The sight of a pointed dorsal fin peeking out above the water immediately evokes our
fight or flight response, but should sharks really cause humans so much anxiety? Or did we
sensationalize and demonize a fish into a monster? Not to mention those people who have a general
phobia of the ocean, thalassophobia. The inability to see what is below,
a fear of drowning, of darkness, of the unknown — these fears helped create a lot
of sea monsters, both real and imagined. Throw in a carnivorous fish and it's easy
to make a real animal a monster—and a lot of people have capitalized on that with the shark.
Yet despite the rarity of shark attacks on humans, these animals have an unwarranted
reputation as blood-thirsty maneaters. And you can largely thank horror movies for the bad PR.
So if sharks are not naturally aggressive towards humans, why did we turn a fish that
kills fewer people a year than falling coconuts and bee stings into such an iconic killer?
The idea of the shark as a monster is certainly linked to their powerful jaws,
muscular bodies, and celebrated olfactory abilities—not to mention those teeth.
I find a lot of sharks cute, but even I don’t want to see those pearly whites up close.
They are powerful creatures that remind humans we are not the animals at the top of the food chain.
Perhaps fear of sharks is simply a lingering biological response to the
possibility of being eaten by these capable hunters.
Still, sharks don’t hunt and eat humans, unlike some lions and other big cats, bears, or hell,
even pythons. Yet they frequently terrorize us on the big screen and in newspapers alike.
There are a few shark-type monsters in mythology and folklore, like the Japanese yokai Isonade,
the Classical Greek monster Scylla with its many heads and three rows of shark-like teeth,
or the primordial sea monster Cipactli from Mesoamerican mythology, but there are
far more shark deities — although some like the Hawaiian Nanaue could fall into either category.
The Polynesian peoples both feared and revered sharks. In some stories,
there are monstrous sharks that eat people, but there are also stories of sharks possessed by
ancestral spirits rescuing humans. According to other legends, some chiefs kept pet sharks who
recognized members of the family. In Africa along the west coast,
some cultures included shark meat as part of their diet, while others saw them as sacred.
Either way, they learned how to live alongside the shark since respect was paramount.
We start to see sharks in a more predominantly negative light from
European sources around the 16th century. In 1553 Spanish historian Francisco López
de Gómara recounted Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico.
which included the conqueror's interaction with sharks,
describing them as “insatiable” and capable of swallowing anything.
While further describing sharks, it is written that they will “attack a cow or horse grazing or
drinking at the river’s edge and will eat a man.” Slave-trade sailors heard of the xoc from the Maya
of the Caribbean and turned the word to ‘sharke’ around the 16th century.
Written historical records from slave ships mention sharks, along with other fish, swimming
alongside the boats, eager to eat whatever was thrown overboard—from excrement to people.
In the 18th century, abolitionists used violent imagery of sharks eating Africans
thrown overboard from slave ships to further emphasize the horrors of the slave trade.
Artists immortalized these haunting images. More visual depictions of shark encounters
appeared after a cabin boy named Brook Watson fell overboard and had his leg bitten off by a shark in
Havana, Cuba. The incident became the inspiration for a famous painting: Watson and the Shark.
Then in the mid-19th century, human-shark encounters became
a more popular fixture on the global news circuit when the Birkenhead Steamer sank.
Newspapers reported that hundreds of sharks occupying the surrounding reefs laid “devastation”
to the survivors. According to survivor Benjamin Turner, who was a child at the time of the wreck,
“A shark would come up, seize them by the leg, and drag them down.” These vivid testimonies, and the
accompanying images, led to one of the first media representations of a so-called “feeding frenzy.”
Still, sharks were considered relatively harmless until the 20th century.
A series of human-shark encounters in New Jersey in 1916 led to major
newspapers labeling the animals as so-called “man-eating monsters,” causing a wave of panic.
Around the same time on the other side of the world in Australia,
surfing was gaining popularity. As more humans entered into shark habitats, the
news began to pay attention to fatal encounters. Public and political outcry led to the “meshing”
of metropolitan beaches; nets were installed along the coastline to catch sharks that got too close.
In 1958, The Shark Attack File was founded to document global shark encounters.
Overwhelmingly, however, sharks were still at the periphery of consciousness for most. Until Jaws.
The famous film is based on a 1974 novel of the same name,
inspired in part by those 1916 New Jersey events. When the film adaptation hit theaters in 1975
it was accompanied by massive fanfare. Jaws defined the summer blockbuster.
It helped launch Steven Spielberg’s career, gave us one of the most iconic movie scores
of all time, and made a whole lot of people terrified to go into the water.
We can partially thank Universal Studios' marketing team for that. Inspiring fear seemed to be their driving strategy.
"It is as if God created the devil . . ."
". . . and gave him . . . Jaws."
Teasers of the film ran on TV (to the tune of $700,000 dollars) and merchandise with the iconic
film poster was created. The fact that people didn’t have much knowledge about sharks made it
easy for the media to exploit fear of the unknown. That fear taps into not just being prey but how
you might become prey— in other words, the jaws of Jaws is what really freaks us out.
Jaws also plays on fears (and guilt) of war, comments on mass hysteria, and criticizes the
reckless scientist. Comparisons of the film’s mayor to the disgraced President Richard Nixon
indicate parallels between the shark-coverup and Watergate. And then there’s the Freudian
reading of a giant male predator engaging in a little voyeurism before attacking a naked woman,
but there’s also the feminist reading that sees the shark as a metaphor of the monstrous feminine
and/or the folkloric myth of vagina dentata. Regardless of how you interpret the film,
it's indisputable that the Great White Shark at its center is meant to be the monster.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
A lot went wrong during the filming of Jaws, including rough ocean waters, bad weather,
and the mechanical shark’s frequent malfunctions. Nicknamed Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer,
the animatronic shark used in the film was notoriously finicky. The exposure to saltwater
in Martha’s Vineyard led to the mechanic’s erosion—and even greater unpredictability.
But these turned out to be what Bob Ross might call “happy little accidents.” The inability
to show the metal puppet on screen contributed to its mysterious menace; we don’t see the full
shark until more than halfway through the movie. In some ways, Jaws feels like an extension of
the kaiju and “big bug” film genres, with a little more horror and action thrown in
alongside Hitchcockian thriller for good measure. It’s man vs. nature with a slasher flick twist.
Post Jaws, sharks were handed the dubious title of “monsters of the deep.” It probably didn’t
help that Jaws author Peter Benchley knew very little about sharks. And most people took the
film’s portrayal of a fictional shark monster as the normal behavior of real Great White Sharks.
Immediately after the film’s release, beachgoers headed inland,
damaging coastal town economies. Shark fishing competitions became a thing. Despite the panic,
and the damage to sharks the movie caused, it also inspired future scientists and the public to learn
more about sharks in general. Benchley by the way? He became a vocal shark conservationist.
Jaws solidified and popularized the perspective of sharks as monsters
and ushered in the “sharksploitation” genre. As digital special effects emerged in the 1990s,
monster shark films became even more popular…we can’t seem to get enough.
As special effects improved, films began to make the shark
even scarier—by making them bigger. Much bigger. Enter the megalodon. The idea of the prehistoric
fish surviving extinction was introduced in the Jaws book, when Hooper, an oceanographer,
speculates that the titular massive white shark is likely a smaller version of a creature lurking
far deeper down in the ocean. He mentions megalodons and questions if they are extinct.
In 1997, another author would pick up on that thread and expand it—literally.
Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten follows a scientist diving the Mariana Trench on behalf of the US Navy
who sees a megalodon and spends the rest of his Captain Ahab-esq life trying to
prove it exists. The book opens with an awesome scene of a T-Rex getting eaten by a megalodon.
Unfortunately, the Meg books’ film adaptation in 2018 didn’t include that scene.
But it did give us Jason Statham underwater fighting a fairly impressive CGI shark.
While in the past the media latched on to the sensational.
With The Meg we got the requisite monster shark attention but with a side of science.
"Mac, tracker is live!"
"Great, real him in, DJ."
The overwhelming majority of scientists insist the megalodon is indeed extinct,
for millions of years, in fact, not hiding in the modern depths of the Mariana Trench.
Plus, the movie shark version is chunkier, longer, and tolerates cold water better than the real thing.
As for its resemblance to a great white shark?
Evidence suggests megalodons were more closely related to mako sharks.
These pop culture shark monsters still have an impact on the real world.
Scholars and scientists have proven that negative portrayals of sharks in the media,
fictional or otherwise, directly correlate to how people conceptualize the real deal.
Even reputable networks like the Discovery Channel capitalize on the shark-monster phenomenon
with faux megalodon documentaries or “serial killer” shark mysteries. These fictionalized
shows rely not only on campy entertainment value but on humanity’s appetite for positioning natural
species as supernatural monsters. The fish becomes a serial killer, a spectral figure—a monster.
Many sharks today are facing the threat of extinction—primarily
because of human actions. Threats to shark populations include fishing, fin harvesting,
pollution, habitat loss, and climate change. It is estimated that 100 million sharks are killed
every year for commercial profit. As apex predators,
the removal of sharks from the food chain has a catastrophic effect on marine ecosystems.
Today, some scuba divers seek out shark encounters, looking not for monsters but for
beauties, honoring the animals by respecting them and studying them—not demonizing them.
Sharks aren’t devious, man-hunting killers. We made them monsters.