Jaws

It’s a shark we all know, with music we’ve been singing to scare our friends at the beach for decades. Jaws, one of Steven Spielberg’s greatest creations, centers around a simple premise: a shark is killing people and everyone is scared. When a girl is killed right at the beginning of the summer season in a small beach town named Amity, the town and its mayor try to keep everything running as smoothly as possible before 4^th of July weekend, fearing lack of business for their biggest event of the year. When more people are killed, the new Sheriff Brody is forced to work with an Oceanographer and local fisherman to hunt down the Great White.

The score to Jaws is arguably one of the film’s greatest and most well known components. The “dun-dun” created by John Williams has lived on in infamy even after the film’s release almost 40 years ago. The sparse, fear-inducing music ultimately aids the fear factor of the few and far between viewings of the shark that was not originally intended for the film. Due to mechanical errors with the prop shark, they had to limit its use on screen which turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened. Even though Spielberg was almost fired during the process, he ultimately used these disadvantages to his advantage in creating a tone of fear and suspense that would have been lost with increased use of the shark. Spielberg’s use of the “Vertigo zoom” and POV shots following the main characters is crucial and only adds to the drama and personal connection to the story of Brody and his ship mates.

Jaws could have turned out to be a cheesy, campy attempt at a summer blockbuster, yet Spielberg, as his first feature film, turned it into one of the most famous film is history. Tracking and killing a Great White on a rampage in a small town is a simple premise, yet with use of interesting camera shots and suspenseful music, Spielberg took negative circumstances and turned it into one of the classics and top-notch work we expect from him today. Even though Jaws is almost 40 years old, it still scares the pants off any beach-goer, and that, is an effective film.