The Birth of Horror
When horror first seeped into literature as a distinct mode, we’re roughly at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published in 1818, and Dr. John Polidori’s The Vampyre follows in 1819. Both texts are almost immediately dragged onto the stage via theatrical adaptations. By the early 1900s, in societies that have completed industrialisation, fear of science and technology fuses with the anxieties of urban life in the newly isolated modern city-dweller.
Pasteur “kills” rabies; biologists and chemists discover powerful formulas against epidemic disease. These victories against illness gradually strip traditional religious authorities of their monopoly. Death changes texture: the aristocrat, who once outsourced fear via indulgences and purchased absolution, now finds his post-mortem guarantee shaken. Fear, once a whip in aristocratic hands lashing the bourgeoisie’s neck, starts rebounding.
As science moves to the centre, religious belief trembles, the bourgeoisie rises, and aristocratic power is crushed underfoot. Fear stops being the aristocrat’s private toy and spills across all classes. The collapse of older authorities, combined with obscene gaps between classes and an explosion in everyday urban crime, produces a new social climate ripe for horror. Elegant aristocratic mansions, once safely tucked away from the city, are suddenly surrounded by expanding urban sprawl. What used to be “far away” is now two tram stops down the road; the stately house becomes prime real estate and demolition bait.
Out of this pressure cooker emerges a new literary approach. Writers articulate distrust toward modern life and its anxieties by reaching back to pre-Christian, pagan fear imagery and re-casting it.
“Creatures torn from their distant natural habitats and brought into the city – the ‘foreign,’ the ‘other’; scientists obsessed with the secret of life who upend all natural balances – ‘disrupted order’; legends born of class antagonisms – ‘bloodsucking nobles’; and split personalities – the ‘other’ within – all come to the fore, enriched with fantastic elements. That Gothic literature appears in late-18th-century industrial England is no coincidence.” (Abisel, 1995: 110)
Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus crystallises this: a pagan echo pressed into service to frame the dystopian existence of the modern human. In the original myth, Prometheus fashions humanity from clay, steals fire from the gods, and hands it to humans. Civilisation begins with fire; from that point on, humans can claim their own destiny, independent of divine whim. Zeus punishes Prometheus by chaining him to a rock; a giant bird gnaws at his regenerating liver every day.
In Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucifer strolls into Eden and offers Eve the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. Again, it’s the figure of revolt who hands the hoarded secret to humans. Prometheus and Lucifer share the same archetypal function.
From the Renaissance onward, the project is to resurrect antiquity and enthrone reason and science as the sole earthly sovereign. Heaven is dragged down to earth as utopia. With the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, La Mettrie’s materialism – the human as machine – becomes the unspoken axiom. Modernity’s human is Nietzsche’s Übermensch in embryo: having created God himself, he can now erase Him and aim toward a god-man ideal.
In this context, horror as an artistic mode stages industrial modernity’s confrontation with the ancient system. Devils and demons are no longer expelled by priests; they’re created and neutralised by doctors. Dracula’s true antagonist is Professor Van Helsing, the cultivated doctor of the modern city. Dracula stands in for a dying aristocracy; Van Helsing for the new, modern “true aristocrat” forged by urban culture. Likewise, Dr. Frankenstein is the necessary condition for the “mad creature” to exist at all.
Where the Church once promised resurrection, now only science – in the guise of the doctor – can reanimate the dead. These stories revolve around the clash between modern rationality and superstition, between life and death. The only occult object modernity still finds genuinely alluring is the philosopher’s stone: the promise of immortality coded as technique.
In Dracula blood is both aristocratic capital and an immortality fuel; in Frankenstein electricity plays the same role. The materialist doctor tinkers with the human-machine just like a mechanic overhauling an engine: disassembling, cleaning, replacing parts and restarting the system.
By the late 1960s, horror cinema’s obsession with the “other” archetype lapses into self-parody. The genre falls into a loop of remakes and formulaic B-movies. Then The Exorcist (1973) and Jaws (1975) smash that loop and give audiences something they genuinely haven’t seen before.
In the U.S., the failure to politically metabolise the ’60s and the resort to naked repression – Vietnam, Kent State, Watergate – leaves a deep legitimacy crisis. Ryan and Kellner lump films like The Exorcist, Jaws, The Godfather, and Airport under the label “crisis films” (Ryan & Kellner, 1988: 89). This essay zooms in on Jaws and what comes after: shark movies as an ideological field. I’ll sketch the ideological transformations of this subgenre through seven shark films.
Jaws (1975)
Spielberg’s blockbuster carries at least two ideological layers. Start with the poster: a naked young woman swimming at the surface; a giant shark rising from the depths. The creature’s exaggerated size is retroactively legitimised by in-film evolutionary talk: ancestors like the Megalodon, modern great whites, maximum lengths, tonnage. The animatronic shark built for the shoot sits at the upper bound of plausibility – about seven metres, roughly three tons – which grounds the spectacle in a pseudo-documentary realism.
The opening is telling. We see a group of hippies partying around a bonfire. Two of them peel off, looking for a place to hook up. The woman makes it into the water naked; the man, too drunk, collapses uselessly in the sand. Next morning, her mangled body is found. The main plot clicks into place.
Across the film as a whole, though, the shark threatens everyone without discrimination: women, men, children. So while the iconic opening creates a template future shark movies will lazily recycle – eroticised female victim, primal monster – Jaws itself doesn’t actually hinge ideologically on punishing female sexuality. Its core is elsewhere.
Structurally, the narrative splits across three male figures: Chief Brody, oceanographer Hooper, and the grizzled fisherman Quint. The classical Hollywood protagonist focus on Brody gradually slides; from the second act onward, Quint increasingly becomes the ideological centre.
The threat of the shark is economic and social: its presence terrifies tourists and threatens the town’s summer season. Brody and Hooper insist on the gravity of the danger; the mayor and business owners shrug them off, determined to press ahead with beach festivities and cash flow. Cue Althusser.
The mayor – elected, slick, money-fixated – is an Ideological State Apparatus in the guise of a local politician. Brody (the cop) and Hooper (the scientist) are State Apparatuses in the more classical sense: trained, credentialed, “objective.” The crisis is very ’70s U.S.: Watergate, Vietnam, an uneasy bourgeoisie that wants both money and a functioning state. So Brody and Hooper embody the fantasy of a rational, protective state reasserting itself over short-term profit.
Brody and Hooper insist that unless they say otherwise, nobody should enter the water. If they do, they get eaten. It’s that simple.
In one pivotal three-way cabin scene on Quint’s boat, the film lays its ideological cards on the table. Quint is a veteran. He served aboard the USS Indianapolis, the ship that delivered the atomic bomb to the launch point. On the way back, the ship is torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Because the mission is classified, the Indianapolis’ position is unknown; no timely rescue is possible. Hundreds of sailors end up in the water, and for five days sharks feed on them. Quint is one of the few survivors.
From that speech onward, the shark stops being a random predator and becomes Axis power: the wartime enemy. Quint is the alcoholic captain of a wounded empire. Hooper evades the shark by diving and hiding – a half-conscious echo of German-Jewish scientists who fled Europe. Brody, clinging to the mast, uses Quint’s M1 Garand rifle to shoot the compressed air tank lodged in the shark’s mouth.
That M1 Garand matters. In WWI and WWII, the German Mauser rifle gave the Wehrmacht a serious edge. The U.S. developed the semi-automatic M1 to counter it: high power, eight rounds, much faster fire. The M1 becomes the symbol of the American infantryman, and by extension of “winning the war.” Quint’s veteran status and his possession of the M1 are hardly accidental details.
The finale – blowing up the shark with the air tank – is a warped replay of the Indianapolis story: “Yes, we delivered the bomb; yes, we paid a price – but we still dropped it and we still won.” The shark is the foreign enemy; the crisis is a diminished state authority; the resolution is re-centering that authority through paternal action.
Result: Jaws is a crisis film that tries to restore faith in a wounded father-state. That’s precisely why it towers above the B-movie horror clutter around it.
Jaws 2 (1978)
War sends men to the front; many don’t come back. Women step into “men’s work,” prove they can do what they were told they couldn’t, gain economic and social agency. Then the guns fall silent, and suddenly this competence is a problem. The ideal post-war woman is supposed to retreat back to the home. Hollywood does its part by constructing female characters to be punished or domesticated.
In Jaws 2, the ideological focus shifts. The town as whole is no longer the main victim; the immediate targets are a bunch of fun-seeking teenagers. The signature set-piece is a woman driving a speedboat with a young girl water-skiing behind her. The skipper is a woman; she’s at the helm. The film’s staging practically whispers: “If a man were in charge, this wouldn’t happen.”
Brody, who in the first film is more lucky than competent, is here elevated to the lone saviour archetype. He kills the shark by electrocution – a pulpy, almost cartoonish solution that nonetheless cements him as the necessary patriarchal protector.
There’s a class angle, too. Women entering the labour force and contributing economically helps the middle class swell, nibbling at the edges of the bourgeoisie. Dual-income nuclear families mean looser parental control, more freedom for kids, and the emergence of youth cultures – skateboarding, arcade games, etc. A confident, affluent middle class scares parts of the old bourgeoisie. Ideologically, Jaws 2 answers by having a “natural” monster attack the lifestyle of the new middle class and its “over-liberated” youth.
The subtext isn’t subtle: the new family form – financially comfortable, less hierarchically rigid – is “naturally” endangered and must be pulled back under patriarchal, state-aligned authority.
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
In Deep Blue Sea the target is once again a woman in a position of scientific authority. Dr. Susan McAlester is a brilliant young researcher seeking a cure for Alzheimer’s. She genetically modifies sharks’ frontal lobes to harvest a protein capable of regenerating neurons; this could, in theory, be applied to humans.
The pitch is noble: cure a devastating disease. The execution is textbook hubris. The film’s visual and narrative rhetoric is not subtle: her ambition, her “recklessness,” and yes, her being a woman in a high-stakes lab are bundled into a warning: women shouldn’t meddle with the sacred domain of high science.
McAlester, unsurprisingly, dies at the hands (teeth) of her own creation. The climactic victory belongs to Carter Blake – hyper-masculine shark wrangler with a harpoon gun – and the ship’s cook, Preacher, who provides both comic relief and righteous masculine indignation.
The poster frames a woman as shark bait; the plot fulfils that promise. The punished subject is not “science” in general but a specific figure: a female microbiologist/genetic engineer. The unspoken message: when women reach into the engine room of life itself, things get out of hand.
The Reef (2010)
The Reef claims to be based on a true story. “Based on” is doing heavy lifting. Hollywood’s “true story” treatments are rarely allergic to embellishment.
Here again, we have a configuration of two hot-blooded couples and a shark. The setting is laid out with psychoanalytic neatness: an island where couples fool around stands in for the conscious mind; the open ocean is the unconscious. At the end, we end up with a triangle: man–woman–shark, an oedipal triad.
The final configuration is especially telling: the surviving woman becomes the shark’s desired object. Everything around her – the men – is systematically eliminated. In the real incident, both members of the couple attacked in open water are hit simultaneously; only Suzie reaches the reef alive. The film, by contrast, choreographs an oedipal, gendered drama of desire and castration.
Open Water (2003)
In the first Open Water, the triangle is even more bare-bones: a hot-blooded couple and a shark. Low budget, minimal dramatization. There’s not much to unpack beyond the obvious: the woman survives, the man is effectively castrated by the shark. Again, male sexuality is punished; female survival is framed as traumatised endurance rather than triumphant agency.
47 Meters Down (2017)
In 47 Meters Down, the politics of flesh is almost embarrassingly literal. Two sisters are the fresh meat on display. They descend in a shark cage; the winch fails; they plummet to 47 metres.
The film fetishises them as consumable bodies: constantly threatened with bites, trapped in a metal cage, their vulnerability on parade. The cage itself is a visual metaphor for pornographic framing – a device that both “protects” and eroticises. The sharks aren’t just predators; they’re stand-ins for the gaze that consumes female bodies as spectacle and snack.
The Shallows (2016)
Among the examples I’ve grabbed at random since Jaws, The Shallows is perhaps the most popular and, paradoxically, the most interesting.
Blake Lively’s Nancy is presented explicitly as a sexualised object – the “hot surfer girl” alone in a secluded bay. The shark, meanwhile, is visualised as aggressively, grotesquely masculine: a literal phallus tearing through the surf. Earlier films could have supported a vagina dentata reading (the shark as castrating female mouth); here, we’re firmly in the opposite configuration: a deranged, hyper-phallic predator obsessively pursuing the female body.
Nancy’s menstrual blood – a visual marker of fertility and bodily autonomy – doesn’t ruin the film; if anything, it enriches it. Despite the fetishisation – bikinis, lingering shots of the wounded leg, etc. – Nancy is the rare shark-movie character who actually defeats the phallic monster using intellect rather than sheer luck or male rescue.
That said, the ending folds back into ideological comfort. Nancy returns to the same bay, this time with her father. Translation: the “free woman” returns, scarred but alive, to the paternal orbit. The subtext is clear enough: “Freedom is all well and good, but it’s safer with Dad around.”
Despite that conservative loop-closing, the image of a woman outsmarting a monstrous, masculinised shark and surviving has weight. It’s one of the few cases in the subgenre where female agency doesn’t end in simple punishment.
Conclusion
Jaws can be read as a metaphorical working-through of contemporary anxieties: feminism, shifts in the workplace, and a crisis of trust in public leadership (Ryan & Kellner, 1988: 101). From there, shark films keep circling the same reef.
The shark is more than a toothy penis; it’s also the spectre of failed paternal leadership. Posters lean heavily on sexual imagery, sure – the open mouth under the naked female swimmer, the sleek body, the threat of penetration. But ideologically, the shark is just as much about the terror of a world without a competent father figure. If Dad doesn’t step up, the creature – chaos, libido, class resentment, women’s autonomy, pick your poison – will eat everyone alive (Ryan & Kellner, 1988: 105).
That’s what turns these films into ideological weapons. Jaws and its crisis-film cousins are fascinating precisely because they depict patriarchy on the defensive. A father who finds himself forced to justify his authority can no longer claim it as natural or self-evident (Ryan & Kellner, 1988: 112). The shark, meanwhile, is an authority with no responsibility – an unowned catastrophe.
Across the subgenre, the recurring pattern is this: anyone who dares sail into freedom gets bitten. Best case scenario, they survive as amputees – physically or symbolically. The message hammered into the viewer’s unconscious is simple: hybridity is punished. Every liminal form – half machine, half human; half child, half adult; half free, half domesticated – must either be fully integrated into the existing order or destroyed.
Even when a character like Nancy survives, the system reinscribes her victory: she returns, chastened, to the paternal shore. The shark is dead, but so is the possibility of a genuinely different order. Dawn breaks, the shift ends; the steel in the worker’s hands stays cold. The promise of “frontiers as far as space” shrinks back down to a fenced-off beach with a lifeguard chair.
References
Abisel, N. (1995). Popüler sinema ve türler. İstanbul: Alan Yayıncılık.
Adams, C. J. (1990). The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum.
Ryan, M., & Kellner, D. (1988). Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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