NEW SHARK MOVIE PROMO ECHOES CLASSIC JAWS POSTER
There's a new shark thriller racing to the surface, The Requin, and like many that have swam in the shark-infested cinematic waters before it, the film poster doffs its Quint's cap to the daddy shark movie of them all, Jaws.
It's that classic set up of shark rising from the depths through the deep blue sea as it hurtles towards its intended victim, which is almost always a woman.
And it isn’t just The Requin that has done it, so has Great White, so has 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, The Shallows, Shark Night and Deep Blue Sea.
This is not a poster accident, of course it isn't, it is invoking all those shark attack beats of the Roger Kastel Jaws poster. And who wouldn't want to emulate the best and illicit those same feelings and illusions of greatness, or should that be great whiteness?
And why wouldn't you copy the film that invented the term summer blockbuster and was once the highest grossing film of all time?
It's not just shark films either, other nature versus man films have taken the same design template and given us Piranha (Jaws with smaller killer fish), Lake Placid (Jaws with a killer crocodile) and Tremors (Jaws with...er Graboids).
Words by Dean Newman
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