June 20, 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of “Jaws,” an American thriller film that captivated the world and the mind of literary scholar Dr. Phil Simpson, who serves as Vice President of Academic and Student Affairs at Eastern Florida State College and recently co-authored “This shark, swallow you whole”: Essays on the Cultural Influence of Jaws.
“My main memory was how utterly terrifying and yet utterly thrilling it all was,” he said, reflecting on seeing the movie in a theater for the first time in 1975. “A lot of kids my age couldn’t get enough of it. The monster aspect of the shark really is most captivating. He’s larger than life, but also not so large that it’s completely implausible.”
That formative experience further fueled a lifelong fascination with genre storytelling and literary studies.
“I was already very conversant with popular culture by age 10,” Simpson recalled. “I grew up on Ray Harryhausen movies, Godzilla films, and Universal horror. By the time “Jaws” came around, I was primed for it.”
The Origins of a Pop Culture Scholar
Simpson’s childhood home was rich with books — classical literature, mystery novels, and science fiction — thanks to parents who were both voracious readers. At age six, he picked up Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, struggling through the vocabulary but enthralled by its vision of dinosaurs surviving in a remote part of South America. His reading diet expanded to include Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, seeding a dual passion for both classical and genre fiction.
Simpson pursued these interests throughout his education, earning his master’s degree in English at Eastern Illinois University, and later a Ph.D. in American Literature from Southern Illinois University. With the support of like-minded professors, he completed a dissertation focused on fictional and cinematic serial killers — a topic that seemed improbable at first.
“I still can’t quite believe I was able to do that,” he said with a chuckle. “But I found a supportive committee who believed in the scholarly merit of the subject.”
Finding His People: The Popular Culture Association
Simpson discovered the Popular Culture Association (PCA), an organization dedicated to the scholarly study of media, entertainment, and everyday culture. He first presented at the national PCA conference in 1994 and never looked back.
“It helped me get my work out there in front of professional and academic audiences early on in my doctorate,” he said. “It validated this entire approach that I wanted to take with my studies: using the tools of literary analysis and all my background, knowledge, and education in traditional classic literature and then applying those same skills to the arena of popular culture.”
His involvement grew steadily. By 1997, he was serving as the Area Chair of Horror Studies, and over the next two decades, he would take on numerous leadership roles, including vice president, president, and chair of the endowment committee — the position he currently holds.
“It was very encouraging to understand that there were other scholars who also really love popular culture who I could form this community with. I have remained friends and colleagues with some of these folks. I definitely found my people at PCA.”
“Jaws”: A Lifelong Fascination
It’s no surprise, then, that “Jaws” — the film that had captivated him as a child and made its director Steven Spielberg a household name — would become the subject of one of Simpson’s most significant academic contributions. Alongside co-editor Kathy Merlock Jackson, he recently published a scholarly volume marking the film’s 50th anniversary, “This shark, swallow you whole”: Essays on the Cultural Influence of Jaws.
In his own essay for the collection, co-authored with colleague Andrew Lieb (EFSC’s Collegewide Chair, Career & Technical: Business & Applied Technology), Simpson explores the shark not just as a monster, but as a cinematic serial killer — a relentless, unseen force that mirrors the archetype of the calculating human predator in films like Psycho.
“The shark is coded like a serial killer,” Simpson explained. “It stalks its victims, eludes capture, and generates a sense of dread much like the classic horror villains do. And it’s portrayed with a cunning that makes it feel almost human.”
While giant monsters and supernatural predators often dominate horror, “Jaws” grounds its terror in a plausible threat. Great white sharks do, on rare but documented occasions, attack and kill humans. That factual underpinning gives the film an unsettling verisimilitude.
“There’s an ancestral memory at work,” said Simpson. “Humans, for most of their history, have been prey.”
In “Jaws,” Simpson notes that this fear is intensified by the unfamiliar, hostile environment. The ocean, vast and unknowable, becomes a stage for vulnerability, making the audience feel out of their element. Since its release, “Jaws” has inspired countless imitators and established a storytelling formula still in use today. From sharks to serial killers, the trope of the hidden predator continues to dominate screens and has become a permanent fixture in the collective psyche — a reminder that no matter how advanced we become, some fears never leave us.
The Craft Behind the Fear
What keeps “Jaws” relevant five decades later, Simpson argues, isn’t just the monster, but the craftsmanship behind it. The film’s troubled production — famously plagued by a malfunctioning mechanical shark — forced Spielberg to innovate, turning limitations into cinematic gold.
“He leaned into suspense, using point-of-view shots and John Williams’ iconic two-note theme to suggest the presence of the shark without showing it,” Simpson said. “It became a masterclass in building tension.”
For Simpson, “Jaws” resonates most deeply as a redemption narrative. Police chief Martin Brody, the reluctant hero with a fear of water, ultimately confronts and defeats the monster. He’s not the seasoned shark hunter or the brilliant scientist, but the everyman who rises to the occasion.
“Brody is us,” Simpson said. “He’s terrified, in over his head, but he feels a responsibility to do the right thing. That story of facing your fears and standing up against overwhelming odds is timeless. These stories ask us: What are you going to do about it? Will you confront the monster, or hope it just goes away? I think we all sympathize with and hope that we would do the same thing if confronted with the situation.”
Simpson’s scholarship, lectures, and conference presentations continue to explore what “Jaws” first sparked in him: a belief that popular culture, when thoughtfully examined, reveals the values, fears, and hopes of a society.
As Simpson put it, “The fears explored in “Jaws” — of the unknown, of the monster beneath the surface, of our own inadequacies — are never going away. That’s why this film, and stories like it, will always matter.”
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