Release Year: 1975

Genre: Adventure, Drama, Thriller

Director: Steven Spielberg

Writers: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb

Stars: Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider

Never before have two notes been so frightening.

Equal parts monster movie, swashbuckling ocean adventure, political thriller, and bromance, Universal Pictures' Jaws is about an enormous shark preying upon an idyllic seaside resort town and the three very different men who team up to stop it. When it hit theaters in June 1975, audiences had never seen anything like it. It blew box office records out of the water, gobbled up three Oscars—editing, sound, and score—and changed Hollywood (and going to the beach) forever.

Beach attendance was at an all-time low that summer, but theater attendance was through the roof. Jaws became the highest-grossing movie of all time and the first-ever summer blockbuster, drawing kids on summer break into nice, air-conditioned movie theaters for the adventure—and fright—of their lives. It endowed millions of viewers with an unprecedented fascination with—and sometimes hysterical fear of—sharks.

And of course, it introduced the world to a young director named Steven Spielberg.

Maybe you've heard of him.

Even setting aside its colossal cultural impact, Jaws is just an enduringly great film. Though it lost the Oscar for best picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, it's been called one of the best movies of all time by everyone from the New York Times to Rolling Stone to the American Film Institute to the Library of Congress. It's a practically perfect potpourri of saltwater, suspense, courage, comedy, blood, boats, tragedy, terror, and teeth.

Did we mention teeth?

As one film analyst put it, "Jaws did for the beach what Psycho did for the shower" (source). It taps into our primal fears and our knowledge that, even though we're pretty high up there on the food chain, we're still on the food chain.

Come on in, Shmoopers; the water's fine.

We've heard it a thousand times: You're more likely to be killed by a bee sting, a cow, or a vending machine than by a shark.

Well, you wanna know what?

We. Don't. Care.

So no, we do not want to go abalone diving. And no, we will not enjoy some seaside cliff-jumping next Tuesday. And we will definitely not be going for any sunset swims—ever—thanks. Know why?

Jaws.

Let's put it this way: Once upon a time there was a ten-year-old boy who wanted more than anything to watch Jaws. His mom said he was too young, but after weeks of diligent and calculated whining, she finally relented. He watched it in his best friend's basement, lights off. He was never quite the same again. That summer, he refused to go in a boat on Lake Tahoe, or to swim his Nana Helen's pool, or even to step on the floor of his bedroom when the lights were off at night. He was afraid that a giant great white shark was circling just beneath his house in a subterranean ocean, and the slightest tremor would prompt the beast to surge up through the floor and eat him. (His bedroom was on the second floor, by the way.)

That's the power of Jaws. It's movie magic at its very finest—Thrills! Chills! Gills! Skinny dipping! Exploding air tanks! Jaws delivers everything a blockbuster should (it was the first one, after all). But it's more than that. This movie swims right into your brain and makes a far-fetched premise seem downright realistic. And it makes you feel like you're right there in the water as that heart-thumping music starts and something brushes against your foot.

What makes Jaws special is just how much it gets to the audience. It's worth studying to figure out how on earth Steven Spielberg accomplished all this. How did he manage to pull such incredible performances from his cast while contending with endless problems with his mechanical sharks? What camera techniques make the audience feel like they are the next ones to become shark food? How can there be so much humor in such a grisly story? Why do we love to be scared?

Decades after Jaws' release, scholars continue to pull it apart to figure out why it works so well. Let's jump in and join them.