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“Jaws” and Hidden Terrors
by Tracy V. Wilson | July 29, 2009
Actors Richard Dreyfuss (L) and Robert Shaw need a bigger boat. (Photo by Universal Pictures/Courtesy of Getty Images)
When I was in college, I took a class on the gothic novel. We started with what’s generally recognized as the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto,” and we worked our way up to Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange.” It was a disturbing semester.
One of the last novels we read was Vladimir Nabokov’s “Bend Sinister,” in which professor and philosopher Adam Krug runs afoul of his government. His son, David, is sent to the Institute for Abnormal Children and killed in an event that happens largely outside the bounds of the page. Part of our class discussion centered on how leaving it up to our imaginations made the scene more horrifying. What was going on in our heads was probably more disturbing to each of us than what Nabokov might have written on the page.
This off-screen terror is usually part of the best horror movies. Take “Jaws” as an example. Because of persistent problems with the film’s mechanical sharks during filming, we don’t see much of the great white that’s terrorizing Amity Island. Anticipating something bad happening — and imagining what that something will be — is a lot scarier than seeing a relatively fakey shark chomp down on some stuntmen. The movie that frightened me more than anything I’ve ever watched (Juan Antonio Bayona’s “The Orphanage,” for those of you keeping score at home) uses the same technique, relying on anticipation and imagination to make everything scary.
In spite of its masterful scariness, I don’t think “The Orphanage” has fostered a widespread fear of orphans. I can’t say the same about “Jaws,” though. Its impact on people’s perception of sharks has been so profound that Peter Benchley, author of the novel “Jaws,” said that if he tried to write the same novel today, it would be a vastly different book — Jaws would have been the victim.
With that in mind, I wonder whether bringing sharks out of the shadowy world of off-screen imagination might help change people’s perceptions of them in the long run — even though what you see on screen can be pretty gory. Seeing real great whites on the hunt is never as scary to me as waiting for Jaws to take a bite out of an unwary swimmer. This year’s Shark Week — which starts on Aug. 2 on Discovery Channel and runs until the 8th — is also adding a focus on shark conservation to its usual blood-and-tooth fare. Discovery is teaming up with Sen. John Kerry to encourage shark protection and cut down on illegal shark finning.
What do you think — does putting sharks into the limelight help them? And has the scariest movie you’ve ever seen affected the way you view the real world?
More on sharks and Shark Week at HowStuffWorks.com:
How Shark Week Works
How many sharks are killed recreationally each year — and why?
How are shark pups born?
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Robert Lamb says:
My parents let me watch “Poltergeist” at a very early age, which traumatized me for years.
Though I love a good horror movie, the American remake of “The Ring” is one of the few flicks to actually do a number on me as an adult. Maybe “The Descent” and “High Tension” count, but they didn’t have me up all night. “Session 9,” despite the presence of David Caruso is extremely effective up until the movie blows it in the third act.
Other films like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Carpetner’s “The Thing” and Croneneberg’s “The Fly,” never scared me in a deep and meaningful way, but I do love them.
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Tracy V. Wilson says:
Oddly, the part of “The Ring” that scared me the most in the theater was the part with the horse on the ferry. (This bit: http://www.spike.com/video/ring-horse-on-ferry/2455859). “Cloverfield” didn’t scare me, but I totally agree with Matt Reeves’ remark that things that are big and spooked are scary. Other parts of “The Ring” were scary by the time I got home and the lights were out, though.
“The Orphanage” is the only one that’s scared me from beginning to end and kept me awake at night as an adult. When I got up the next morning I could still feel the adrenaline.
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[...] Go here to read the rest: “Jaws” and Hidden Terrors [...]
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Katie Lambert says:
I’m with Robert on “Poltergeist,” although for me it was an illicit viewing.
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Back before the hype overshadowed the film, the wife and I drove out to the sticks to catch a screening of “The Blair Witch Project.” While much of the movie is clumsy, the last 20 minutes were very unnerving. And part of the reason it was so effective was that you never saw whatever it was that came after the students making the documentary. After the film, we were faced with a late night drive back through a wooded, unpopulated area. That was pretty creepy.
My wife would mention the 1980 film “The Changeling.” She still gets freaked out if someone lets a toy ball bounce down a set of stairs. She’s not a big fan of vintage wheelchairs either.
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Jonathan has a point — for all that’s annoying and dated in “Blair Witch,” the closing moments were pretty creepy.
~rl
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Now that I’ve thought on it some more, both “Jacob’s Ladder” and the train car episode of “Twin Peaks” unsettled me to the point that the late-night grocery store trip that coincidentally happened after each of them became really, really creepy.
I think I lucked out in seeing “Blair Witch” in an entirely urban setting — if it had come out a couple of years later, I’d have been driving on dark, scary mountain roads to an isolated cabin in the woods after watching it.
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I’ll chime in as a non-Howstuffworks person
.. I vote Blair Witch and The Ring. Those were the two movies to ever scar me. I watched Blair Witch at home alone at night in my rural wooded town and then had to go into the basement after to get my laundry. Not fun. As far as The Ring, I still cannot to this day bring myself to look at a television in the dark for fear it will somehow turn itself on. -
POLTERGEIST is probably the single scariest movie-going experience of my life, because I saw it in its original run, on a big screen, and as a kid the terror I felt remains with me to this day. I can still remember vividly my legs trembling from the adrenaline in the theater. It put the terror right into your living room, your bedroom, not the haunted house on the hill. The beast was within, not without, so there was no escaping it. This “beast within” idea was explored more literally in other films of the time, too — ALIEN, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and THE THING. They are all favorites of mine, and yes one can argue they are even scarier and bloodier, but I never got to see those on the big screen as a kid….so POLTERGEIST takes the terror crown for me.
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Katie and Rob, I grew up in a relatively strict household, and we were late adopters on cable and VCRs, so I missed out on just about all the childhood terrors that could come from the movies. I didn’t see anything really scary until I was old enough to drive myself to the movies.
That’s probably why my biggest childhood fears were dying of consumption and dying in childbirth.
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How about “White noise” and “Silent Hill”? I found both to be quite different from most horror movies, and I could never tell for what reason. Has anyone else seen them?
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Andrei, “Silent Hill” had some good atmosphere going on it — Gans can deliver in that department, at least in spots. I wasn’t crazy about “Brotherhood of the Wolf,” as a whole but the scene with the shepherd girl was an excellent splash of horror.
Now the game, “Silent Hill 2,” that had some nice chills in it.
~rl
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Being a film major in college, I remember our professor giving us the same lecture about sex in films. In old time movies – they couldn’t show what was going on behind the bedroom – in which case, what was going on inside our imaginations was probably a lot hotter.
I LOVE “The Orphanage” – it’s one my my favorite movies because it leaves so much up to the imagination. That movie stayed with me for days after I saw it. The scariest movie I’ve seen in a while was “The Happening” – it wasn’t scary in the traditional sense, but M. Night shot would pan the camera down or away at the most awful of moments – again – leaving so much of it up to your imagination. I think it scares our Psyche that we “normal” people have the capacity to imagine such terrifying scenes ourselves without someone showing them to us.
Thanks for posting!
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According to Hollywood Reporter (via SciFi Wire), there’s an American remake of “The Orphanage” in the works: http://scifiwire.com/2009/08/larry-fessenden-to-direct.php.
I wonder … if the English version is as good as the Spanish version, which one will scare me more overall? Did reading subtitles cut down on the fear factor, since I wasn’t as immersed, or did it heighten it, since I was out of my comfort zone and surrounded by a language I’m not fluent in?
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Personally, I think it will be a total different experience completely. My bet is that if the movie is done right, you’ll be even more scared and hyped up because you won’t have the language barrier and it might feel more “at home” so-to-speak.
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Thanks for writing back!
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I’ve never found language to be a barrier to a good horror movie.
But anyway, the fact that Larry Fessenden is slated to direct is excellent news. His low-budget indie vampire film “Habit” was excellent.
“Wendigo” was flawed, but had some fine craftsmanship in it. “The Last Winter” is an interesting supernatural climate change thriller — I just wish he’d written a more interesting character for Ron Pearlman to play in that.
~rl
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