The First Time I Saw Jaws, and What It Taught Me About Fathers

Photo by Alex Steyn on Unsplash

I first saw Jaws when I was about eleven, maybe twelve. It was late, a school night, and I couldn’t sleep. I crept out of the room I shared with my brother and sister in our cramped flat, and wandered into the front room, where my father was watching TV.

He didn’t send me back. He didn’t say, “This might be too scary for you.” He just gestured at the sofa and said, “You can sit with me if you want.” So I did. It felt like a treat — like being admitted 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 lurched into view. White eyes. Dead meat.

I shot upright and went back to bed. But the image followed me. Every time I closed my eyes, that head rolled back into the dark.

Much later — decades later — I realised that one of the subplots of Jaws is about a father and his son. There’s a quiet scene where the boy mirrors his father’s gestures at the dinner table, hand for hand. Tender. Small. Love rendered in silence.

That night, I wasn’t in that subplot.

Instead of being shielded from horror, I was casually ushered into it. My father didn’t mean harm, but the absence of intention doesn’t soften the impact. It’s still a kind of negligence — lazy parenting dressed up as permissiveness.

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

I think about that when people brag about how “cool” their parents were for letting them watch films beyond their years. They smirk as if early access to violence and dread was a badge of honour. But I suspect some of that laughter is hollow. A defence mechanism. The kind of laugh a child makes when they want to prove they’re not scared, even though the fear has already sunk its teeth in.

My father wasn’t rebellious or cool. He wasn’t offering freedom. He was simply inattentive, treating me like a small adult — which sounds noble until you realise what adults get exposed to, what they absorb without a shield.

That night we sat together in the dark, yes. But we weren’t in the same film.

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