The Horror and the Thrills

Rewatching Jaws has spawned a new debate within me. Basically, I can’t figure out what to call this movie. Is it a horror film, or is it a thriller? Is it a thriller with horrific elements or is it simply a thrilling horror movie? In the past, I have discussed horror as a wide genre that incorporates Psycho, as well as Halloween and The Sixth Sense. But that may be too broad. Is The Silence of the Lambs a horror film? It certainly scared me, and in some ways, the movie is very similar to Halloween, which no one can deny being a horror film.

I think Spielberg may have the key here, but in some ways, he's misleading. He said that when he read the script for Jaws, he thought it was basically the same story as one of his previous films, the wonderful made for TV movie Duel. It's about a semi-truck that terrorizes this a salesman, who acts as a kind of everyman. The whole movie is kind of like one big tense car chase, but the truck itself is quite horrific. Jaws is the same thing in the water, except that the mechanical beast has become a living beast, one that will not stop pursuing the Orca and its crew.

It sounds like a great horror movie to me.

What are the elements of horror? Scares? Jaws is scary, but I don’t think it’s all that scary, at least not past watching it the first time. For most of the film, the guys on the boat are perfectly safe as they walk around the boat with Jaws safely in the water, out of reach. The only way one would get killed is if he were to fall in. The shark itself looks pretty mechanical, too. Not very scary looking. The opening scene could be scary, but not once you know what is going to happen.

Blood? Yeah, there’s blood, but Jaws is not exactly a gore-fest. The disembodied leg that floats to the bottom is pretty gross, but it’s not Texas Chain Saw Massacre-gross. Even when Quint buys it at the end, we don’t see the guy get cut in half. It’s pretty gross just because you watch him fight to keep out of the shark’s mouth, kind of like when Hooper is in the tank and Jaws breaks through it. You just know they’re going to die, and yet you watch them try to fight to stay alive. Yeah, that gives me the creeps.

But I’m still not sure. My impression now is to call this a thriller and not a horror movie, even though it scares me so much I can’t stand to go in the ocean.

Maybe next time I will talk about Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime and how terror and horror fits into that. Or may I will talk about how what my one-year-old daughter and terrorists have in common.

As Kurtz says, "The horror! The horror!"