It’s easy to take a 50-year-old film for granted, especially before streaming took over our t.v. viewing culture. For a long time, Jaws was running interminably any and everywhere on cable networks, same as the National Treasure and Pirates of the Caribbean movies are today, played ad nauseum alongside The Day After Tomorrow and Armageddon. The groundbreaking (er, water breaking) Jaws from 1975 is being celebrated hard this year with a new retrospective documentary in honor of the horror classic’s five decades of supremacy. Yes, folks, skip the futile debate as to whether the original Jaws is a horror movie or not. It is. It simply is. For taking place on a beach called Amity Island alone, I’m just sayin’.

It’s slicker and more methodic than your typical horror fare, but no matter how many times you may have seen Jaws, there’s no denying the primal urgency when Stephen Spielberg locks in and makes us all piss ourselves with the threat of a great white shark tearing us to shreds on a beach getaway. Aided by John Williams’ halcyon score and that iconic opening piano and string death march (you’re bom-bomming it in your head right now, I can tell), no movie sent a palpable fear factor into an entire nation back in 1975 better than this one. Just the eminent artwork of our razor-toothed boy (on the set, a robot shark Spielberg and company loving called “Bruce”) is one of the most horrific concepts in cinematic history. I can only imagine Jaws author Peter Benchley’s savage delight to see his vision come to such visceral life.

I was five when my folks took me to see Jaws at Edmondson Drive-In on the outskirts of Baltimore City. I recall being awake for the opening sequence, wide-eyed, at Chrissie Watkins’ (Susan Backlinie) nighttime skinny-dip run afoul and shutting my eyes in fear of it. That shuddery reaction put me to sleep briefly, of all things, and when I woke next, it was the scene of the gored victim being rolled on the gurney. Talk about a memorable intro to a lifetime of horror addiction!

To this day, I marvel at Stephen Spielberg’s shrewd and attentive capture of the fishing village as much as I do the slow, painful sinking of Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw with the omnipresent threat of ol’ Brucie gnawing them into chum. No spoiler threats as we know Shaw’s grizzled sea captain Quint not only goes down with the ship but down the shark’s gullet, and his was one of the few onscreen deaths you feel genuine loss and remorse. More impactful after broing down scenes before with a nerd boy marine biologist and the overwrought, do-gooder town sheriff to the sloshed rendition of “Show Me the Way Home.” It’s a song my mom is fond of singing with friends over wine and generations later, it’s still a freaking hoot. Jaws fans get it. Nobody else does.

You gotta love it when a mechanical monster shark readily took down a mechanical monster ape, the ill-fated 1976 edition of King Kong, in special engagement re-releases. Those hapless sequels? Let’s not go there, even if Jaws 2 has a few tense moments and yeah, I was guilty of collecting that film’s trading cards back in the day. Ten years ago, I was fortunate to catch a 40th anniversary re-release of Jaws at a local Cinemark on its biggest screen and believe me, the wide-encompassing engagement through adult eyes made it a bigger, more awesome spectacle. Same as getting to see an anniversary reissue of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining from 1982 in the same movie house. An entirely new experience in both cases. You can get your chance to see Jaws on the big screen this year for its 50th birthday. No doubt this will be a 4th of July where the theaters possibly run wilder than the fireworks outdoors.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.