By Maria Mitchell
Jaws (1975). Composer: John Williams.
The production of this movie was plagued by one nearly insurmountable obstacle: The shark didn’t work most of the time. It’s funny to think how irritating the shark must have been to the crew behind the scenes. Horror at sea held H.P. Lovecraft’s fervent attention and he wrote luridly about sea monsters, including the famous Cthulhu. Jaws is a horrid peer to Cthulhu when it comes to carnage at sea. A large part of what made Jaws an immortal horror icon was the music John Williams wrote for the shark’s rampage in the film.
“The Main Titles”/”The First Victim” – The intro is quiet. While there is suspense, the suspense is more focused in the following cue.
“The Empty Raft” – One cello gets things moving. It is quickly joined by the whole string section of the orchestra. Harsh spikes of sound make this cue very violent.
“The Pier Incident” – The pizzicato flecks are a nice touch in this cue.
“The Shark Cage Fugue” – The music is moderately fast in the beginning, but this cue tapers off to a smooth musical strain.
“Shark Attack” – The solid eight count of shrieking piccolos 30 seconds into this cue is the epitome of music that slices sound with fervent fear. This is a great track that is brief and brutal.
“Ben Gardner’s Boat” – This is a slight piece of music. Slight in the sense that it is very quiet and slow, and there are only tiny shades of tremolo strings trembling beside the French horns, until three minutes into the cue, when there’s a spike in the music.
“Montage” – This had an almost humourous intro that sounded very classical with cheerful horns and gentle harp glissandos. Strange cue for a horror movie, but some gentle beauty makes the horror more palatable.
“Father and Son” begins equally benignly and trails off into the horn theme that evokes the shark’s lurking presence.
“Into the Estuary” – A fine showcase of the frenzied strings that stab as mercilessly as the shark’s teeth. The horn theme is at its strongest when set off against the fast strings. At 1:39, a violin is cued that sounds sad and mournful. According to the anthology, Ghosts, edited by Marvin and Saralee Kaye, there’s an entire subgenre of weird ghost stories dealing with violins. The editors made this statement in their introduction to the story, “The Ensouled Violin” by Madame Blavatsky. When violins sound as ghostly as this one, I can understand the fascination with violins as an instrument that evokes ghostly pathos in literature.
“Out to Sea” – Sparse timpani gives this cue its suspense and a trilling oboe gives it a little injection of pathos.
“Man Against Beast” showcases a startling intro and some unexpected soft points in the music. When the music is soft, it serves as an intro for the deep strings that are the shark’s kinetic signature. This cue uses a lot of percussion. The shift to a major key at 3:50 makes the cue sound bright and heroic.
“Quint’s Tale” is a cue that dramatises the difference between suspense and spookiness. Spookiness is a feeling of apprehension that is more diffuse than suspense. Suspense is a feeling that is experienced by prey in a horror film when they know they’re being pursued. Spookiness is a feeling when much of the worst is either over or still to come, and no one knows exactly what to expect, so they enter a resignation of not really wanting to know.
“Brody Panics” – This cue was very quiet.
“Barrel off the Starboard” – This is a brief cue.
“The Great Shark Chase” – This cue oscillates between sounding horrific and heroic. Hero-horror music is strange and very schizophrenic in sound. The ringing, happy whistles that break in at 1:50 are a bit annoying, but still keep well with the sudden, strange bursts of musical phrases that rattle off in this pivotal piece.
“Three Barrels Under” – Slow, dark music can deaden suspense, but this cue is not dead weight. Some unusual, dream-like percussion at 1:15 creates confusion in the piece. I don’t know what instrument this is, but I would guess a marimba.
“Between Attacks” – It’s really interesting how many emotions the French horns in this soundtrack can mirror while being confined in the space of just a few bars. The horns here don’t sound sad, happy, triumphant, suspenseful, or defeated. They sound strange, and strange emotions are the hardest to define with adjectives, so I’m not going to try.
“The Shark Approaches” – My favourite part is the crazy harp glissandos that make their entrance at 1:48. They overpowered everything else.
“Blown to Bits” – What is really cool about this cue is that it doesn’t sound, at first, as if the shark is giving up by a long shot.
The “End Titles” are briefer than the main titles. This is good for a horror movie. Once the suspense is over, there’s no reason to keep dragging out the horror themes. Especially in a film, like Jaws, where the inhuman antagonist is obliterated. Once he’s gone, he’s gone, and he doesn’t need a swan song cued in his memory.
Overall, this is a great horror soundtrack and should be played at beach parties this summer.
The soundtrack of Jaws is available at Amazon.com.