The Water Line Belongs to Jaws 2, Not Jaws

The line is so tied to the shark that people forget which film it sold. It sold the sequel. Here is the film, the credit, the poster and why the wording works. For more lines like it, see the famous movie taglines section.

Jaws 2, not Jaws

Jaws 2, the first sequel in the series, was released on June 16, 1978, and Jeannot Szwarc directed it.

The poster prints the line as “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…” and ends it in three dots. A subway poster carried it too. The dots do the work. They leave the sentence open and the reader finishes it. A second line was also listed for the film: “One good bite deserves another.”

What the first Jaws used instead

The first Jaws poster carried a flatter line: “The terrifying motion picture from the terrifying No. 1 best seller”. It points at the book and at terror in general. Accurate, and forgettable. The film was not short of lines: “See it before you go swimming.” and “Don’t go in the water.” were also on offer, and its trailer reached for a bigger sentence, “it is as if God created the Devil and gave him jaws”.

Who gets the credit

Andrew J. Kuehn, who developed the first film’s trailer, is credited with coining the phrase. Say “credited to”, not “written by”: his 2004 Associated Press obituary, run in the New York Times, puts the line among his best but never says he coined it. More on trailer producers as tagline writers is in who writes movie taglines.

Why the wording works

The line plays on the aquaphobia many viewers developed after the first Jaws. It never names the shark, and it never says why the water is unsafe. That gap is the point: the tagline lets the reader imagine horrors far more disturbing than the ones in the film.

People who have never seen Jaws 2 still recognize it, and it has been parodied and homaged several times. It also travels: the phrase became quotable for just about anything with a sense of ominous danger ahead: “Just when you thought it was safe to [fill in the blank]”. Next to the first poster’s line, it names a feeling rather than a book. That is the whole gap between the two posters.

The poster and the campaign

The one-sheet repeated the first film’s image of a shark rising from below. This time the shark breaches the surface as it goes after an oblivious water-skier. The poster also carried the warning “MAY BE TOO INTENSE FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN.”

Reused, and misattributed

The 1996 film Flipper borrowed the structure for its own tagline: “This summer it’s finally safe to go back in the water”. The line also drifted away from its film. A Boston Globe writer put the problem plainly: “Who remembers that the line promoted ‘Jaws 2,’ not the original?”

Dialogue is a different list. AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes puts Brody’s “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” at number 35, the line people misquote as “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”. The famous line about the water is a tagline, written for a poster.

The first film has the standing: AFI’s list of the 100 greatest American films places Jaws at number 56, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2001. The water line still belongs to the sequel.

For a second line that names no monster and leaves the worst part to the reader, read “In space no one can hear you scream”. For the term itself, see what a movie tagline is; for more lines in the same genre, horror movie taglines.