by J †Johnson, Staff Writer

Don’t go in the water. Don’t go in the pool. Don’t go in the sewer. In 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws made us afraid of the vasty deep ocean, summoning a monster into the collective conscience of popular culture. The deadly surface/depth game of this archetypal summer blockbuster has gotten into our heads, making us uneasy any time we take a dip and hear the Jaws motif, and has provided a thematic framework for legions of films to follow in its wake. Many of them are shamelessly derivative, whether they celebrate the Jaws phenomenon or simply steal its formula.

Let’s consider three spawn of Jaws films that appeared in the five years after Bruce’s big splash: Grizzly (dir. William Girdler, 1976), Piranha (dir. Joe Dante, 1978), and Alligator (dir. Lewis Teague, 1980). While these films are all Jawsploitation cinema, they are also unique variations on nature horror with their own ideas and charms. They are just as rewarding to revisit, and as a whole just as fun as the so-called original good-time nature bites back thriller.

Anyway, Jaws is not remarkable for its originality, but for its novel reframing of the classic creature feature. Triangulate King Kong (dir, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), Godzilla (dir. Ishirō Honda, 1954), and Creature from the Black Lagoon (dir. Jack Arnold, 1954), and Jaws feels inevitable, just as Grizzly’s Jaws on Land concept is a no-brainer. Throw Them! (dir. Gordan Douglas, 1954) into the mix and you get true inspiration for Piranha and Alligator. We’ll look at all three Jawsploitation flicks, with particular attention to Piranha and Alligator, to think about how ecohorror arises from the simple pleasures of a Terror From the Deep film. Along the way we’ll also think about how both Jaws and Grizzly point the way to the slasher cycle that John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s Halloween properly launches in 1978. 

We don’t come to monster movies for originality, but to find additional ways to think about our relation to the so-called natural world. We can have fresh approaches without the lie that there was a first time for anything, or that a good horror film is a wholly original artwork. Nature horror is an ideal case study for that, since it relies on the world around us for ideas, just as any art form responds to the world as it is, or as it could be. Jaws is animated primarily by the fear of what swims below the surface, and the difficulty of acknowledging what we cannot or do not want to see. We can interpolate commentary on commerce and authority, and we can dive a little deeper to think about homosociality and masculinity in the Boys’ Adventure on the Sea section of the film. But beyond the psychology of our fear of unseen depths, Jaws has a lot of surface without a lot of subtext, which of course is part of its general appeal.

Grizzly for the most part swaps the shark for a bear and the ocean for the woods and lets that play out among variations on character types, and a melancholy autumn sunshine over the trees vibe. Piranha and Alligator, though, have more to say, and an irrepressible energy, thanks to John Sayles’ seriously playful scripts. Whereas Sayles co-wrote the original story on which Piranha’s screenplay is based, Sayles rewrote an existing script for Alligator. The latter is notable because of the derivative layers it adds. Not only is the story in a lineage that traces back to Jaws, but Sayles reworks both his own Jawsploitation (Piranha) and the Alligator script he rewrites. Here an emergent ecohorror brings ecological consciousness to nature horror’s fear of the outdoors.

Let’s be clear that we are using the term derivative in a progressive rather than derogatory sense. To say one thing derives from another is to describe the general conditions of art. Surely there are plenty of hackneyed derivative works out there, but Sayles makes something new (twice!) even as he draws on clear precedents. In this sense to derive is to draw out, to refine and transform materials into something new if not original.

Sayles talks enthusiastically about his sources in two video interviews included in the Scream Factory Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray, mentioning the primary inspiration of Japanese films like Mothra (dir. Ishirō Honda, 1961) and Godzilla, from which he extracts a narrative formula. He also credits Them! for inspiring him to incorporate the L.A. River as the monster’s underworld lair. And he notes other reference points, like Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V., which features albino alligators that survive on rats and garbage in subway tunnels. Like Pynchon, Sayles plays off urban legends of pet baby alligators flushed down suburban toilets after the novelty passed. Sayles also mentions traditional stories of foolhardy knights entering dragon lairs. He doesn’t have to mention Jaws, which is no less inspired by adventure stories and monster movies (as well as the 1974 Peter Benchley novel on which Jaws is based). Sayles discusses some of the social themes he works with, which emerge from the formula he observes. He talks about a progression of social problems that are not dealt with until they make their way up social classes. So we see the alligator first in what Sayles refers to as the ghetto, and we can track it through lower-middle-class to middle-class settings, and eventually to the upper-class wedding party the alligator so riotously crashes near the end of the film, all of which are connected by the underworld sewer system. While Chief Brody’s You have to believe me! routine from Jaws gets pulled through all of these films, Sayles uses it to comment on when authorities are and aren’t responsive to social crises. 

The film also thinks about what we throw out and where it goes. Early in Alligator, a girl takes home a souvenir from a gator wrestling show, names him Ramón, and after a bonding scene with her little buddy, the girl runs off to school and leaves her parents to squabble over the new pet before daddy flushes Ramón right down into the main story. A clever shot from the perspective of the toilet lets us follow Ramón to the sewer that will become his new home, and also establishes our own descent to the underworld. We can track this technique all the way to the end of the film, when we look up from a manhole at our gator killers (another moment where we are put in the monster’s position). Alligator’s extensive sewer environs reference a conceit from classic literature (katabasis, or descent to the underworld) as the film takes us along with its characters to the land of the dead. It’s a contemporary underground wasteland littered with garbage that is also a dumping ground for medical waste, and this brings in another set of social concerns that Sayles writes into the script. Just as the class commentary emerges naturally from the story progression, themes of animal experimentation directly address the basic requirements of a monster script.

How did the alligator get in the sewer, and why’s it so big? The urban legend takes care of the first question, and the animal experimentation subplot not only ties in with the sewer system but gives us the conditions for Ramón’s gigantism. Slade Laboratories is experimenting on dogs to develop a hormone that will result in larger cattle for the meat industry. They come up with a synthetic testosterone that results in a higher metabolic rate and an insatiable appetite, which doesn’t solve the resource problem the lab so crassly tries to address. What to do with the chemically enlarged canine bodies of their failed experiments? Why, pay the same pet shop owner they hire to nab lab dogs to toss the bodies in the sewer! And the thing about sewers is they connect everybody and everything. So those body-swelling, appetite increasing hormones feed little Ramón, who finds those doggies quite tasty! And that wedding massacre? It takes place at the estate of Mr. Slade, whose daughter is marrying the head researcher at Slade Laboratories. Sure, we have a neatly tied plot, including the little girl who took Ramón home, now all grown up as the herpetologist Dr. Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker), who wrote a book called The Last Dinosaur that links her to our gator hunting hero, Detective David Madison (Robert Forster). But we also have a well integrated set of social concerns that give Alligator its own trashy but satisfying ecohorror flavor, distinct from the saltwater taffy of Jaws.

Let’s pause for a second on herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians, and bring Piranha back into the pool. There are a couple other key innovations that distinguish Piranha and Alligator from Jaws, even as they play off themes it established. We can follow an aquatic monster progression from big, singular monster (Jaws) to tiny swarm (Piranha) and back to big singular monster (Alligator) with a difference: Ramón is not a phenomenal singularity like Bruce, but a result of specific conditions that can produce other mutations (as we see in the film’s final shot, when another baby alligator drops into the sewer). Likewise, in Piranha, the Vietnam-era military experimentation that results in aggressive, mutant fish that can survive in both fresh water and saltwater also produces other little monsters. We meet them in a relatively isolated scene at the mostly abandoned research facility. We could see the scene as disposable, since the little stop-action mutants don’t appear elsewhere in the film, but the scene is such a delight that we wouldn’t want to flush it with the razorteeth in the facility pool. Anyway, we learned our lesson about that, didn’t we?

The point here is that the social concerns Sayles wrote into these scripts connect to larger cultural concerns, but are also well tied to the cinematic and generic traditions he’s operating in, while they also tie to the storylines. And if Sayles is circumspect about Alligator’s debt to Jaws, Piranha wears it on its sleeve. After the cold-open kill scene at the facility where a couple of teens jump in the pool and become fish food, the title sequence fades from the image of a blood-red ocean to an arcade game called shark JAWS, where we see the blocky little digital shark for a moment superimposed over the red waters before we arrive on the console screen, operated by skip tracer Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies), who’s hired to find the missing teens. “The Making of Piranha” feature on the Scream Factory Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray (hey, these films have become collectible!) opens with producer Roger Corman acknowledging that they modeled the film on Jaws, but he immediately goes on to say that they deliberately went with tiny fish to avoid being accused of merely copying Jaws. That decision leads to all the elements that make Piranha its own little ecohorror monster.

Back to herpetology, because we need to discuss reptiles. This is a key innovation that Alligator brings to the pool party (more on pools in a moment). Jaws is a biter, and his habitat is the ocean. The film establishes a monster out of place (MOOP) theme that gets elaborated in the other two films. In Jaws, the ocean beast becomes a beach monster when it goes where it doesn’t belong. In Piranha, fish native to South America are developed (via radiation-enhanced breeding) during the Vietnam war to destroy the North Vietnamese river systems, according to Dr. Robert Hoak (Kevin McCarthy), who continues the experimentation on his own after the war ends prior to the launch of Operation Razorteeth. “We developed a lot of mutants,” he tells Maggie and the drunk guy Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) she drags around with her as she tracks down the teens. “That’s science in the service of the war effort,” Hoak intones. So this gives us both killer piranha and delightful stop-animation monster eye candy at the periphery of the scene. The titular MOOPs will nibble their way from the facility pool, which Maggie drains inadvertently into the lake, to infiltrate the local ecosystem where they can wreak vengeance on fishermen and terrorize lakeside campers and beachgoers wooed by a huckster at the new development in town. If Maggie and Paul don’t stop them, the fierce little MOOPs will make their way to the ocean.

In Alligator (and here’s that herpetology thread), the MOOP progression goes down the toilet, into the sewer, into a suburban backyard pool, and into the river. But Ramón is an amphibious reptile, which gives us a wider range of contexts to explore. So we gator-stomp down streets to nest in alleyways, while also doubling back through the sewer system that can take us pretty much anywhere, including that high society wedding party. As the territory expands, so do the set pieces. Jaws makes us afraid to even jump in a pool, but before Jaws 3 (1983) gives us the shark in a tank, Alligator gives us a monster in a swimming pool, and a couple years before that, Piranha gives us carnivorous fish in a pool those kids shouldn’t have jumped into. And while we’re riffing on herpetology, we ought to mention a related innovation: frontal and rear attack. The potential is there in Jaws, and Bruce certainly throws his weight around, but he mostly comes at his prey with all those teeth, as do the piranhas of 1978. By 1980, we see Ramón snap those jaws, but he also swings that tail. Here again the monster variation gives new pleasures to gorehounds.

So we can teach an old formula new tricks, which of course is just how Jaws gives us variations on the creature feature moves it adapts to its own routine. But what about the original Jaws rip-off, 1976’s Grizzly, which hits theaters just one year after Jaws makes it unsafe to go in the water? Well, not only does Grizzly show us that it’s also not safe to go on land, but it foreshadows the film that rips off the film that adapts the Jaws formula to a babysitter slasher—Grizzly is to Friday the 13th (dir. Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) what Jaws is to Halloween (dir. John Carpenter, 1978). There’s a horror-nerd theory that Halloween features a human shark, Michael Myers, who more or less indiscriminately kills everyone in his path, just because they’re there—like our pal Bruce eats everyone he meets. And whether or not you believe that first version of Michael Myers is extra scary because he has no motivation, you have to admit it’s kind of fun to think of Jaws as a proto-slasher. And if you can swallow that, then why not consider the backwoods killer of Grizzly to presage Jason Voorhees, scourge of Camp Crystal Lake, beginning with Friday the 13th—or with Friday the 13th Part 2 (dir. Steve Miner, 1981), for those of us who also like to point out that there’s no hockey mask until the third film in 1982. Throughout Grizzly, the monster is discussed as a serial killer who preys on women, and we get plenty of the killer’s perspective in what we will come to recognize as slasher-cam in a few years. “He’s gonna retrace his route. I mean, he’s gonna come back to the scene of his crime,” the naturalist bear tracker Arthur Scott (Richard Jaeckel) tells us about our heavy breathing lady killer. The precedent is set not only for the slasher, but for the knock-off Neighborhood Slasher Goes to Camp film.

Don’t go in the water. Don’t go in the pool. Don’t go in the sewer. Don’t go in the woods. And don’t dismiss the derivative monster films that do what creature features have been doing since the first monster jumped out of the ocean.