What is it about this movie that still terrifies, enchants and delights viewers more than 25 years after its original release? The story of Police Chief Brody, who makes it his own personal quest to catch and kill the great white shark that terrorizes the small beach community of Amity, Jaws is one of those movies that film buffs as well as the casual moviegoer can relish and deconstruct for hours on end. It doesn't even matter that the shark looks laughingly fake – when it's coming for some poor sap swimming along in the water and that brilliantly simple John Williams music starts to play, you're either gonna freak out or scream your ass off, guaranteed.

That sort of mania is precisely what greeted the world upon the film's release. The closest we've come in the past few years to something that even scratches the surface of how this movie changed perceptions and induced countrywide conversation is Fahrenheit 9/11 . Imagine all the furor over that one magnified tenfold and replaced with the fear of being eaten alive while swimming at the beach; opening at precisely the same time: the start of summer.

Using myself as a test case, let's see what type of mania can result upon watching this movie for the first time at the ever-so-impressionable age of, oh, let's say 11. Of course it can be taken as a given that anything showing human gore and carnage is snatched up straight away. What's great about this movie is the adage that says, and I'm paraphrasing here, “what we think is always much worse than what actually is.” The fact that a shark's victims usually don't even see their killer makes this all the more chilling, and is exemplified in the very first scene in the movie when poor Chrissie gets brutally ravaged by our main villain, while we see nothing but Chrissie from the neck up, getting thrown this way and that like so much as a rag doll. Thankfully, the scene takes place at night, and the dark water is black enough for us not to see what Chrissie undoubtedly saw as her last few minutes ticked by – water as red as the blood that flowed in her veins. So, what does this do to a youngster living in his 11th year?

Well, pardon me for using the Queen's English, but it fucks you up.

To this very day I don't even wade in the ocean, let alone swim in it. I mean, don't you know that most shark attacks occur in water just three feet deep? You don't? Then go rent this damn movie and stop asking me to go to the beach with you. Lake Michigan ? I'm all over it. Give me dangerous E. coli levels any day, rather that than getting ripped apart, kicking and screaming, by a bloodthirsty man-eater.

In the book Jaws by Antonia Quirke, she begins her introduction with a discussion of how Peter Benchley's novel of the same name was tailor-made for the type of myth-induced primal terror that the movie so vividly creates for us: “Here was one of those stories which seems always to have been nebulously there, unformed but already comprehended, waiting for someone to come along and fix it, nail it, get it right. And this is the first thing to say about the film of Jaws , which has this property of seeming discovered rather than created. It is definitive. It is the definitive articulation of a myth. It hits the nail right on the head. That's the Spielberg touch.”

Right you are, Tony. For better or worse, that's Spielberg's gift. He takes already solidified feelings and bends them to his view of the cosmos, of right and wrong, of good and evil. He'll put a nice little plastic bow on it and entertain the hell out of you, but then he makes his point. You can't argue. Sometimes he gets this formula right, and with Jaws he definitely did. Tenfold.

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