Jaws (1975)

  I think everyone loves Jaws. There would be something terribly wrong with you if you didn't. I like to watch it while eating tomato soup. I take my crackers and run them through like salted fins every time the theme music plays. Maybe that's just me.

This movie ruined my summer vacation the first time I saw it. My grandmother let me check it out of the local library when I came down for a visit. I refused to get in the pool after dark from that point forward. And we're not talking some sort of cove where you could get an influx of sea water, we're talking white-sided, in-ground, chlorinated, in the middle of Orlando, over twenty miles inland kind of pool. Did not matter. I was convinced that somehow a shark was transported into it as soon as the sun went down. Even the lights in the pool didn't assuage me. There were two, one on either side, purplish and bubble-shaped.

You know that bit in the movie where Quint is talking about the USS Indianapolis and how the sharks come up and their eyes have no pupils, they're more like a doll's eyes, flat and black, so that you don't know it's even alive until it bites you? That turned my skin cold at six-years-old and I could not look at those pool lights without thinking of that description. Fucked me up but good.

Of course, I had an extremely over-active imagination at the time especially for things of a catastrophic nature. This movie cured me of swimming about as fast as the Challenger disaster convinced me that I didn't want to be an astronaut.

As an adult, I realize that shark attacks and space shuttle explosions are extremely rare occurrences statistically and that you are more likely to be struck by lightning while winning the lottery but that's a bit of cold comfort when something brushes the back of your calf on the other side of the sandbar. There might as well be a full string section scoring your sprint to dry land.....before you realize that it was just a piece of seaweed.