Francesca Rudkin: Why does Jaws still have such a long-lasting impact?

The Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin

This week, Steven Spielberg’s terrifying film Jaws turned 50. Yes, 50.

Jaws was released in 1975, and on Friday afternoon I mentioned this on Newstalk ZB and shared how much it affected me when I saw it for the first time.

We were having our first big family holiday - Mum and Dad took us to the Gold Coast to see family, and on the first night my cousin thought it would be a great idea to slip the Jaws VHS into the player to entertain his Kiwi cousins. We were there for two weeks to enjoy the beach and sunshine, and I refused to enter the water. I think I may have got in up to my knees at the beach, and then I would ask if we could go back to the apartment complex pool. My parents did not take me to Oz to swim in a pool.

Even though I was scared senseless by the film, I was reminded by the chat on Friday that so was everyone else. People were calling to say Jaws had driven them out of the ocean for their entire lives.

Not many films leave that kind of impression. It didn’t matter that we knew the shark wasn’t real. It didn’t matter that we knew it was a fictional story. It didn’t matter that we knew we were being manipulated for entertainment’s sake. Jaws simply had us all on edge in the water.

Jaws also created a template many films have followed since. Alien was said to be pitched as Jaws in space, and in Nope, filmmaker Jordan Peele’s lead characters are stalked by a mysterious alien presence which doesn’t reveal itself until late in the film, much like the great white in Jaws.

Withholding the shark’s appearance in Jaws until the second hour wasn’t intentional, but it worked brilliantly as a tension building device. What the audience conjured up in their imagination was worse than anything Spielberg could deliver. It turned out that Bruce, the mechanical shark, was a nightmare to work with. He hadn’t been tested in salt water and often wasn’t able to perform.

So, Bruce appeared less than expected and also pushed the shoot out from 55 days to 159. This meant the film couldn’t open when scheduled, which was just before Christmas in 1974, and the decision was made to release it in the summer of 1975.

Jaws didn’t just revolutionise the ‘creature’ genre. It was the first ever summer blockbuster and changed the way Hollywood releases movies. It also became the first film to cross the US$100 million takes mark at the box office. It was also a disservice to sharks!

But as Friday’s chat proved, this pop culture phenomenon’s biggest achievement is probably that summers have never been quite the same.

Thank goodness we get to commemorate the Jaws anniversary in winter.

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