks or trees, when it’s far more likely that a friend you’ve neglected will have died? Maybe be afraid of that.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to fling myself into the waves when I next see the ocean. Jaws did a number on me. Let’s leave it at that.