SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

By: Tony Pacitti
October 25, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

JAWS | d. STEVEN SPIELBERG | 1975

Do you ever refer to the shark from Jaws as “Jaws”? I did when I was nine.

My best friend and I were obsessed with the Jaws movies, which manifested in strange acts of devotion like writing “Jaws” or “Jaws 3D” with mustard on our bologna sandwiches. We devised an elaborate shark family tree that mirrored the Brody clan’s, and the conflict between the heirs of Jaws (the first one, the mother shark) and Martin Brody (the captain from Seaquest!) took on biblical significance. Jaws: The Revenge may not have explicitly offered us this maritime twist on the whole “two households both alike in dignity” thing, but it certainly encouraged our belief that it was there between the lines for us to find.

I never saw the horror in Jaws as a kid. Jaws was grandfathered into my own personal canon, something to be revered as a classic because that’s how it was sold to me. How scary can a classic be? Classics are old. That’s a shitty take, but I was nine. I refused to believe it scared people out of the water.

Years of passively ingesting Jaws like so many license plates through the mouth of a tiger shark meant that I never noticed the big neon “EAT” signs flashing over Pipit the dog and Alex Kintner until my thirties. I just never stopped to think about it. Sometimes early exposure and having a film committed to memory means you take it for granted.

Now my anxiety spikes when beach goers cross the lens and the camera cuts closer and closer to Brody and that poor guy starts calling for his dog like nothing’s wrong. Alex and the dog get slaughtered, like they always have, but my god. At least the dog gets it off-screen. Alex Kintner gets the goriest death in the film. A quick cut to Jaws the shark rolling in delight amid a roiling geyser of pre-teen blood in the bright New England sun. A little shaking, a little tenderizing, down Alex goes.

Spielberg gets a lot of shit for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom being too nasty. And it is nasty. It’s gross, it’s mean, it’s big-p problematic, but for my money there is nothing nastier in the man’s resume than making us watch what Jaws does to that little Kintner boy. Temple of Doom may have had child endangerment coming out of its curse wazoo but not one of those kids was devoured on-screen.

I watched it dozens of times as a grade schooler and never once saw myself in Alex, or either of the Brody boys for that matter, or how the kids in those movies were there just to bait us into a sense of dread. They were chum. I was in it for the shark and the mythology my friend and I wove from the trail of guts it left in its wake. Now it’s my little slice of Halloween in the summer. Once a year I throw on Jaws and I’ve got a one-man panic on my hands on the Fourth of July.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

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