The image of the predatory shark has been preying on human consciousness since ... not very long, actually. Although the creatures themselves, in one form or another, have been around for 400 million years, confirmed scary shark sightings before the 20th century are relatively thin on the ground, so to speak.
It’s believed that some historic descriptions of sea monsters devouring people refer to sharks and the earliest identifiable picture of one is from around 700BC. But in these early accounts, they are described more as a fact of life than as a particular source of terror or danger.
An exception, according to Canadian Hakai Magazine, was, “Roman philosopher and naturalist Pliny the Elder [who] illustrated shark abundance when describing the swarms of dogfish that plagued sponge divers in Natural History.
“Divers have fierce encounters with sharks, which make for their groin, heels and all the pale parts of their body. The only safe course is to turn on the sharks and frighten them,” Pliny wrote.
It’s not too far removed from the bop-them-on-the-nose advice still dispensed today.
People continued to be confused about what sharks were or weren’t, and did or didn’t do, for centuries. According to the Smithsonian magazine: “Also in the Middle Ages, fossilised shark teeth were identified as petrified dragon tongues, called glossopetrae. If ground into powder and consumed, these were said to be an antidote for a variety of poisons.” Obviously, an easy mistake to make.
The word “shark” itself did not become widely used in English until the 16th century and its origins have been linked to an ancient Mayan word which may or may not have referred to sharks.
If it’s monstrous sea creatures in general you want, Moby Dick’s biographer Herman Melville is traditionally the go-to guy as he didn’t just write about whales. But his poem about sharks presents them as benevolent pals of pilot fish, describing their paradoxical symbiotic relationship in his poem The Maldive Shark:
“From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!”
The shark as terrifying beach predator enters the scene a little over 100 years ago. The Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 off the coast of New Jersey inspired the public imagination about the creatures in a way with which we are now familiar. Over 12 days that year, four beachgoers were killed and one injured in attacks in that locale.
There was a suggestion that giant sea turtles were to blame. Nice try, shark apologists. But the attacks came to an end after a great white was caught and killed. The horrific event was widely reported and the subject of a graphic novel, a non-fiction account and the not-at-all-hysterically-titled novel Silent Came the Monster. Confusingly, a 2012 TV movie Jersey Shore Shark Attack had nothing to do with the tragic 1916 events but was based on the tragic reality TV show Jersey Shore.
But it was the 1975 blockbuster movie Jaws, based on Peter Benchley’s novel, that did for sharks what Hamlet did for Danish princes.
Jaws itself had something of an appetiser six years before its release in a little-known film by cult auteur Sam Fuller, who disowned Shark! after a dispute with producers over the final cut. Admittedly, an exclamation mark in the title is seldom an indicator of quality but the movie had a respectable writer, director and performers, including Burt Reynolds and Barry Sullivan.
Jaws was followed by numerous sequels and imitators. But little was added to the foundation myth until 2013′s Sharknado – the first of six movies in the series – reinvented the genre by positing sharks caught up in tornadoes and descending from the sky onto their victims. Netflix has announced a movie in which our fishy hero turns up in Paris and wreaks some havoc in the centre of the city during the Olympics.
And, perhaps most excitingly, Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss has finally agreed to do another shark movie, Into the Deep, due for release this year. Fans will await this with bated breath, if not baited hooks.
It’s hard to say whether sharks feature so much in popular culture because they are scary, or that we are scared of them because they feature so much in popular culture. Ironically, as the stories have got bigger and more numerous, shark populations have been in decline.
But there is no doubt that fear of sharks, justified or not, keeps people out of the water and the creatures continue to play a sometimes surprising part in popular culture, as evidenced by the 2016 novelty hit Baby Shark – but that’s a different kind of horror for another day.
