One summer in the early 1960s, my mother walked the beach near our Sea Girt, New Jersey home. A shark came into the calm shallow of the Atlantic and chomped off the leg of a man wading right in front of her. 

Another that week. And another. Grisly accounts and sightings of man-eating “great whites” all along the central Jersey coast appeared daily in the Asbury Park Press. Lifeguards stood high on their stands and whistled us out of the surf repeatedly at any sign of a dorsal fin. The summer was terrifying. 

When Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel, Jaws, appeared on the paperback rack, my mother snatched it up, read it, and passed it on. She and everyone else at the Jersey Shore convinced themselves that Benchley, who lived in New Jersey, based the book on our summer shark attacks. 

What a book. After eyeing that famous book cover, my seven-year-old son, Joe, became interested in and eventually obsessed with sharks. Having read in Dr. Spock that I shouldn’t tell my child frightening stories, like the crucifixion of Jesus, I kept the Jaws story from him. 

The movie Jaws was released the following year. I refused to watch it, much less expose it to my eight-year-old. His sleep was already interrupted by nightmares after getting hit with a pitched baseball at Little League. 

At age nine,Joe announced that Jaws was at the neighborhood theater on Dollar Day and begged me to take him. The near-empty theater was spooky. I held both hands over my eyes for most of the show .

“You can open your eyes now,” Joe said.

I did, just as the shark was ripping apart a girl on her raft.

“Oh my god! I’m going to puke! I thought you said it was ok!”

We laughed so hard we could hardly hear the movie. Thus began those funny years when boys learn there’s a big payoff in pranking their parents.

When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981, we lived in Chicago. 

“Is it about Noah’s Ark?” I asked Joe.

“No. The Ark of the Covenant. You know, where the Ten Commandments are.”

Dragging him to Sunday school all those years had paid off.

We ran to the 1,400-seat Esquire Theater on Oak Street. The only tickets left were upfront. Right there, on the front row, the entire wall before me slithered and hissed as Harrison Ford was lowered into a hypnotic pit of 10,000 snakes. 

I shut my eyes. 

“OK to look now,” Joe whispered.

And again, I got fooled into watching the creepiest part of the movie, where Indiana Jones is staring down a hooded cobra.

Raiders is set in 1936 and follows Indiana Jones vying with Nazi Germans to recover the invaluable long-lost Ark of the Covenant. Some have interpreted it as Steven Spielberg’s creation to slam the Nazis for the Holocaust. But to me, it’s a hilarious, breathless adventure, made memorably funnier by the prank of my fourteen-year-old movie companion.

And a memorable relief from how I view Nazis today. 

Regan Burke's book, "In That Number" was a finalist for Chicago Writers Association non-fiction Book of the Year. Her brief memoirs and personal essays appear in the Christian Science Monitor, Sun Magazine, Chicago History Museum "In This Together" Project, City Creatures, Safe 'n Sound, Easter Seals Blog. Chaleur, Rise Up Review, Bird Garden's Murder of Writers and Writing Out Loud. She lives on Potawatomi land in downtown Chicago. Her main activity is reducing the weight of the here and now.

13 thoughts on “Sharks and Snakes At the Movies”

  1. Doing what I did for a living meant snorkeling and diving frequently. Passengers always enjoyed fresh lobster, speared fish and crab. I frequently encountered sharks, barracuda, and other swimming predators. Thank God, they were never too interested in me. We always towed our net full of kills about 50-feet behind us. In doing so, we hoped the predators would be attracted to the fresh kills first.

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  2. I remember the Esquire! Hilarious…Having read in Dr. Spock that I shouldn’t tell my child frightening stories, like the crucifixion of Jesus, I kept the Jaws story from him.

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  4. Sigh. My family stupidly watched Jaws at the beach on a family vacation. That was it for the ocean for me. Similarly, as a young adult, the guys in the outer banks beach house next door spent an evening shark fishing and landed four or five sharks large enough to do real damage. That vacation was dry ever after as well. Amazing how scary that movie was without CGI or AI to create the scenes. I think at this point we’ve seen it all and nothing will ever seem as scary again.

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  5. Jaws came out when we were living on Nantucket…no way we were ever going to see that… As for Snakes on a Plane..again.. .. .never! I take it..your son enjoyed the movies…

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  6. I love the part where you and Joe laughed so hard you could hardly hear the movie. And fun fact just fyi: my husband Mike is deathly afraid of sharks, but “Jaws” is one of his favorite all-time movies=he’s a big Steven Spielberg fan.

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  7. Thanks for your article. I was back in Jersey and at the movies for a short while. Your writing can transport people and bring them back. Very well done.

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