Deadlights: Come On In, The Water's Great

Poster art for Jaws by Roger Kastel

Spielberg's Jaws, as ruthlessly streamlined as its ocean-going antagonist, is the perfect entry point into the world of horror film. It includes a smattering of upsetting but not gratuitous gore, a small handful of jump scares, and enough suspense to hang a bridge -- sort of like a tasting menu of horror's key elements. It's also surpassingly easy to become  invested in. Brody, Hooper, and Quint are one of film's great trios and the film's supporting cast are perfectly sketched, the most mundane scenes shot with an energy and immersion you won't find anywhere else. Brody's quick in-and-out visit at his office early on in the movie is a sterling example of doing a lot with a little. Spielberg introduces us to characters, exposes us to overheard conversations, shows us a few things about Brody, and moves the plot along at a rapid clip while he's doing it.

Jaws gets to the action right out of the gate, but there's a huge amount of downtime in the movie: town meetings, family dinners, amateur shark autopsies and of course the famous scene in which Quint, Hooper, and Brody compare scars. This stuff is as vital a lesson to horror appreciation as any gruesome slaying or spectral aberration. Horrible deaths only matter if the characters dying are people we care about, and Jaws crafts each person we meet with admirable heart and effortless attention to detail. Police chief Brody's interactions with his wife and kids put to shame every other depiction of family life in horror and action film within two decades of the movie, with the exception of Manhunter. There's an easy, natural warmth to his home -- the kind of thing that makes you care whether or not he comes back from his shark hunt.

You'll find plenty of people who'll argue Jaws isn't really a horror movie at all, that it's a thriller or an action movie or an adventure movie, but that kind of genre exclusionism pays no attention to Spielberg's masterful use of the membrane of the ocean's surface, or to the terrible gravity and depth of Quint's reminiscences of the sinking of the U. S. S. Indianapolis at the tail end of World War II. Jaws is horror, toying with our fear of the unknown, of the animal kingdom, of the boundless expanse and bottomless depths of the ocean. That it does so in an approachable way is hardly a mark against its quality. It's the kind of movie you can use to push your tolerance for suspense, to gauge how you handle violence, to start to learn the ropes of what makes a horror movie tick.

Of all the lessons Jaws has to teach, though, it's the showing of something beautiful so that we'll fear to see it broken that hits hardest. "Give us a kiss," Brody, a little the worst for drink and a disastrous day as Amity Island's chief of police, tells his youngest son. "Why?" the kid replies. Brody gives him a half-serious look. "Because I need it." It's a tender moment, small and warm, and it communicates that if horror wants to matter, if it wants to touch us where we live and get its claws around our hearts, it has to understand what love and connection look like and why we build our lives around them. So if you hide under the blankets whenever you see a hockey mask, if the idea of the alien bursting out of someone's chest makes you want to vomit, but you still want to dip a toe into the water, start with Jaws.