The horror genre is known to have some of film’s most legendary scores. It’s music, after all, that helps to manipulate our emotions when we watch a movie, and what better way to manipulate one’s emotions than through fear? Michael Myers is inseparable from the suspense-building beats composed byJohn CarpenterforHalloween. You can’t watch aFriday the 13thmovie without doing the “Ki ki ki ma ma ma” sound that composerHarry Manfredinicreated. And then there’s the greatest film composer of them all,John Williams. His efforts single-handedly saved a youngSteven Spielbergin 1975 withJaws. The mechanical shark for the film, jokingly named Bruce, famously kept breaking down, meaning that the score had to be depended on even more to do what the visuals couldn’t. To say that Williams' score worked is an understatement. The music Williams created outshines its great white monster. It’s not the shark we’re scared of. It’s that music leading the way that haunts us almost five decades later.
John Williams is the composer of so many of our cinematic memories. He’s the man behind the music for many of Spielberg’s best films, fromE.T., to theIndiana Jonesfranchise, andJurassic Park. He’s also the guy that gave us the unforgettable notes toStar Wars,Home Alone, andHarry Potter. Those films, however, had their heroes and villains front and center. You sawHarrison Fordas Indiana Jones. You saw the T-Rex stomp through the park. You saw Darth Vader and Kevin McCallister. Williams' efforts enhanced those characters and films. InJaws, though, the music is a character in its own right. The score is the monster.
It’s common knowledge that Bruce the shark was a hunk of junk. Spielberg has spoken about his disdain for the contraption many times over the decades,including telling talk show hostDick Cavettin 1981that:
“The first mistake of the shark was they made a big mistake and they built it for fresh water. They all knew we were going to the Atlantic Ocean but for some reason they built it for fresh water… Electrolysis is a major problem when you get salt into all the machinery and all the electrical system… We had the shark on a huge 90-foot platform 30 feet under the water, and at the press of a hydraulic button and pulling a lever back, supposedly the shark comes shooting out of the water headfirst… The shark came up tail first and it was like a 25-foot moon… It was a total disaster. We never fixed the shark but in the cutting room I was able to use so little of it and imply so much more.”
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The shark was such a disasterthat it’s only shown on screen for just four minutes ofJaws' 130-minute runtime, and almost all of that is in the ending. ImagineJurassic Parkwithout showing the dinosaurs or imagineE.T.without, well, E.T. They would have never become the classic films they are now without giving us the central characters audiences wanted.Jawsgot away with it though. Firstly, because of the use of the dorsal fin. We can’t see the shark, but we can see that fin cutting through the water like a blade ready to cut through its victims. It’s frightening. The monster’s absence works because it’s a monster meant to be hidden beneath the waters. That fear of the unseen when we’re swimming, our legs dangling in the darkness, served up for any horrible thing that might want to take a nibble on us, makes the shark’s absence okay. It also makes the ending, when Bruce has his big, extended moment, that much more effective.
John Williams' Score for ‘Jaws’ Became the Monster
Implication by dorsal fin and underwater POV shots weren’t enough to keep the shark scary though. It needed more. That’s where John Williams' score enters. It is the source of the true horror, suspense building through sound, our fear and heartbeats rising at what we couldn’t see, our imaginations running wild. A thrilling score usually accompanies a movie monster. Michael Myers is so much scarier with the pounding piano theme song leading the way, but he’s still scary without it. Steven Spielberg had no choice but to make the music the voice of the monster.
Recently,Spielberg and Williams sat down withStephen ColbertonThe Late Show With Stephen Colbertto talk about how music becomes an actor in their films. Williams talked about coming up with the music forJaws:
“I was thinking, what could be the simplest possible thing? It has to be low because the shark is very deep. It has to be something that when it’s approaching you, it’s completely unstoppable. There isn’t a force on Earth that’s going to stop a shark in his attack on you. And I thought to myself, it’s mindless, but someone who knows world will say that the shark is a very intelligent creature and it’s not at all mindless. But another big issue with us was, if you play this very softly and slowly, you advertise or you advance the thoughts that the shark is there just by hearing the music. There’s no shark nearby, but if it speeds up and comes closer to you and gets louder and louder, the same two notes, you’ve got an actor that you can’t see and a threat that by some primordial instinct you are threatened by, as we should be, by a great predator.”
Spielberg added:
“And the shark wasn’t working anyway, so I didn’t have a shark. The shark was always nearby, it was in the shark shed getting fixed, and so all I could do was go off and figure out, I’ve got to make my movie, now without a shark. So I did. I shot a lot of scenes where there was supposed to be a shark. In the script there was a shark, but there was no shark in the scene. So I just started making stuff up, like a pier getting pulled out by the shark, and you don’t see it, and the pier turns around, so the pier becomes the shark. The shark was scheduled, but the shark didn’t meet its call time because it was getting fixed all the time. But Johnny sort of saved the movie because he became the shark and the music substituted for the absent shark, which made it a hell of a lot scarier and more suspenseful than had I had the shark working perfectly.”
The ‘Jaws’ Theme Made Audiences Fear Something They Couldn’t See
Two, sometimes three simple notes, first slow, then faster and faster, as the shark gets closer and closer, savedJaws. The music becomes the monster straight from the beginning,when poor Chrissie leaves her beach party to go skinny-dipping in the ocean at night. We get a POV shot from underneath her in the water, then as the shot closes in on her, the music starts up. Immediately we know this is the shark and it’s getting closer. We now have that frame of reference for any other time in the movie. If a person is in the water and the music begins with that slow, two-note march, we know the shark is there. In scenes like where Chrissie is attacked, you see nothing of the shark, not even a dorsal fin, but that music is so terrifying that you would almost swear you saw it, because the score puts the shark in your mind.
It’s even more intense in a later scene when young Alex Kinter is on his yellow raft just feet off the shore. Now it’s during the day, and we’re dealing with a child, one that’s so close to shore, but even he isn’t safe as another shot takes us underneath him in the water, with that swelling music pulling us up to his doom. We again don’t see the shark, outside of quick faraway movement of fins. We barely even see Alex die, but we’re scared out of our minds because of that bone-chilling score.
TheJawstheme is now synonymous with fear and impending doom closing in. How often have you hummed the theme absentmindedly as you closed in on a friend to scare them as a joke? Even if it’s safe, it never fails to produce some anxiety anyway. The music is tension. The music is intensity. The music is a monster. AndJawswouldn’t be one of the greatest movies ever made without it.
