Movies
‘JAWS’ Director Steven Spielberg Says He Hasn’t Made a Horror Movie Yet… But Might Someday
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.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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