Weird Darkness - The Real Shark Attacks Behind 'Jaws' — Terror and Blood on The 1916 Jersey Shore
This episode of Weird Darkness dives into the world of sharks — the 1975 film that made a generation afraid of the water, the 1916 New Jersey attacks that shaped America's fear of the sea, the unsolved disappearance behind a 2003 horror movie, a catalog of real maulings, and the science of why sharks bite people at all.It opens with Steven Spielberg's Jaws, the 1975 blockbuster that grossed $7 million its first weekend and ranked sixth on IMDb's list of the ten best horror films. The mechanical shark, three models all nicknamed "Bruce," sank on first submersion and corroded in the saltwater of Nantucket Sound, forcing Spielberg to keep the animal off-screen for all but roughly four minutes and to build terror through John Williams' two-note score instead. Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, who now calls it "the fish movie," predicted audiences would fear the ocean the way they feared showers after Psycho. Clinical psychologists Ali Mattu and James Hambrick, both trained to talk people out of irrational fears, admit the film gave them their own galeophobia, with Mattu once showering while standing on the edge of the tub to avoid a drain-based attack. Author Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel, spent his final years advocating for shark conservation after fishermen killed sharks by the thousands in the film's wake, cutting large shark populations along the eastern seaboard by an estimated fifty percent.From there the episode turns to the real attacks that preceded the fiction, the deadly summer of 1916 along the Jersey Shore. Charles Vansant, a 25-year-old from Philadelphia, bled to death in the lobby of the Engleside Hotel in Beach Haven on July 1 after a shark clamped his left leg in three-and-a-half feet of water. Five days later Charles Bruder, a 27-year-old Swiss bellboy captain, lost both legs off Spring Lake, and on July 12 the killing moved more than a mile inland up Matawan Creek, taking 11-year-old Lester Stillwell and Stanley Fisher, the 24-year-old tailor who dove in to recover the boy's body. President Woodrow Wilson convened a cabinet meeting over "the shark horror," and shark hunter Michael Schleisser later killed a shark in Raritan Bay with human bones reportedly found inside, after which the attacks stopped.Next the episode examines Open Water, the 2003 film built on the disappearance of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, experienced divers left behind by the Outer Edge dive boat at St. Crispin Reef on the Great Barrier Reef on January 25, 1998. No one noticed them missing for roughly forty-eight hours. A dive slate later recovered miles away bore the date January 26 and a plea for help, their diaries revealed unhappiness and Tom's stated readiness to die, and their wetsuits and air tanks washed ashore without a single bite mark or trace of blood. Australian diver Ben Cropp argued tiger sharks took them within two days, while boat owner Jack Nairn faced a manslaughter acquittal and a civil negligence conviction that shuttered his company, and more than twenty people claimed to have seen the couple alive afterward, leaving the truth unresolved.Next comes a run of documented real-life attacks stretching across centuries. The USS Indianapolis sank near Guam on July 30, 1945, dropping roughly 900 sailors into the water where sharks reduced the survivors to 317. Barry Wilson, a 17-year-old tuba player, became the first person killed by a shark in California history, and free-diving abalone hunters Omar Conger and Randall Fry were both taken by great whites, Fry's body recovered with his head separated from it. Bethany Hamilton lost her left arm at thirteen and returned to competitive surfing, spearfisherman Rodney Fox survived a torso bite by gouging the shark's eyes and now educates the public about the animals, and Brook Watson lost a leg to a shark in Havana Harbour in 1749 at the age of fourteen.The episode closes with the science of why sharks bite people, drawn from researchers including Gavin Naylor of the Florida Program for Shark Research and marine biologist Blake Chapman. Attacks correlate with the overlap of people and sharks in the same water, which is why rising seal populations off Cape Cod — rebounding under the 1972 Marine Mammal Act — drew great whites that delivered Massachusetts its first fatal attack in eighty-two years in 2018. Most bites appear to be cases of mistaken identity, the flash of a foot resembling bait fish, and the three species most often responsible are the great white, tiger, and bull sharks, the last hunting murky water by smell and electroreception rather than sight. The odds of dying in a shark attack sit near one in 3.7 million, yet Hannah Mighall, mauled by a five-metre great white in Tasmania's Bay of Fires at thirteen, still carries the toothy bite scar on her leg and the nightmares that came with it, alongside her refusal to see the animals culled for what they did to her.
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