The original Blockbuster, Jaws is many things (thriller, drama, action-adventure), but, at heart, it's a horror film. The biggest film ever at the time, Jaws set Steven Spielberg on his path to becoming the most commercially successful director ever. It status as a behemoth of cinema history can never be doubted, but, strip that away, and the film is still a masterwork, still one of the most well-crafted Hollywood films of all time. Even taking away the iconography - the opening, the catchphrases, the music - Jaws is still a monumental achievement in horror, alternating between genuine moments of shock and more brooding, tense, atmospheric unease. It's been suggested that, with Jaws, Spielberg helped take cinema out of its experimental late-60s, early-70s phase and into a period of more commercial, big-budget, high-concept Blockbusters. There's certainly some weight behind that argument, but to suggest Jaws is merely a blockbuster is to misunderstand it completely.
