Jaws is unquestionably one of the scariest movies ever made, almost single-handedly making people afraid of stepping foot into the water for the past 50 years. But is Jaws a horror movie?
If you ask Steven Spielberg himself, the answer to that question is NO. And it’s a sentiment that many people tend to agree with. Sure, the terrifying blockbuster masterpiece is about an almost supernaturally evil great white shark eating its way through an island community, but I have seen first-hand the kinds of comments you get back on social media when you dare to call Jaws a horror movie. “It’s a drama with a shark in it,” some people say. Others call it an “action-adventure movie,” while some prefer to label it a “scary suspense thriller.”
It’s all of these things, of course. And it’s also a Horror Movie.
Jaws may be one of the all-time scariest movies ever made, but even the film’s director doesn’t think it’s a horror movie. In a new interview with Empire Magazine, in fact, the director of Duel, Jaws and Jurassic Park swears he’s to date never directed a horror movie!
Spielberg tells Empire, “I haven’t directed a horror film yet, and I’ve always wanted to, and someday I may.”
That comment led into Spielberg talking about Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which Spielberg found to be such an effective horror movie that “it actually arrests my desire to someday make a really, really scary movie.” For what it’s worth, the social media discourse on Weapons often gets around to conversations about whether or not it’s actually a horror movie… go figure!
Horror fans who spend a lot of time online are well-versed in this maddening type of conversation, and it often seems that two things are true at the same time: 1) Horror People consider everything to be a Horror Movie and 2) Non-Horror People don’t think anything is a Horror Movie. Movies like Jaws and Silence of the Lambs are frequently subjected to this kind of genre scrutiny, and the conversation often seems to rear its ugly head whenever a horror movie earns mainstream recognition on the awards circuit. Here’s how that typically works…
When Weapons was released into theaters, it was a new Zach Cregger horror movie. The Barbarian guy. But when Amy Madigan actually won an Academy Award for Weapons, it was no longer a horror movie. After all, a movie THAT successful, THAT good, and THAT celebrated by the goddamn Academy couldn’t possibly be a lowly horror movie… COULD IT?!
(Sinners also won Oscars. It’s also apparently not a horror movie.)
Now I’m not saying Spielberg looks down on the horror genre, but it’s that kind of thinking that typically seems to be driving these weird conversations. To some, a “horror movie” can be nothing more than a masked killer running around the woods and hacking up horny teenagers. To others, well, horror is more what it actually is: a massive black umbrella under which all kinds of different stories can be told and endless different topics can be broached. Believe it or not, horror movies can even have well-developed characters! And things to say!!
Horror fans may not know precisely how to define what makes a horror movie a horror movie – and what makes any given movie, well, NOT a horror movie – but it’s just something you can FEEL. And when you’re afraid to step into the water because you think Bruce might be down there waiting to bite off your leg and make a meal out of you, well, it’s probably because Steven Spielberg’s Oscar winning shark drama nestled that fear deep into your brain.
He was trying to scare the shit out of you when he made Jaws. If that’s not the work of a man who was making a horror movie back in the early 1970s, I’m not personally sure what is.
And if Jaws wasn’t Steven Spielberg’s magnum opus as a horror movie, then I’d damn sure love to see what he could pull off when he’s actually trying to make us fear for our lives.
There’s an episode of the Henry Rollins-hosted horror anthology series “Night Visions” titled Hate Puppet. William Atherton plays a horror novelist. At one point in the episode, his character scoffs at a horror movie trailer playing in a bar. He calls it moronic. “You write horror too,” the bartender responds. Atherton shoots back, “I write PSYCHOLOGICAL TERROR.”
It’s something I always think about at times like these. And it makes me chuckle.
