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Here's my working definition of horror:

Intent:
This is the first test. The intent of a horror film is to horrify its audience. If a film fails this test it is certainly not a horror film.

Conventions:
Faithful to the Hollywood continuity style, horror is tightly structured and paced to ensure specific responses from the audience at specific times. Open-ended audience response is hardly ever intended. Few films fail this test as that would undermine the first test. Consequently, a manipulative, Hitchcockian style of shooting and editing is preferred to, say, the deep focus realism of Welles' Citizen Kane which employs the more speculative style of long takes and long shots.

Theme:
Unconscious vs. conscious. Horror deals with the hidden mind over the waking mind, with primal desires and fantasies over logic and reason. This is where horror departs from science fiction, which is thematically geared towards an intellectual openness and the adventurous spirit of progress. The fundamental principle of horror is that people are afraid of the unknown for good reason and should not explore too far outside of the tribal circle. This was Lovecraft's view. Knowledge is dangerous; ignorance is bliss. This explains the multitude of unintelligible monsters in the genre such as Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Leatherface, The Thing, the zombie, and the werewolf, for example. These monsters are atavistic expressions of unrecognized, deep-seated mental processes that are better left alone.

Tradition vs. progress. This follows with horror's union with the unconscious. Since horror is predicated upon people's fatal desire to explore the unknown, genre work tends to be largely reactionary. Dracula provides a classic example. When Van Helsing realizes that he cannot combat the monster with science (the blood transfusion), he resorts successfully to traditional magical rites and charms. A good way to apply this test is to determine if the scientist in a film (should there be one) is right or wrong in wanting to know more about the monster or thing. Horror examples of the scientist include Dr. Frankenstein, Professor Knowby of Evil Dead, Herbert West, and Ash of Alien.

Abnormal vs. normal. Either the audience or some character(s) in the genre film will make the journey to the other side, and, usually both character and audience make the journey. By this, I mean a transition from a state of relative normality to a state of abnormality. I cannot think of any genre film that is completely in the norm. Horror films seem to deal exclusively with abnormality of some kind.

Jaws is definitely horror. It satisfies every criterion of the above model. Hooper was the closest character to a scientist and even he wanted to kill that sea demon.