Jaws attacked 50 years ago, changing how we look at movies — and sharks

Summers have never been quite the same since June 20, 1975, and it's all thanks to a "mindless eating machine" that terrorized moviegoers and beachgoers alike. That was the day Jaws hit theatres, ushering in the era of the summer blockbuster and becoming a pop culture phenomenon that still resonates 50 years later. 

Steven Spielberg's classic tale of a great white shark stalking the waters off an island beach town in New York state and devouring unsuspecting swimmers, broke records and became the first film to cross the $100-million US mark at the box office. 

The film was credited with helping "revitalize" the movie landscape in what was a slumping year, The New York Times reported at the time, as people lined up outside cinemas for hours.

Since its release, we've come to expect a summer chock full of action-packed films that thrill and chill. What sets Jaws apart, even today, is how it influenced not just the movie industry, but the real world, too.

There's a reason we're still talking about Jaws, says Charles Acland, a communications studies professor at Montreal's Concordia University and author of the book American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder. 

"It is an expertly constructed motion picture," he said, but it also got into our heads and made it "hard not to think about sharks for a few years and maybe even ever since."

Chris Lowe was around 11 years old when the film came out. He grew up on Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts where it was shot, swimming and fishing in those same Atlantic waters that became the fabled hunting ground for the ocean's most notorious apex predator.

Jaws didn't frighten him because he watched it being made, and a lot of familiar faces from his town made it into different scenes. But he certainly got a kick out of how scared others got.

Lowe also knows a thing or two about sharks: he's the director of Shark Lab, at California State University Long Beach, and has been researching sharks for 30 years. He says the film actually influenced him and a lot of other shark biologists.

According to Lowe, very little was understood about great whites at that time — something Spielberg played to in the film. 

"What made that movie work, believe it or not, was the fact that you rarely saw the shark and the storytelling allowed people's imaginations to run wild," Lowe said. 

You don't actually see the shark, a 7.6-metre animatronic beast nicknamed Bruce, until 81 minutes in — during that unforgettable, "You're gonna need a bigger boat" scene (don't worry, it's embedded below). In total, it's only on screen for about four minutes.

But Lowe says that was, and still is, enough to make people think twice about going into the water. He says people who've seen Jaws can almost hear the eerie "dun dun" of the iconic score by John Williams when they go for a swim, leaving them wondering what's lurking beneath the surface.

For Lowe and his friends, the terror Jaws inspired wasn't the worst thing in the world in the summer of 1975.