I remember being a 10-year-old kid when ‘Jaws’ came out
One movie changed countless days on the New England coast.
Illustration by Charlotte Wilder
By Jack Pickell, Boston.com Staff
It was the summer of 1975. I was 10 years old. I remember rushing to the movie theater to watch Jaws when it first came out. My parents dropped off my older sister and me at the now-shuttered Salem Theater on Essex Street, along with two of our young cousins. We were all between 8 and 12 years old, and it was the first movie I ever went to see without an adult.
For a little kid in the ‘70s, it was a new, eye-opening experience to sit and watch a pretty, blonde young woman shed her clothing on the beach during a twilight romp into the ocean.
It was also new to sit and watch that same pretty, blonde young woman scream for her life as she was pulled under the water by what had to be the biggest shark in the world. I remember being really scared — terrified, in fact — as Chrissie was killed. But there was no way I was letting my big sister or my cousins know that. I stayed silent, and continued to take in the movie.
And then it hit me again. Watching Quint struggle with the shark and get taken under was pretty much the most graphic and horrifying thing I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t just the scene’s gruesomeness. It was that the guy — who I was sitting there expecting to save the day — was suddenly dead. That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?
Jaws shook 10-year-old me, but despite the terror I felt, I actually ended up loving it — swear words and all. But it was more than a movie. It was a movie that also changed something, and it wouldn’t be until years later when I figured out what, exactly, that meant.
Our family spent summers up at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, and after Jaws, my friends and I routinely mistook a floating piece of seaweed for the dorsal fin of a Great White. We’d peer out over the water and suddenly think about the danger lurking beneath. On a lighter note, this was when I also started to dive underwater and grab my sister’s ankle when she wasn’t expecting it.
I’d never heard of Martha’s Vineyard or the fictional Amity before Jaws. The only beaches I knew were in Salem, Beverly, Manchester (before it was By-The-Sea), and Gloucester. But a lot of the beach shots in Jaws reminded me of the beaches I knew, convincing me that shark danger was as real on the North Shore as it was to our south.
Behind the scenes photos of Jaws filming on Martha’s Vineyard (article continues below):
[bdc-gallery id=”109644″]
In two hours and 15 minutes, Jaws forever changed every day spent at the beach. Sharks went from being creatures I’d read about in books to these deadly menaces that were out there, somewhere, maybe just past the waves that broke around us as we played at the ocean’s edge. They became something else to worry about, aside from the undertow.
Could another movie have the same impact on New England as Jaws did back in ’75? Maybe, but I’m not so sure.
A couple of years later, The Deep came out, and we all scrambled to see that, too. The creature in The Deep was a giant eel that lied in wait near a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean and feasted on divers searching for treasure. That movie didn’t come close to scaring me as much as Jaws did – possibly because I was two years older, and, also, a giant eel was really not something anyone at Good Harbor Beach actually worried about. Another reason is because, as I remember it, The Deep wasn’t a very good movie.
Today, local children likely become aware of sharks not from seeing a scary movie, but from news reports and viral videos that surface every summer of shark sightings off the Massachusetts coast, or beyond. For kids, seeing these images and videos of sharks taken from local fishing boats are a glimpse at nature. To them, I’d guess it’s more cool than frightening.
But what about us grown-ups? For those of us who came of age in that era, we’ll always associate shark sightings with those haunting opening measures of John Williams’ theme and actor Robert Shaw’s agonizing screams. For us, sharks are a little more dangerous, and the ocean is a bit more daunting, all because of Jaws.
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