Jaws

Iconic and terrifying.

Made in the 70's, that theme tune evokes everything. I don't need to see a shark, just a bit of murky water and the theme tune and I am high tailing to dry land!

The background story also gives a beautiful insight into the human mind.

Steven Spielberg's first big movie. He wanted a movie with a giant scary shark. So he got the best in the business to build 3 gigantic puppets. They were built with hydraulics, with big gnashing teeth. Super scary.

Unfortunately when they took the puppet sharks to the Atlantic Ocean to film, all 3 sharks failed in multiple ways on multiple occasion. Salt water and hydraulics are not an easy combination. The catch cry from the crew became "sharks broke again".

Costs spiralled and timelines were repeatedly stretched. Spielberg quickly found a huge amount of pressure and an uneasy sense that he may never be hired for a movie again.

Spielberg's genius was to pivot. He showed a remarkable ability to flex with circumstance. Instead of the sharks being front stage he moved to the Hitchcock technique of suspense.

Instead of seeing long sequences of a giant shark with gnashing teeth, we were given hints of something moving in the seaweed, invited to be the eyes looking up from the depths at dangling legs, we were given that theme tune.

The move to stirring our suspense but not letting us see what it was we were fearing, meant the fear amplified and intensified through out the movie, becoming scarier and scarier.

This technique of suspense building and not seeing the feared object, is almost exactly what drives many trauma reactions, and anxieties. We never see the feared event as we use so many behaviours to get away from it before it gets here. As such we continue to believe something terrible will happen to us and it is only because we employ techniques such as avoidance that we are able to survive.

Therapy on the other hand invites us to slowly and carefully examine the shadows of our past and present, so we can carefully judge what is actually dangerous and what is actually just a puppet.