"I don't know. What can we do? Christ, I'd rather have a hurricane. Or even an earthquake. At least after they happen, they're over and done with. You can look around and see what's been done and what has to be done. They're events, something you can handle. They have beginnings and ends. This is crazy. It's as if there was a maniac running around loose, killing people whenever he felt like it. You know who he is, but you can't catch him and you can't stop him. And what makes it worse, you don't know why he's doing it."
In his seminal book on Jaws (the movie) Nigel Andrews quotes this passage from Peter Benchley's novel (page 192 of my Fawcett paperback edition) and points out how it references two Hollywood trends that neatly bookend the Spielberg blockbuster. Before Jaws the disaster movie was all the rage, a trend that was kicked off by Airport (1970), reached a peak with the Academy Award winning The Towering Inferno (1974) and fizzled out with the appropriately named When Time Ran Out...(1980). These were stories of group jeopardy with soap opera scripts. They were peopled with Hollywood A-list casts, who were content to chew whatever scenery remained standing after some cataclysmic event forced them to re-evaluate their lives. Cinemagoers flocked to watch the stars die grisly and painful deaths and to be amazed by pre-CGI effects that offered the kind of spectacle TV could not provide. The films were directed by workmanlike film-makers (Ronald Neame, Mark Robson, Irwin Allen, Jack Smight). Dialogue scenes played like television, and for the big spectacular stunts the camera was invariably locked off. Today the films have a certain nostalgic charm for those who can remember seeing them on their original release, but mostly the wooden acting and polystyrene sets now seem laughable - just as the Fifties Biblical epics looked tired and hackneyed to a Seventies audience.
Universal was responsible for Airport and its subsequent sequels as well as Earthquake (1974), which I think is probably the best of Seventies disaster movies. It seems that the studio was positioning Jaws as its next big disaster film. Early posters for the movie included a sidebar with head shots of the main actors and a single tag line for each character, identifying them through their role. This was the default marketing approach for big cast productions like The Towering Inferno. The posters were trying to tell us that we would really come to care about these people when in fact all the audience wanted was to see them drown, or be consumed by flames, or crushed by a falling slab of concrete. Of course, Jaws broke the mold in more ways than one; if it was a disaster movie, then it was the first one where you really did care about the characters.
The fact that Charlton Heston was seriously considered for the role of Chief Brody also says something about the studio's mindset pre-production. Heston had become associated with the genre even though he had starred in only two major disaster films by 1974. It's difficult to imagine him as Brody - except maybe in the final scene when he's looking into the jaws down the barrel of a rifle.
Three years after the release of Jaws when Irwin Allen's The Swarm was hammering one of the final nails into the disaster movie cycle's coffin, a low-budget horror film re-invented and re-invigorated another kind of cataclysm: the one-man disaster that was the faceless serial killer. The movie was Halloween. Michael Myers, who - just like the shark in Jaws - had his own signature music, stuck randomly and without warning. There are interesting structural parallels between Jaws and Halloween. Both films open with a tour-de-force killing. Both films have a trio of protagonists (the crew of the Orca and the three babysitters). Both films show characters experiencing feelings of doubt and self-denial (don't close the beaches - there is no bogeyman). Both films have show-stopping monologues (Quint's Indianapolis speech; Loomis's condensed case history of Michael Myers). Both films have final confrontations that involve improvised defence based on the materials to hand (the oxygen tank and the coat hanger as weapons). Of course, the big difference is that Jaws has a resolution whereas Halloween - like so many of John Carpenter's great endings - leaves the audience staring into the abyss. Maybe Dr Loomis should have rammed a tank of compressed air down Michael Myers's throat before he emptied his revolver into him.
