50 Years After Jaws, the Water's Not Safe... for Sharks

Overfishing and pollution are taking a bite out of their numbers.

- Lara Williams

Fifty years on from the release of Jaws, it's still not safe in the water... if you're a shark.

Steven Spielberg's legendary movie about a man-eating great white shark is a masterpiece. The iconic score, the camera work, the dramatic tension that comes from withholding the villain and a great script all make it a Hollywood classic. But its success disturbed both Spielberg and Peter Benchley, the author of the book the film is based on.

The tale helped galvanize a fear of the ocean predators and potentially contributed to a huge backlash. An article published in The New York Times in October 1975 reports that the film spurred an interest in shark fishing tournaments.

While some were terrified of swimming after watching the movie, there were plenty of fishermen keen to prove their bravery by catching a shark. In 2014, Dr. Christopher Pepin-Neff, an associate professor in public policy at the University of Sydney, coined the term "the Jaws Effect," arguing that because the public believed the fictional story of a vengeful shark so completely, it justified anti-shark policies while taking conservation off the table.

In 2022, Spielberg told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs that he feared sharks were "mad" at him for "the feeding frenzy" of fishing that happened after 1975. Benchley dedicated his post-Jaws career to advocating for shark conservation and, after his death, his widow Wendy Benchley co-founded the Peter Benchley Ocean Awards. Still, Spielberg and Benchley aren't the only culprits for what's happened in the oceans during the last half-century.