There are no sharks in Lake Simcoe. Of this I am certain. But the summer just before I turned 14, I couldn’t dip a toe into the waters of Cook’s Bay, Ont., without picturing the gaping maw of a great white shark coming for those toes and everything attached to them.
Yes, I had just seen “Jaws.”
Frankly, if you lived in North America in the summer of 1975 and had even a passing interest in movies, it’s hard to imagine you didn’t see “Jaws.” The film, about a giant shark that terrorizes a New England beach community, is credited with the invention of the summer blockbuster.
Sid Adilman, writing in the Toronto Star, called it “the blockbuster of the season” after it opened on June 20, 1975, earning $1.3 million in 55 Canadian theatres in its first week and setting box office records at those cinemas. It eventually made $498 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of its time.
None of that was of consequence to an imaginative 13-year-old who was alternately thrilled and terrified by what director Steven Spielberg and his co-conspirators had put onscreen.
I wish I could remember exactly where and when I saw the film with my family — all I recall is sitting on edge in my theatre seat waiting to see which of the oblivious bathers the shark was going to strike next.
The Star’s review on June 23, 1975, called it “nothing less than a masterpiece of terror, a movie that grabs an audience like a strangler’s hands arousing you from sleep.”
I don’t know about “strangler’s hands,” but there was something visceral about the scenes of swimmers being chomped on by a mostly unseen 25-foot predator.
And it wasn’t about gore, of which there isn’t much in “Jaws”; we don’t see a severed limb until well into the movie, when the great white claims its fourth victim. But not even the sight of shark catcher Quint (Robert Shaw) being bitten in half by the beast was as unsettling as the film’s glimpses of vulnerable limbs exposed from below while the underwater camera zoomed in and the John Williams score speeded up to let us know the shark was closing in.
That was definitely the scariest part of the movie — well, that and the head that pops up in the porthole of a sunken boat being examined by oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), which made me scream. It was those munchable arms and legs that, despite the clear absence of sharks in Ontario’s freshwater lakes, made it so easy to imagine being a victim of one when I waded into the water near my grandparents’ cottage.
I have written in the Star before about the summers I spent at the cottage as a child and teenager, and how much I loved leaving Toronto behind for the respite of Lefroy, Ont. Our cottage was on Barry Avenue just across the street from Lake Simcoe and since several of the families on that street leased a private beach, ours included, we spent a lot of time in the lake. I was in my late 20s before I saw, let alone swam in, an ocean.
The ocean, of course, was not just a setting for “Jaws” but also a filming location when Spielberg made the movie in Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1974. As has been well documented in the decades since its release, if not for the problems that plagued the shoot — among them faulty mechanical sharks and the vicissitudes of filming in the North Atlantic Ocean — Spielberg would not have created such a suspenseful masterpiece. Those malfunctioning prop fish meant the director had to find other ways to signal the approach of the killer: a shot of a fin, that menacing music, a victim being jerked to and fro, a barrel popping up at the side of a boat.
You don’t have to be a film studies major to glean the power of an unseen threat to fuel audience unease.
As an Associated Press story marking the 50th anniversary of “Jaws” noted, “The suspense came less from the shark than the fear of the unknown and that spine-tingling question: What’s in the water? Spielberg, with the significant aid of John Williams’ instantly iconic score, delayed the appearance of his Great White until well into the film.”
A Gallup poll of American adults who had seen the movie in 1975 found that 18 per cent said it was the most frightening movie they had ever seen, and 35 per cent said it increased their fear of swimming in the ocean — a fear that plagued more women than men, 47 per cent to 23 per cent.
There was even a case of “cinematic neurosis” reported in a 17-year-old Kansas girl who hallucinated being attacked by sharks.
“Humans have always feared the unknown,” reported a Psychiatric Times article that discussed the case. “In environments where escape is made difficult, such as while swimming, this fear becomes even more intense.”
I can attest to that, having always been apprehensive about swimming in deep, open water. Mind you, my own irrational disquiet that summer wasn’t neurosis — just the overactive imagination of a young teen in the throes of puberty, facing all sorts of real-life unknowns.
That summer I was on a threshold, starting to take ever more interest in the boys we spotted in town. Soon, I’d be more excited about hanging around the variety store, waiting for the townies to show up with offers to go to the drive-in or the stock car races, rather than going to the Red & White with my parents and buying candy.
But jumping in the lake was a constant throughout those years, thoughts of killer sharks notwithstanding.
“Jaws” isn’t the only scary movie I saw in the ’70s — “The Exorcist,” for instance, made me immediately throw away my Ouija board — but it is the one whose images and sensations still permeate my consciousness 51 years later.
