Jaws (1988)

I first saw Jaws when I was about eleven, maybe twelve. It was late, a school night, and I couldn’t sleep. I got out of bed, in the bedroom I shared with Toby and Nemone, in the cramped flat above the antique shop, and wandered into the front room, where my father was watching TV.

He didn’t send me back to bed. He didn’t say, “This might be too scary for you.” He just gestured vaguely at the sofa and said, “You can sit with me if you want.” So I did. It felt like a treat — like being let into the adult world.

The film was halfway through. Night at sea. Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss. They were poking around an abandoned fishing boat, their torch beams slicing through the fog. Then the underwater camera angle, the hull breached — and the bloated, half-eaten head of a fisherman lurching into view. White eyes. Dead meat.

I got up and went back to bed. I said I couldn’t watch anymore. When I closed my eyes, my mind repeated that scene over and over.

What I only realised much later — decades later, maybe — is that one of the central subplots of Jaws is about a father and his son. There’s a quiet scene, early on, where the son mirrors his father’s gestures at the dinner table. His posture, his hand movements. It’s tender. It’s small. But it’s unmistakably love.

That night, I wasn’t part of that subplot.

Instead of being protected from horror, I was accidentally ushered into it. My father offered access, not shelter. He meant no harm. But the absence of intention doesn’t undo the impact.

I think about that now, as a father myself. I think about the difference between being there and being attuned. About how much I wanted to be seen, and how little I asked to be. About how sometimes what scars us isn’t cruelty or violence or abandonment — it’s the simple misalignment of needs. One child, searching for comfort. One parent, lost in the plot.

We sat together in the dark that night. But we were not in the same film.

Jaws wasn’t the only one. There was Deliverance — a backwoods nightmare of male violence and primal dread — and The Long Weekend, an eerie Australian eco-horror about guilt, decay, and the land taking revenge. All watched too young, too late, with no warning. Just me and my dad, the room dark, the volume up, no buffering presence to say, “Maybe not this one.”

It was after Mum had left. That alone explains a lot.

She would never have allowed it. Not because she was prudish or controlling, but because she had a radar for emotional damage. She would have known what it meant to show a child those particular stories at that particular age.

But Dad didn’t operate like that. His parenting style was something between absent-minded host and laissez-faire libertarian. He treated me like a little adult — which sounds noble until you realise what adults get exposed to. What they absorb without a shield.

He didn’t explain the films. He didn’t sit me down and say, “This is a story, it’s not real.” He didn’t ask if I was frightened. Or if I understood.

He just watched. And I sat beside him pretending I was fine. It was closeness of a kind — a quiet collusion. But not the kind that makes a child feel safe. The kind that makes them feel vaguely haunted, like they’ve seen things no one’s going to help them make sense of.

What a child sees — and when — becomes part of their emotional vocabulary. I’ve spent years trying to unlearn mine. Or at least, translate it.

Because here’s the truth: it’s not the monster under the bed. It’s the moment you turn to your parent, expecting them to say “Don’t look,” and instead they hand you the binoculars.