You know the saying: life imitates art. But sometimes art takes a chunk out of life and doesn’t let go. That’s what Jaws did. It didn’t just reshape cinema—it rewrote the cultural script for what a shark was, what the ocean meant, and who we were when we dipped a toe in the surf. Spielberg’s fake shark may have been rubber, but the fallout was all too real.

Because when Jaws hit theatres in 1975, it didn’t just break box office records. It detonated a planet-wide phobia. Rational adults who’d swum in the sea their whole lives suddenly refused to go waist-deep. Boating trips were cancelled. Beaches posted shark patrols like they were expecting Normandy-level invasions. People weren’t afraid of sharks before Jaws. After Jaws, they couldn’t stop picturing themselves inside one.

It’s not hard to understand why. Spielberg’s shark wasn’t just a predator—it was a force of nature, a myth made flesh. It was death from below, unknowable and unstoppable. Williams’ theme didn’t help either—it drilled into your brain like a warning siren. And once the public bought in, they didn’t just flinch at the water. They went hunting.

In the years following the release of Jaws, shark killings skyrocketed. Fishermen organised tournaments with the explicit goal of slaughtering as many as possible. Some sharks were mutilated for sport. Others were left to rot as trophies. The film had awakened an ancient fear and rebranded it as a civic duty. Sharks weren’t just animals anymore. They were villains. And the public wanted revenge.

Peter Benchley, who penned the original novel, would spend the rest of his life trying to undo the damage. He became a staunch conservationist, publicly lamenting how Jaws had fed hysteria. He wrote editorials, gave speeches, funded marine science. But the cultural machine had already chewed through the facts and spat out something far juicier: the monster myth.

And that myth still lingers.

Modern marine biologists have tried for decades to rehabilitate the shark’s image. We now know most species are shy, endangered, and critical to ocean ecosystems. We know attacks are rare—freakish outliers, not targeted carnage. But Jaws set the template. It tattooed an idea onto the global psyche: that beneath the surface lurks something ancient, evil, and waiting.

Here’s the kicker: Spielberg didn’t set out to demonise sharks. The terror came from budget constraints, not bloodlust. Bruce the Shark barely worked, and so the film’s horror became abstract, psychological. But abstraction has consequences. When the threat is offscreen, your brain fills in the blanks—and public imagination filled those blanks with teeth.

Yet maybe there’s something poetic in that. Because Jaws isn’t really about a shark—it’s about fear. Fear of nature, of losing control, of our place on the food chain. It’s about how humans respond when faced with something vast and indifferent. We named it. We hunted it. We called it evil. And the sea just kept rolling in.

Fifty years later, we’re still wrestling with the aftermath. Not just in how we make movies, but in how we treat the planet. The irony of Jaws is that it scared us away from the ocean, when what we really should’ve been afraid of was ourselves.

• Saul Muerte

The scariest thing in Jaws isn’t the shark—it’s the sound of the shark. Two notes. Half a heartbeat. A musical ellipsis that creeps up from the seabed and drills straight into your spine. John Williams didn’t score a monster—he sculpted a presence. One that lurks just outside the frame, gnashing in silence, until your chest tightens and you start checking the shadows under your seat.

In truth, Bruce the Shark barely works on screen. The rubber betrays the realism. It’s stiff, sluggish, and allergic to saltwater. But Spielberg, handcuffed by malfunctioning mechanics and a limited budget, turned to the invisible: sound. And sound became the soul of the film.

Williams’ score is almost mathematical. Minimalist to the point of menace. That primal, pulsing motif—da-dum… da-dum…—doesn’t just suggest the shark is coming. It makes the water itself seem sentient, malevolent. No visuals necessary. Just rhythm. Just dread. Williams said the theme could be interpreted as “relentless, unstoppable,” like fate itself. And he wasn’t wrong. It’s practically aquatic Morse code for you’re screwed.

But the real genius lies in when the sound disappears. The opening attack? No music. Just ambient waves and ragged breathing. Chrissie’s screams. The sound of helplessness. Spielberg and editor Verna Fields trusted the silence—weaponised it, even. They understood that real horror isn’t the monster leaping out, it’s the waiting. The not-knowing. And they cut this film like a time bomb—tick, tick, breath, splash, gone.

Verna Fields deserves sainthood. She didn’t just edit Jaws, she saved it. She built its rhythm with a razor blade and a stopwatch. The cuts are precise, but never sterile. The pacing lets the tension throb, then twist. Her instincts gave Jaws its pulse, and her ear gave it breath. Fields’ decision to linger—on a bobbing raft, on a shark’s-eye view, on a reaction shot just a beat too long—makes the film feel like it’s constantly holding its breath with you.

Sound designer Robert Hoyt and mixer John R. Carter also understood the assignment. The underwater acoustics are muffled, dreamlike, warped—as if you’re already halfway gone. The difference between wet and dry audio isn’t just technical, it’s thematic. The ocean is a place where rules collapse. Where your screams don’t travel. Where your senses betray you.

And then there’s the famous Ben Gardner jump scare—maybe the purest blend of editing, timing, and sonic sabotage ever captured on celluloid. Spielberg throws the entire audience into the ceiling, not with a shark attack, but with a silent, bloated corpse slipping out of a hole in a boat. Fields cut it in her swimming pool. Spielberg added the shriek later. Together, they created a moment that still makes audiences flinch five decades later.

This is the power of Jaws—not just what’s seen, but what’s felt. And feeling is built from rhythm. From restraint. From silence. From two piano keys, repeating like a death mantra.

Other films used gore. Jaws used suggestion. Other films shouted. Jaws whispered.

And we’re still hearing it.

• Saul Muerte

Amity, as you know, means friendship. That’s the line. The pitch. The myth sold by mayoral pinstripes and anchors in sand. But Jaws is no feel-good postcard. It’s a thinly veiled civics horror story. Underneath the blood and brine is a scathing portrait of a town willing to sacrifice its children for a few more tourist dollars. Sound familiar?

Because Amity is America. Or at least the version of America we don’t like to admit exists—the sun-bleached community where civic pride curdles into denial, where public safety is trumped by profit, and where leadership means smiling through catastrophe with a cigar in hand and blood on your shoes.

Look at Mayor Vaughn, a man so cartoonishly committed to keeping the beaches open he might as well be handing out coupons for half-price limb reattachments. He’s not evil—he’s worse. He’s reasonable. He’s the guy who says “Let’s not overreact” while a shark chews through the local swimming club. His face is everywhere in 2025. He’s every politician downplaying a crisis, spinning a headline, blaming the scientists. Vaughn is the face of inaction, of plausible deniability, of capitalism cloaked in community.

This is the real brilliance of Jaws: it isn’t just a monster movie. It’s a movie about systems. Broken ones. It’s not just the shark that kills Alex Kintner—it’s the chamber of commerce. It’s the vote to keep the beaches open. It’s the hushed phone calls, the shrugged shoulders, the gentle pressure on Brody to “ease up.” The real monster doesn’t have teeth—it has a necktie.

And Brody? He’s not the sheriff, he’s the conscience. The outsider. The guy who moved to town thinking it would be quieter, safer—only to find out that even paradise has politics. His face when he sees that mother waiting for him in black is the face of a man who knows he failed—not because he didn’t try, but because the system didn’t want him to succeed.

It’s all too real. Substitute “shark” for “virus,” “chemical spill,” “gun violence,” “climate change,” take your pick. Jaws is a fable about what happens when truth is inconvenient and accountability is bad for business. A sunny allegory dipped in blood. Amity is the American dream under siege, and the town fathers would rather let it rot than admit something’s wrong.

But Spielberg never shouts. He doesn’t need to. He lets the imagery do the work. The tourist banners flapping in the wind while the ocean turns red. The newspaper headlines are getting smaller. The way Brody’s warnings are always drowned out by local laughter, local logic, and local greed. This isn’t parody—it’s prophecy.

Fifty years on, the shark still scares us—but it’s the town that hits too close to home. Jaws looked at America and asked a brutal question: when danger comes to your doorstep, who gets protected? Who gets ignored? And who gets eaten?

Spoiler: it’s never the ones in charge.

• Saul Muerte

Before the blood, before the teeth, before the fins slicing through sunlit water—Jaws is a story about three men on a boat. Three archetypes stuffed into a floating coffin and set adrift with nothing but a harpoon gun, some beer, and enough resentment to sink a battleship. Forget the shark for a moment—this is the real engine of the film: Brody, the outsider cop with a conscience, Hooper, the rich-boy oceanographer with gadgets and a grudge, and Quint, the seafaring working-class warrior who’d rather spit on authority than answer to it.

It’s Moby Dick meets 12 Angry Men, with blood in the water and resentment in the air.

Let’s start with Brody—our everyman. A New York transplant trying to keep Amity safe, but slowly realising that civic responsibility means nothing when your town’s economy is built on sunburns and fried clams. He’s the man in the middle. Not rich, not poor. Not a sea dog, not a scientist. Just a guy with a badge and a conscience, trapped between two forces louder and more certain than him. Watch him on that boat—swabbing, second-guessing, chain-smoking his stress. He’s the reluctant centre of a tug-of-war between experience and education, brawn and brain.

Then there’s Hooper—young, wired, arrogant. He’s got sonar, flares, and a boat that cost more than your house. He’s used to talking over people, used to being right. But he’s also deeply, emotionally rattled by what’s happening. A kid who loved the sea until it bit back. You can see it in that moment he stares into the opened belly of a tiger shark and realises the real killer is still out there. Hooper’s got money, but no armour. He’s the progressive in a world that doesn’t care about your degrees when the water turns red.

And Quint—ah, Quint. Salt-crusted, sunburnt, drunk on both whiskey and war trauma. He’s the last of a dying breed: the self-made man who doesn’t trust institutions, technology, or rich kids with soft hands. He’s got scars—literal and metaphorical. His monologue about the USS Indianapolis isn’t just a great scene; it’s the soul of the movie. The war shaped him, spat him back, and now he hunts sharks the way some men hunt ghosts. He’s not fighting just a fish—he’s fighting death itself, with a smirk and a machete.

Put these three together on a boat, and what you get isn’t just tension. You get a class war. Old money vs. old trauma. The system vs. the sea. Intellectualism vs. instinct. Spielberg knew exactly what he was doing here—this wasn’t just a monster movie, it was a chamber piece in saltwater. The shark? Just the trigger. The real horror is watching these men unravel—respect each other, resent each other, and finally, get ripped apart by the very thing they were trying to control.

By the time Quint’s blood paints the deck, it’s not just a death—it’s a eulogy for an entire generation of men who thought they could conquer the wild with nothing but grit. Hooper survives, but barely, and only by going under. Brody survives too, but you can see the price in his silence as he paddles away on the wreckage of the Orca. They both live, but the myth of masculinity—stoic, self-reliant, invincible—sinks to the bottom with the shark.

Fifty years on, this triptych of men feels even more vital. Not because it tells us who we should be, but because it shows us what happens when we try to be it all at once. The protector, the thinker, the killer. We saw ourselves in these three. And we watched what the ocean did to them.

Spoiler: the ocean won.

• Saul Muerte

Here’s the thing about the shark: it barely worked.

It sank. It stalled. It glitched and groaned and refused to cooperate. Nicknamed “Bruce” on set, the beast spent more time in dry dock than terrorising the screen. Spielberg was 26, sleep-deprived, in over his head, and rapidly learning the only thing scarier than a killer shark was a Universal executive demanding to know why the footage still wasn’t usable.

And somehow, that mechanical failure became a cinematic miracle.

Because what Spielberg did—what Jaws did—was weaponise absence. The shark, originally meant to be front and centre, became a whisper in the dark. A shape beneath the surface. A disturbance in the rhythm of things. You didn’t see it. You sensed it. And that, it turns out, is the oldest, darkest trick in the horror book.

The great lie of movie monsters is that we want to see them. We don’t. Not really. We want to imagine them. The moment you put teeth on screen, you give the audience a sense of control. You label the fear. Spielberg yanked that control away. With John Williams’ pulsing two-note theme doing all the heavy lifting, he transformed absence into dread. The water itself became the monster.

It was Hitchcock’s Psycho shower scene stretched over two hours—and soaked in salt. This wasn’t just an accident. It was an evolution.

The lineage is everywhere. Fast forward to 1999 and you’ve got The Blair Witch Project freaking people out with sticks and sobbing. Paranormal Activity builds its terror from night-vision nothingness. It Follows delivers slow, patient doom from offscreen threats. Even Ari Aster plays coy with his demons, knowing full well that what you don’t see can stick in the brain far longer than anything prosthetic or CGI.

But Jaws did it first—because it had no other choice. And that’s what makes it genius. The ocean becomes a canvas of paranoia. The camera lingers on legs dangling from piers, swimmers bobbing like bait, empty stretches of sea humming with invisible menace. You start scanning the horizon like your life depends on it. Spielberg took a broken prop and turned it into a philosophy: less is fear.

What’s wild is how this “restraint” has been almost entirely misunderstood by Hollywood ever since. In the years that followed, the pendulum swung back to spectacle. Bigger sharks, bigger blood, more teeth, more tech. Sequels gave us full-frontal fish. Other monster movies mistook visibility for effectiveness. But the terror in Jaws came from its limits. The scariest monster in movie history only appears on screen for about four minutes. And that’s all it needed.

Because fear, real fear, comes not from what’s in front of you—but what’s lurking just out of view. It’s the ripple. The shadow. The dark shape sliding silently beneath your feet.

And in that space—between the surface and the scream—Jaws lives on.

• Saul Muerte

The 1970s began with a bang. Or maybe a bottle being smashed in some dingy Manhattan dive bar by a furious auteur screaming about final cut. Either way, it was the era of the director as God: Altman, Coppola, Scorsese, Ashby, Friedkin. Films were messy, political, experimental, personal—shot through with cigarette smoke, New York grime, and the scent of celluloid freedom.

Then came the fin.

Jaws didn’t mean to kill anything. That’s the great irony. Spielberg was a film brat just like the others, trying to make his mark, trying to keep the camera dry and the production afloat. But when Jaws exploded at the box office—wide release, national marketing, TV spots, merchandising—the studios smelled blood in the water. And they didn’t just dip a toe in. They cannonballed.

Suddenly, the auteur was out, and the high-concept was in. You didn’t need a soul, just a hook. Something you could pitch in two words and poster in one: “The Shark.” “The Alien.” “The Ark.” The seismic success of Jaws set the table for Star Wars, Close Encounters, and the age of Event Cinema. The summer blockbuster was born, swaddled in popcorn grease and lit by the flicker of a thousand multiplex screens.

What died? Ambiguity. Risk. The kind of film where a character might sit in silence, drink whiskey, and tell you a story about the USS Indianapolis—without cutting away, without cutting corners, without caring if you were bored. That kind of patient tension would soon be carved up, streamlined, test-screened to death.

And it’s not Spielberg’s fault. He made a damn masterpiece. But he also gave the studios a blueprint: thrill them, brand it, repeat. What was once a wild landscape of rogue visionaries turned into a theme park, complete with merchandising stands and licensing deals. From the moment Jaws hit, the clock was ticking on the Director’s Decade. Within five years, the studios would have their claws back in the tiller, and the artists would be back to hustling for their next passion project on the sidelines.

But the irony’s saltier than the Atlantic: Jaws is a product of the very freedom it helped destroy. You feel it in the sweat on Roy Scheider’s brow, the simmering class tension between Brody, Hooper, and Quint, the silence that builds between John Williams’ stabs of dread. It’s not just spectacle—it’s cinema. Dangerous, uncertain, and tinged with fear. And maybe that’s why it resonates still: because it wasn’t meant to be a product. It just became one.

So yes, Jaws gave us the summer movie. But it also gave us the final act of New Hollywood, played out not in a boardroom, but on the high seas—with one man trying to keep control of a beast too big, too unruly, too monstrous to contain.

Sound familiar?

• Saul Muerte