If you look up the entry for Jaws on either the IMDB site or Wikipedia, you'll find the film is classified as a thriller, but in a lot of movie listings it's often labeled as a horror film. It was selected alongside movies like The Exorcist, Dracula and Psycho for the 82nd Academy Awards tribute to horror films, and when CNBC asked its online readers 'Is Jaws really a horror film?' 62% of them said yes. Websites like Class Horror.Com carry reviews of it alongside more obvious horror movies populated with zombies, vampires and demons.
In some respects, the shark in Jaws can be seen as another in a long line of Universal Monsters, a lineage that dates back to the studio's early silent films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney. The Golden Age of Hollywood horror stretched over the 1930s and 1940s when Lugosi, Karloff and Lon Chaney Jnr stalked the screen as Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, and the Wolfman respectively. Like Jaws, these creature features were subject to increasingly silly sequels (The Curse of ..., The Son of ...., Abbott and Costello Meet ...) that were made with none of the panache of the originals.
By the Fifties audiences wanted something more relevant to their lives than the traditional horror movie tropes of graveyards and haunted houses. The monsters of that decade were the products of natural rather than supernatural forces: botched atomic experiments that spawned giant insects, alien visitors from outer space and newly discovered species brought back to civilization from some remote corner of the world.
Of all the Universal Monsters, Jaws owes the biggest debt to The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). The scene where Julie Adams rashly goes for a dip in a white bathing suit and is stalked from beneath by the Gill-Man has underwater POV shots that anticipate the opening of Spielberg's film. There are also visual parallels to scenes on the Orca when the tramp steamer Rita is attacked and the creature's presence beneath the surface is indicated by the movement of the ropes in which he has become entangled. There are even some low-angle camera flourishes tracking along the steamer's gunwale that could come straight out of Spielberg's directorial bag of tricks.
What differs the monster in Jaws from the Gill-Man (or, indeed, the Frankenstein monster or the Wolfman) is the lack of any sense of pathos and identification. Even King Kong managed to evoke the audience's sympathies when he fell from the top of the Empire State Building.
The shark is closer to monsters like the huge spider from Tarantula or the giant ants from Them! - an elemental force of nature ("What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine."). Audiences tend to empathise with creatures that are at least recognisably human and are capable of showing some kind of emotion. In The Bride of Frankenstein we feel the creature's pain when he is persecuted by the pitchfork-wielding villagers. At the end of An American Werewolf in London there is a glimmer of understanding in the monster's yellow eyes as it recognises Jenny Agutter before being gunned down in a London back alley. Even Godzilla managed to gain a huge Japanese fan base even though he had trampled much of Tokyo underfoot. But at no point in Jaws are we ever rooting for the shark.
