The movie Steven Spielberg called ‘Jaws’ on land: “The terror is unseen in both”
When Jaws was released in 1975, it invented the modern summer blockbuster. These days, we don’t think twice about summer release schedules being crammed with big-budget comic book movies and crowd-pleasing action flicks. It would be weird if they weren’t. But before Jaws took the box office by storm, summer was seen as a bit of a dead zone. Audiences wanted to be outside enjoying the sunshine, not piled into a dark cinema.
Another way that Jaws changed the game was by keeping its horror close to its chest. It is ostensibly about a shark, but the shark itself is rarely visible. We only see it in a few key moments. While this may have had a lot to do with technical problems (the mechanical shark was not particularly reliable by most accounts), the effect was revolutionary. Jaws was a creature feature in which the creature was hardly visible. As a result, the audience was able to project its worst nightmares onto the absence of the shark and the presence of John Williams’s spine-tingling score.
In 1982, Spielberg revealed that he saw great similarities between the visually elusive horror of Jaws and another movie that was about to be released. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist is set in a California subdivision and centres on a family terrorised by an unseen supernatural presence that tampers with the electricity, rearranges objects, and abducts the youngest child in the household. Spielberg co-wrote and produced the film, and some even believe he was the shadow director, but his contract with Universal precluded him from helming the project due to his commitment to ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, so it was Hooper who ostensibly took the reins.
Still, it’s clear based on Spielberg’s comments about Poltergeist that he took plenty of credit for its tone and approach to horror. “It’s real scary,” he said. “It’s sort of a land Jaws for me. It’s a movie about ghosts, but it’s not a send-up, it’s not a comedy. It’s really a movie about a haunting in suburbia. The great similarity is that terror is relentless, and the terror is unseen in both movies [until the end].”
This is true to some extent, but there are moments when Hooper’s influence is crystal clear. The director made a name for himself with his 1974 cannibalistic horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and although Poltergeist barely tickles the edges of that film’s depravity, there are several key moments of gore that are a far cry from the unseen menace of Jaws.
For example, in one scene, a character peels off his face, his skin falling in gooey chunks into the sink and revealing his grinning skull. Apparently, the hands in the scene actually belong to Spielberg, but the grotesque body horror is pure Texas Chainsaw rather than Jaws.
Melting flesh and undead skeletons aside, however, it is true that Poltergeist saves its horror imagery until the end. It doesn’t achieve the same sort of nerve-shredding suspense that Jaws does, but then again, what other movie has ever been able to rise to that benchmark?
