20 Horror Films Where Humans Are The Real Monsters

Jaws: the original blockbuster and the most iconic monster movie of all time. Steven Spielberg’s troubled production turned cinema gold in the mid-seventies and made the director an instant star internationally, but do you know the real monster of Amity Island?

The film gives us a man-eating great white shark that is attacking and consuming beachgoers and holidaymakers of one of New England’s hitherto most attractive resort towns. Police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and professional shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) team up to track and hunt the thing before it can ruin summer forever.

Now, this is possibly the oldest chestnut in the canon of “the monster’s not the monster”, but the town’s Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) is of course the real monster in Jaws. At the end of the day, the shark is a shark. Sure, it may be a bit more bloodthirsty than the standard great white, but it’s still a cold-blooded creature of instinct. The Mayor, on the other hand, is a money-grubbing capitalist whose only interest is dollars and cents. He keeps the beaches open, tells the public it is safe to go in the water, and covers up the shark attacks and their culprit multiple times, making him directly responsible for a pile of deaths.