Sharksploitation!

[Mr T.]

Sharksploitation!
Jaws and the sad decline of the shark movie.
By Rebecca Onion
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005, at 4:24 AM PT

Say, "Ahhhhhhhh ..."

In Peter Benchley's novel Jaws, the corpulent newspaperman Meadows says to Sheriff Brody, "Sharks are like ax-murderers, Martin. People react to them with their guts. There's something crazy and evil and uncontrollable about them." Judging from the public reaction to Jaws (the movie), the man was right. The film celebrates its 30th anniversary this month with a special DVD and a festival on Martha's Vineyard. All of which leads to a question: Why has no shark movie since Jaws managed to hold a bloody, severed leg to the original?

For starters, Spielberg famously hid his shark, while the sequels and imitators immediately went in for visual overkill. "Everybody said you can't have the shark coming out of the water for the first time again," said Jeannot Szwarc, the director of Jaws 2 (1978). "Though people kept saying, 'Don't show the shark too much,' I kept saying from the beginning, 'We must show the shark a lot,' " he added. Not that Szwarc had much choice: The script provided for an exploding boat that left the shark crispy on one cheek—a "Scarface of the Sea" in the words of producer Richard Zanuck. Jaws 3 arrived in 1983. The producers of Jaws 2 said, quite rightly, that this version should have been a parody.

In the decades after Jaws, surprisingly few shark movies—other than the sequels—got made. There were other creature films—Piranha (1978), Orca (1977), Anaconda (1997)—that obviously bit into Jaws' style, but nobody seemed willing to touch the shark. It fell to Renny Harlin, the director of Deep Blue Sea (1999), to take up the mantle of sharksploitation. He felt the anxiety of Jaws influence but shrugged it off with the bravado of a kid with bigger and better toys. "When I received the script, I thought, 'What about Jaws, there will be so many comparisons,' " Harlin says of his movie. "But the technology had developed so hugely that we could do something that hadn't been possible before." Harlin's big innovation turned out to be: Smart Sharks! (Due to a mad scientist's genetic experiment with their brains, the sharks get really intelligent, and eventually, in a bid for freedom, they try to destroy the research lab where they're being kept.) Bad idea. It was the "primal" nature of Jaws' attacks that made them so scary. In Benchley's book, the opening scene, in which the unseen shark (Benchley calls him "the fish") drags the naked, postcoital Christine Watkins down into the water, the fish has no thoughts about attacking the girl. "The fish did not see the woman, nor did he smell her," writes Benchley. "Running the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibrations and signaled the brain." Giving sharks free will, however diabolical, as Deep Blue Sea does, makes them seem human, like annoying younger brothers.

Since then, the only movies that have dared to feature sharks arrive on DVDs that are devoid of any fancy extras, leaving us to guess at the intentions of the writers, directors, and producers. The remoras of the movie world, these films feed on Jaws and Deep Blue Sea's table scraps, adapting their plots and scare tactics. Each DVD is emblazoned with a punched-up version of the classic Jaws shark-under-girl poster. Usually, in these new riffs on the image, the girl has more cleavage, plus a boogie board or a scuba outfit, and the shark has more size, more teeth, and an angrier bright-red gingivitis.

These lower-grade films seriously up the death count. I counted 20 kills in Shark Zone (2003), but I could be wrong, because this widespread slaughter makes it hard to keep track. The shark in Jaws, in contrast, ate only five people on his first outing, but it seems like more.* Another major innovation these films can claim is the biggering of the shark. The concept of the megalodon—a prehistoric shark that's larger than any living Jaws—is dear to the hearts of shark conspiracy theorists, who believe that, like the coelacanth, the "meg" could one day be discovered in the ocean depths.

The meg, which is the star of Shark Hunter (2001), Shark Attack III: Megalodon (2002), and Megalodon (2004), provides an easy visual shock—when you see it juxtaposed against a submarine, for example, or when a character handles a palm-sized tooth left behind after an attack—but like other shocks, this one gets milked to death. In Shark Attack III, for example, the meg eats a motorboat whole, rising out of the water like Moby Dick. One such attack would have been great, but then the meg goes on to attack a yacht filled with fat cats—then, when the fat cats try to get away, one of them jumps right into the meg's huge mouth, while another Jet Skis into it.

With this kind of excess, it's not a surprise that an authentic, low-budget shark movie would be hailed as a revelation. Open Water was supposed to be the big scare film of the summer of 2004, but at the end of its paltry 79 minutes, the man sitting behind me got up and said to his wife, "That was it? I'm going to ask for my money back." He spoke for the nation. Real sharks, like the gray reef and bull sharks used in Open Water, are smaller and less impressively toothed than Hollywood sharks. Perhaps seeing them on the screen reminded the public that real sharks are disappointingly benign. They don't normally eat people or have vendettas against island towns or underwater research stations. As the old saw goes, we are far more of a threat to them than they are to us.

Not that this will stop Hollywood, which has now tried big sharks, smart sharks, freshwater sharks (in the Lou Diamond Phillips/Coolio 2003 TV movie, Red Water), and real sharks. All considerations of pacing and characterization aside, Jaws' success seems like a matter of timing—the movie worked because technology was just good enough to make the shark, and pre-CGI audiences were just green enough to scream at him.

*Correction, June 16, 2005: The article originally and incorrectly stated that the shark in the original Jaws ate four people, when in fact it was five. Click here to return to the corrected sentence.

Rebecca Onion is a writer living in Brooklyn.
Still from Jaws courtesy Archive Photos.

[Mr T.]

"Jaws" at 30: Film Stoked Fear, Study of Great White Sharks

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

June 15, 2005
Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1975, Jaws had moviegoers paralyzed by fear. The story, about a giant great white shark that terrorizes a seaside community, tapped into the most primal of human fears: What unseen creature lurks below the ocean surface?

Millions of beachgoers heeded the advice of the movie's tagline—"Don't go in the water." They filed into theaters instead, and Jaws became the biggest box office hit to date.

To the dismay of many scientists, however, Jaws cemented a perception in the minds of many people that sharks were stalking, killing machines. The reputation remains entrenched in the public psyche 30 years after the movie's release.

"It perpetuated the myths about sharks as man-eaters and bloodthirsty killers … even though the odds of an individual entering the sea and being attacked by a shark are almost infinitesimal," said George Burgess, a shark biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Burgess says the movie initiated a precipitous decline in U.S. shark populations, as thousands of fishers set out to catch trophy sharks after seeing Jaws. Later, in the 1980s, commercial fisheries further decimated shark populations.

But the phenomenal popularity of the movie also helped the study of sharks, researchers say. Before Jaws, very little was known about the predators. After the film's release, interest in sharks skyrocketed, resulting in increased funding for shark research.

"On the one hand, the movie did damage to sharks, because people saw them as monsters," said Robert Hueter, who directs the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida. "But for scientists, the whole Jaws thing started working in our favor, because of the overexaggerated public interest in these animals."

Mechanical Shark

In the hands of a young director named Steven Spielberg, Jaws, which was based on the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, was widely hailed as a masterful thriller. Its music score, by John Williams, contains one of the most recognized themes in movie-music history.

Filming was plagued by technical problems. Scenes with a mechanical shark had to be cut, because it did not look believable enough. That, however, only made the movie scarier, heightening the unsettled feeling of helplessness that many moviegoers felt toward the beast, which remained largely unseen.

"The fear of being eaten is ingrained in people," said Mike Heithaus, a marine biology professor at Florida International University in Miami. "If we feel like we have some control or [a] fighting chance, a situation isn't as scary. With sharks there are no trees to climb, and you can't outswim a shark."

Real-life shark attacks, though widely publicized, are extremely rare. People in U.S. coastal areas, for example, are about a hundred times more likely to be struck and killed by lightning than killed by a shark. According to the Florida Museum of Natural History's International Shark Attack File, there were 61 unprovoked shark attacks worldwide in 2004, resulting in seven deaths.


"Those are ridiculously low numbers when you consider the billions and billions of human hours spent in the water every year," said Burgess, who curates the Shark File.

Kill Tournaments

The number of shark attacks has increased over the past several decades, but that is because humans are going into the water in increasing numbers.

Humans are not part of sharks' normal prey.

"Most sharks don't attack prey that is close to their own size, and they can be wary of strange situations or objects they're not used to, like humans," Heithaus, the Miami marine biologist, said. "This makes attacks very unlikely, even if a hungry shark sees a person."

But sharks have suffered greatly at human hands. Between 20 to 100 million sharks are killed by fishing each year, according to the Shark File, which is administered by the American Elasmobranch Society, whose members study sharks, skates, and rays. The organization estimates that some shark populations have plummeted 30 to 50 percent.

That decline can be traced in part back to Jaws. In the years after the movie's release, the number of so-called kill tournaments spiked.

"There was a collective testosterone rush that went though the U.S. in the years following Jaws, where guys just wanted to catch these sharks so they could have their pictures taken with their foot on the head of a man-eater and the jaws later displayed on their mantle," Burgess said.

Biological Buck

When Jaws premiered, scientists knew little about sharks, partly because they were considered a nuisance by fisheries.

"The most important commercial species always get the biological buck in terms of grants and money," Burgess said. "Nobody cared much about sharks. They ate good fish, so they were considered bad by fisheries."

In the 1980s U.S. commercial fisheries turned their attention to sharks. Commercial overfishing further depleted the number of sharks. As shark populations declined, marine ecosystems suffered.

"As a result, we soon started getting funding from fisheries to do basic research on sharks—how old they get, how fast they grow, how many young they make," Burgess said.

Scientists have since learned that sharks, as apex predators, can affect the entire ocean food chain from their position at its top.

Most people, when they hear the word "shark," may still think of a huge great white shark, like the one in Jaws. In reality, there are more than 375 shark species, and only about a dozen are considered particularly dangerous.

But the public is slowly learning, scientists say.

"In the final analysis, Jaws has been a positive thing for the science of sharks," Hueter said, "because it has elevated the public's interest in these animals."