The sight of a pointed dorsal fin peeking  out above the water immediately evokes our fight or flight response, but should sharks  really cause humans so much anxiety?

Or did we sensationalize and demonize a fish into a monster?

Not to mention those people who have a general phobia of the ocean, thalassophobia.

The inability to see what is below, a fear of drowning, of darkness, of the  unknown — these fears helped create a lot of sea monsters, both real and imagined.

Throw in a carnivorous fish and it's easy to make a real animal a monster—and a lot of  people have capitalized on that with the shark.

Yet despite the rarity of shark attacks on  humans, these animals have an unwarranted reputation as blood-thirsty maneaters.

And you  can largely thank horror movies for the bad PR.

So if sharks are not naturally aggressive  towards humans, why did we turn a fish that kills fewer people a year than falling  coconuts and bee stings into such an iconic killer?

The idea of the shark as a monster is  certainly linked to their powerful jaws, muscular bodies, and celebrated olfactory  abilities—not to mention those teeth.

I find a lot of sharks cute, but even I don’t  want to see those pearly whites up close.

They are powerful creatures that remind humans we  are not the animals at the top of the food chain.

Perhaps fear of sharks is simply a  lingering biological response to the possibility of being eaten  by these capable hunters.

Still, sharks don’t hunt and eat humans, unlike  some lions and other big cats, bears, or hell, even pythons.

Yet they frequently terrorize  us on the big screen and in newspapers alike.

There are a few shark-type monsters in mythology  and folklore, like the Japanese yokai Isonade, the Classical Greek monster Scylla with its  many heads and three rows of shark-like teeth, or the primordial sea monster Cipactli from  Mesoamerican mythology, but there are far more shark deities — although some like the  Hawaiian Nanaue could fall into either category.

The Polynesian peoples both feared  and revered sharks.

In some stories, there are monstrous sharks that eat people, but  there are also stories of sharks possessed by ancestral spirits rescuing humans.

According to  other legends, some chiefs kept pet sharks who recognized members of the family.

In Africa along the west coast, some cultures included shark meat as part of  their diet, while others saw them as sacred.

Either way, they learned how to live alongside  the shark since respect was paramount.

We start to see sharks in a more  predominantly negative light from European sources around the 16th century.

In 1553 Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara recounted Spanish conquistador  Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico.

which included the conqueror's  interaction with sharks, describing them as “insatiable”  and capable of swallowing anything.

While further describing sharks, it is written  that they will “attack a cow or horse grazing or drinking at the river’s edge and will eat a man.” Slave-trade sailors heard of the xoc from the Maya of the Caribbean and turned the word  to ‘sharke’ around the 16th century.

Written historical records from slave ships  mention sharks, along with other fish, swimming alongside the boats, eager to eat whatever  was thrown overboard—from excrement to people.

In the 18th century, abolitionists used  violent imagery of sharks eating Africans thrown overboard from slave ships to further  emphasize the horrors of the slave trade.

Artists immortalized these haunting images.

More visual depictions of shark encounters appeared after a cabin boy named Brook Watson fell  overboard and had his leg bitten off by a shark in Havana, Cuba.

The incident became the inspiration  for a famous painting: Watson and the Shark.

Then in the mid-19th century,  human-shark encounters became a more popular fixture on the global news  circuit when the Birkenhead Steamer sank.

Newspapers reported that hundreds of sharks  occupying the surrounding reefs laid “devastation” to the survivors.

According to survivor Benjamin  Turner, who was a child at the time of the wreck, “A shark would come up, seize them by the leg, and  drag them down.” These vivid testimonies, and the accompanying images, led to one of the first media  representations of a so-called “feeding frenzy.” Still, sharks were considered relatively  harmless until the 20th century.

A series of human-shark encounters  in New Jersey in 1916 led to major newspapers labeling the animals as so-called  “man-eating monsters,” causing a wave of panic.

Around the same time on the other  side of the world in Australia, surfing was gaining popularity.

As more  humans entered into shark habitats, the news began to pay attention to fatal encounters.

Public and political outcry led to the “meshing” of metropolitan beaches; nets were installed along  the coastline to catch sharks that got too close.

In 1958, The Shark Attack File was founded  to document global shark encounters.

Overwhelmingly, however, sharks were still at the  periphery of consciousness for most.

Until Jaws.

The famous film is based on a  1974 novel of the same name, inspired in part by those 1916 New Jersey events.

When the film adaptation hit theaters in 1975 it was accompanied by massive fanfare.

Jaws defined the summer blockbuster.

It helped launch Steven Spielberg’s career,  gave us one of the most iconic movie scores of all time, and made a whole lot of  people terrified to go into the water.

We can partially thank Universal Studios' marketing team for that.

Inspiring fear seemed to be their driving strategy.

"It is as if God created the devil .

.

."

".

.

.

and gave him .

.

.

Jaws."

Teasers of the film ran on TV (to the tune of  $700,000 dollars) and merchandise with the iconic film poster was created.

The fact that people  didn’t have much knowledge about sharks made it easy for the media to exploit fear of the unknown.

That fear taps into not just being prey but how you might become prey— in other words, the  jaws of Jaws is what really freaks us out.

Jaws also plays on fears (and guilt) of war,  comments on mass hysteria, and criticizes the reckless scientist.

Comparisons of the film’s  mayor to the disgraced President Richard Nixon indicate parallels between the shark-coverup  and Watergate.

And then there’s the Freudian reading of a giant male predator engaging in a  little voyeurism before attacking a naked woman, but there’s also the feminist reading that sees  the shark as a metaphor of the monstrous feminine and/or the folkloric myth of vagina dentata.

Regardless of how you interpret the film, it's indisputable that the Great White Shark  at its center is meant to be the monster.

"You're gonna need a bigger boat."

A lot went wrong during the filming of Jaws,  including rough ocean waters, bad weather, and the mechanical shark’s frequent malfunctions.

Nicknamed Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer, the animatronic shark used in the film was  notoriously finicky.

The exposure to saltwater in Martha’s Vineyard led to the mechanic’s  erosion—and even greater unpredictability.

But these turned out to be what Bob Ross might  call “happy little accidents.” The inability to show the metal puppet on screen contributed  to its mysterious menace; we don’t see the full shark until more than halfway through the movie.

In some ways, Jaws feels like an extension of the kaiju and “big bug” film genres, with  a little more horror and action thrown in alongside Hitchcockian thriller for good measure.

It’s man vs. nature with a slasher flick twist.

Post Jaws, sharks were handed the dubious title  of “monsters of the deep.” It probably didn’t help that Jaws author Peter Benchley knew very  little about sharks.

And most people took the film’s portrayal of a fictional shark monster as  the normal behavior of real Great White Sharks.

Immediately after the film’s  release, beachgoers headed inland, damaging coastal town economies.

Shark fishing  competitions became a thing.

Despite the panic, and the damage to sharks the movie caused, it also  inspired future scientists and the public to learn more about sharks in general.

Benchley by the  way?

He became a vocal shark conservationist.

Jaws solidified and popularized the  perspective of sharks as monsters and ushered in the “sharksploitation” genre.

As digital special effects emerged in the 1990s, monster shark films became even more  popular…we can’t seem to get enough.

As special effects improved,  films began to make the shark even scarier—by making them bigger.

Much bigger.

Enter the megalodon.

The idea of the prehistoric fish surviving extinction was introduced in  the Jaws book, when Hooper, an oceanographer, speculates that the titular massive white shark  is likely a smaller version of a creature lurking far deeper down in the ocean.

He mentions  megalodons and questions if they are extinct.

In 1997, another author would pick up  on that thread and expand it—literally.

Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten follows a scientist diving the Mariana Trench  on behalf of the US Navy who sees a megalodon and spends the rest  of his Captain Ahab-esq life trying to prove it exists.

The book opens with an awesome  scene of a T-Rex getting eaten by a megalodon.

Unfortunately, the Meg books’ film adaptation  in 2018 didn’t include that scene.

But it did give us Jason Statham underwater  fighting a fairly impressive CGI shark.

While in the past the media  latched on to the sensational.

With The Meg we got the requisite monster  shark attention but with a side of science.

"Mac, tracker is live!"

"Great, real him in, DJ."

The overwhelming majority of scientists  insist the megalodon is indeed extinct, for millions of years, in fact, not hiding in  the modern depths of the Mariana Trench.

Plus, the movie shark version is chunkier, longer, and  tolerates cold water better than the real thing.

As for its resemblance to a  great white shark?

Evidence suggests megalodons were more  closely related to mako sharks.

These pop culture shark monsters still  have an impact on the real world.

Scholars and scientists have proven that  negative portrayals of sharks in the media, fictional or otherwise, directly correlate  to how people conceptualize the real deal.

Even reputable networks like the Discovery  Channel capitalize on the shark-monster phenomenon with faux megalodon documentaries or “serial  killer” shark mysteries.

These fictionalized shows rely not only on campy entertainment value  but on humanity’s appetite for positioning natural species as supernatural monsters.

The fish becomes  a serial killer, a spectral figure—a monster.

Many sharks today are facing the  threat of extinction—primarily because of human actions.

Threats to shark  populations include fishing, fin harvesting, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

It is estimated that 100 million sharks are killed every year for commercial  profit.

As apex predators, the removal of sharks from the food chain has  a catastrophic effect on marine ecosystems.

Today, some scuba divers seek out shark  encounters, looking not for monsters but for beauties, honoring the animals by respecting  them and studying them—not demonizing them.

Sharks aren’t devious, man-hunting  killers.

We made them monsters.