Shark Zone. Shark Night. Big Shark. Super Shark. Sharktopus. L’ultimo Squalo, or The Last Shark. Swamp Shark. Dam Shark. Sand Shark. Snow Shark. Ice Shark. Sky Shark. Ghost Shark. Ghost Shark 2: Urban Jaws.
Over the past fifty years, since the beginning of the sharksploitation genre, the world’s largest predatory fish has been mechanised (Roboshark), zombified (Zombie Shark), exorcised (Shark Exorcist), irradiated (Atomic Shark) and reanimated (Sharkenstein). It has been lycanthropic (Sharkside of the Moon), vampiric (Sharkula), extraterrestrial (Shark Encounters of the Third Kind) and remade through a series of one-star spin-offs (Raiders of the Lost Shark, Planet of the Sharks, Jurassic Shark, Noah’s Shark).
The stories of sharksploitation films are different combinations of comedy and horror. While most are unrealistic (Avalanche Shark), some are lifelike. Open Water, for example, was celebrated for its slow and realistic terror—two people stranded in the ocean after being accidentality abandoned by a scuba-diving charter. But all films within the family, even the silly, hold something unsettling within them, even if it’s only a fraction. There is a reason we have sharksploitation and not cowsploitation. Even though cows kill more people per year, there’s no box-office bovine horror. No Hooves.
Most sharksploitation titles will be unknown to the average person. The genre consists mostly of B-movies that come and go in obscurity. Their sequels, normally born from bad reviews and little to no bankroll, seem to be mandatory (2-Headed Shark Attack, 3-Headed Shark Attack, 5-Headed Shark Attack, 6-Headed Shark Attack). A description I found of the great white’s jaw anatomy works equally well for the genre’s inclination for serialisation: ‘the great white will never run out of teeth because if one is lost, another spins forward’.
The reviews, when there are any, show a range of audience expectations. Some say, ‘One of the worst films I’ve ever seen. 1/5’, while others say, ‘One of the worst films I’ve ever seen. 5/5’. They also imply dedicated fans (‘After the abysmal Sharknado 4, Sharknado 5: Global Swarming represents a bounce back’. I wonder what they think of Sharknado 6?).
But not all of these films are poor ventures fated for a quiet online flop. Meg 2, a 2023 film starring Jason Statham, was a blockbuster that grossed $395 million while being ridiculed by critics and the crowd: ‘Easily one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life’. And in 1999, Deep Blue Sea was another box-office success. The story followed Samuel L. Jackson and a group of well-meaning scientists who did a whoopsie by creating sharks with bigger brains—all the better to kill you with.
And of course, before megalodons awoke from the depths of an ancient trench, before sharks gained increased cranial mass, before they lurked in the snow, in the earth, beneath our beds and in the afterlife (Ouija Shark), there was a story about a comparatively normal shark. There was Jaws. The first-ever summer blockbuster, that outgrossed The Godfather to become the then highest-grossing film of all time, making over $1 billion adjusted for inflation. You could argue this film is what truly started the sharksploitation genre, even down to its string of slated sequels (Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, Jaws the Revenge and Cruel Jaws).
But before Jaws (1975)there was Jaws (1974), the number one best-selling book, published fifty years ago this February—a book that resides in the shade of the blockbuster, but remains the antecedent to many strange, funny and occasionally thrilling children.
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Adaptation from book to film can be a delicate process of omission. For Jaws, one significant change was to the main protagonist being a cuckold, which the book dedicates a considerable amount time to setting up and describing. Like all good sharksploitation, Benchley’s Jaws is about a killer shark. But it is also about an older, blue-collar cop competing with a younger, hotter, richer marine biologist whom he rightly suspects of having sex with his wife. To give the flavour:
The last thing he [Brody] wanted was to spend days on a boat with Hooper, especially in a situation in which Hooper would outrank him in knowledge, if not authority. He could send Hooper alone [on the boat with Quint] and stay ashore himself. But that, he felt, would be capitulating, admitting finally and irrevocably his inability to face and conquer the strange enemy that was waging war on his town. Besides, maybe—over the course of a long day on the boat—Hooper might make a slip that would reveal what he was doing last Wednesday.
Describing the plot before the book was published, Benchley wrote, ‘The purpose of the novel would be to explore the reactions of a community that is suddenly struck by a peculiar natural disaster—not an earthquake or a flood … but a continuing, mysterious devastation that as time goes on, loses its natural neutrality, and begins to smack of evil’. An example of this community reaction can be seen when local politicians and others pressure Brody into playing down the threat, as they don’t want to scare away the summer tourism on which the town depends. Here, Brody capitulates, a decision that costs lives.
Chief Brody’s doubts about his marshal and marital status are, I think, also part of Benchley’s exploration of a town’s reaction to a mysterious disaster. The anxiety of a chief of police, charged with protecting the local community, coming face to face with something he struggles to understand and control makes for a kind of No Coast for Old Men in which a preternatural force of malice makes a man question his worth. And when you add the cuckolding, this personal struggle begins to sound less like a McCarthy drama and a lot more like a George Saunders story. A balding cop who is searching for revenge on a giant fish that has exposed the limits of his jurisdiction. A man who is further emasculated by seeking help from the man who is having sex with his wife.
If the book treated these ingredients well, I think it could have been a standalone classic—more White Noise than white shark. What could have been a comedy of machismo, following characters vying for authority—or the appearance of authority—in a worsening crisis instead becomes a fish-themed revenge adventure that reads like true-crime pulp: ‘Brody tried to smile. “Me, I guess I’m just a screwed-up cop”’. In the end, Hooper is killed by the shark following a showdown with Brody; Quint and the shark die together, and the chief is the último hombre left to paddle back to shore.
At its release, the book received similar notes from the critics: writing bad; shark good. A review in The New York Times said that it suffered from passages of hollow portentousness, florid and sentimental lapses and clanky—perhaps inevitable—allusions to Moby Dick: ‘But the shark is so menacingly adequate an embodiment of imagined malignity that, even though its attacks are telegraphed, they fix one’s attention. In these scenes the novel’s faults are forgotten. Other times, they circle restlessly like fins’.
And retrospectives aren’t much kinder. It’s often noted that the dialogue lacks the film’s pith. ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat’ is improvised dialogue from the movie, without which we would never have had ‘You’re gonna need a bigger house’ (House Shark) and ‘You’re gonna need a bigger cross’ (Shark Exorcist). Quint’s famous monologue on the abyssal and doll-like eyes of a great white—another of the story’s most memorable scenes—is also an invention of the screenplay, added by Pulitzer-winning playwright Howard Sackler.
Spielberg’s movie removes what gets in the way and bolsters what remains, creating a cleaner and livelier revenge story. He keeps the main three characters but omits the spiteful cuckolding, creating a ragtag bunch of men bonded by extreme fishing. This clears the stage for the true star of the show: the great white. The film, of course, keeps the book’s perfect title. It also keeps the seaside town of Amity and the string of gory killings that haunt it, famously rendered in live action with a one-and-a-half ton animatronic shark. The sensation the film caused on release is renowned, and its impact on public perception has been so great that it’s been coined the ‘Jaws generation’, with the great white shark garnering what is arguably the worst publicity ever seen below sea level. The serial killer of the sea.
Ever since the film’s release people have looked for what the shark and our fear of it really mean. Natural disasters, terrorism, immigrants, impotence—the shark swims for all things. Fidel Castro read Jaws. ‘It’s not a very good book, but I think the movie must be good because it’s a Marxist picture … it shows that businessmen are ready to sell out the safety of citizens rather than close down against the invasion of sharks.’ To Slavoj Žižek, none of these (and all of these) interpretations is correct. ‘The function of the shark’, he argues, ‘is to unite all these fears, so we can, in a way, trade all these fears for one fear alone’—a fundamental ideology used in fascism.
But the question of this essay is not What does the shark mean? but Why is the animal itself so frightening? Why is the shark such a strong ‘embodiment of imagined malignity’? Why does the fish smack so thoroughly of evil?
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GREAT WHITE. WHITE NIGHT. Dark Water. Shadows of Despair. Death From the Sea. PISCES REDUX. A Question of Evil. Benchley’s alternate titles for Jaws are so plentiful you can make a haiku:
Out of the Stillness
Off the Beach, The Grinning Fish
Infinite Evil
The long list of alternative titles shows Benchley’s knowledge of old monster stories, and his ideas of what creates the novel’s horror. The Grinning Fish is a good example. Many times, in the book, the shark looks as though it’s smiling. In a later chapter, on the first day of the great shark hunt, Brody sees the conical head with two black holes for eyes silently floating above the water. The shark has been watching them, its serrated mouth hanging limp in a strange grin. ‘That’s what they look like when their mouths are open’, says Quint. ‘Don’t make him out to be more than he is’. But Brody feels off. A day later, he remembers the ‘leering’ face: ‘“I don’t know”, he said, “that fish sure looked mean yesterday. Like he meant to be mean. Like he knew what he was doing”’. Over the long days of fishing even Quint begins to admit that the shark might not be so stupid after it outsmarts him time and again. And then, a moment of acknowledgement: right next to Brody, out of the still water, ‘the great head reared up, mouth open in a slack, savage grin, eyes black and abysmal. Brody stared in mute horror, sensing that this was what it must be like to try and stare down the devil’.
The eeriness of the shark—what transforms it from a natural disaster into something more mysterious—is the characters’ reluctant recognition that the fish is thinking. That behind the ostensibly vacant gaze of a ‘garbage bucket’ that ‘doesn’t know shit’, to quote Quint, there is a non-human mind with its own desire and intent.
Maneater was another alternative title for Jaws, a word that would be used by many sharksploitation movies to come. The word itself is old. In 1758 Carl Linnaeus wrote the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, laying the foundation for the contemporary zoological categorisation of the natural world. In the same book that labelled us Homo sapiens, Linnaeus codified the great white shark as the man-eater. In one edition of Systema Naturae, in the description of the great white, he repeated the idea that this fish swallowed the prophet Jonah. The word ‘whale’ isn’t used in the original biblical story; the giant creature is called ‘the great fish’, which is also another title for Jaws, as was Leviathan (Linnaeus-Jonah).
But before Linnaeus, animals known as man-eaters could be found in ancient encyclopedias of the natural world. Thousands of years ago the Greeks brought tales from Indus, or modern-day India, stories of the wildlife, people and cultures that formed early encyclopedias of the sub-continent, borrowing from Indian epics and mythology and the literary works of Indian philosophers. In these books there are stories of an animal called the martikhórās. Etymologists suggest this word is a transliteration of the Persian compound martīya (‘man’) and xuar- (‘to eat’), a word we now pronounce as manticore.The animal was a chimera with the body of a tiger, tail of a scorpion and the head and face of a man. The mouth of this human face had multiple rows of sharp teeth, like a great white’s jaw. These fantastic creatures were known for hunting and devouring groups of people crossing the landscape,stories that would be repeated in Western encyclopedias for millennia. In his early editions of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus listed the manticore under the section Animalia Paradoxica. Many people have suggested that these stories were reports of encounters with India’s tigers, transformed by fear and amusement.
Today, a dictionary entry for ‘man-eater’ reads: an animal, especially a tiger, lion, or shark, that eats or is said to eat people; the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, the shark reputedly most dangerous to humans. In recent centuries, the word has been further adopted by the scientific field and used to denominate animals that intentionally hunt humans. During the British colonisation of India, stories of man-eating tigers again found their way to the West, increasing the animal’s infamy. In the 1950s, ‘man-eater’ also became synonymous with the rogue shark theory after an Australian academic, Sir Victor Murphy Coppleson, published his book SHARK ATTACK. To quote the foreword, ‘This book is the first ever published on shark attacks … Dr Coppleson proves conclusively the theory of the rogue shark—a man-eater, who having once tasted the human blood, waits for further victims’.
This theory is the basis for Jaws, with the shark called a man-eater and rogue in both book and film (the book even alludes to stories of man-eating tigers). ‘What I now know, which wasn’t known when I wrote Jaws, is that there is no such thing as a rogue shark which develops a taste for human flesh’, Benchley later reflected in an interview. Now refuted by scientists, the theory was once popular with the world’s leading experts. The success of Jaws slung the man-eater myth—which, at its core, is based on an animal with intent to do harm—into the public imagination. Following a cluster of fatal shark attacks in Australia, Benchley wrote an open letter in a newspaper titled ‘Without Malice’ in an attempt to stop a retaliatory shark cull, stating, ‘This was not a rogue shark, tantalised by the taste of human flesh and bound now to kill and kill again. Such creatures do not exist, despite what you might have derived from Jaws’.
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In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh recalls encounters with natural disasters, including both famous stories about the tigers of the Sundarbans—our infamous man-eaters of India—and his survival of an and unprecedented tornado in Delhi in 1978, which passed directly over him and killed dozens of people in his vicinity:
Many stories of encounters with tigers hinge upon a moment of mutual recognition … To look into the tiger’s eyes is to recognize a presence of which you are already aware; and in that moment of contact you realise that this presence possesses a similar awareness of you, even though it is not human …
But what is it that you are communicating with, at this moment of extreme danger, when your mind is in a state unlike any you’ve ever known before? An analogy that is sometimes offered is that of seeing a ghost, a presence not of this world. In the tiger stories of the Sundarbans, as in my experience of the tornado, [in which Ghosh previously noted the aptness of the metaphor eye of the storm, as his experience felt ‘strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld’] there is, as I noted earlier, and irreducible element of mystery.
Benchley’sdescription of Jaws being about a mysterious natural disaster now begin to sound more meaningful, as do his alternate titles of Apparition and Spectre. Ghosh goes on to explain that a word often used to describe the mysterious feeling within experiences with natural disasters is uncanny. For Ghosh, this uncanniness is partly a recognition of something we have forgotten: that human-centric thinking and uniformitarian perspectives on the natural world have made it easy to neglect ‘the presence and proximity to non-human interlocutors’ and the ‘awareness that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctly our own: the capacity for of will, thought, and consciousness’.
Jaws, as both book and film, hinges upon moments of beholding and being beheld, on uncanny interactions with a non-human consciousness. It is in Captain Quint’s eerie monologue about the shark’s doll-like eyes, in the vacant stare and savage smile of Benchley’s great fish. And it is something found throughout the sharksploitation genre. ‘Alright people, these sharks are thinking hard and clear’, to quote Russell Franklin, Samuel L Jackson’s character in Deep Blue Sea. Or in the words of the movie’s main protagonist, Carter Blake, an edgy ex-con turned shark wrangler, ‘What you’ve done is taken God’s oldest killing machine and given it will and desire’.
But a fish with desire does not a demon make. Non-human will is an important part of the mystery within these natural disasters—the eerie recognition of a ‘human’ element in something that is not human—but morally, the fish still smells pretty good.
In the opening pages of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, an old sheriff recalls a moment of similar visual contact to those described in Jaws. He tells of exchanging glances with a man being sent to the electric chair for committing a motiveless killing. On the way to execution, the man told the sheriff he had wanted kill someone for as long as he could remember, and that if he was set free he would do it again. ‘They say the eyes are the windows to the soul’, reflects the sheriff. ‘I don’t know what them eyes was windows to and I guess I’d as soon not know’. As Chief Brody does in Jaws following his stare-down with the shark, the sheriff invokes ideas of the antichrist after exchanging glances with a presence that shares human likeness but no humanity: ‘Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he’s real. I’ve seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I won’t do it again’.
As the sheriff fears, a prophet of destruction does arrive—a preternatural psychopath with a bowl-cut who dispenses violence based on the toss of a coin (literally) or his own esoteric principles. This is the stuff of the slasher movie, a genre filled with stories of mysterious human-shaped killing machines that exert sudden and often unexplainable gore. It has been said that the ‘implacable non-human’ is embodied by the shark in Jaws as it is by Michael Myers in Halloween or Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th. As the town reporter says in Benchley’s Jaws, ‘Sharks are like axe murders, Martin. People react to them with their guts. There’s something crazy, evil and uncontrollable about them’. The eeriness of the non-human encounter is transformed into evil by the realisation that this presence means to be mean. It is the recognition of a mind that enjoys cruelty—a prophet of destruction delivering violence implacably and without any clear reason.