Roger Kastel‘s Jaws poster, an exquisite representation of the greatest horror movie ever made, has been imitated as much as, if not more than, Spielberg’s legendary film. It’s impossible to imagine the one without the other. Combine them, and Jaws becomes much more than a giant, man-eating great white shark.
Jaws is the primordial terror of predators lurking beneath the water, circling in the jungle brush, descending unseen from the sky. Jaws is unchecked, insatiable animal aggression: nature stripped of evolutionary checks and balances. Jaws is beyond nature, the supernatural, the devil, the possessed (“he’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes“). Jaws is the male sex drive, a giant dick with teeth. Jaws is Freud’s Id, the iceberg representing the sublimated Unconscious. Jaws is humanity stripped of the manufactured veneer of civilization.
The message of Jaws is that we’re all stuck in the same shabby boat, soon to be dead in the water, trying to fend off the monster that’s trying to break in and tear us to pieces.
The catch is: we’re also the goddamn monster.
2 Warps to Neptune 