The ‘Jaws Effect’: the very real consequence of Steven Spielberg’s classic movie
When Steven Spielberg released Jaws in 1975, audiences suddenly found themselves considering the not entirely pressing threat that sharks posed with newfound seriousness. Before the thriller came out, sharks had about the same fear factor as clowns: objectively horrifying but unlikely to pop up in day-to-day life. However, the film’s marketing campaign was so effective that sharks suddenly appeared everywhere.
Every beach towel, game, and shark tooth necklace sold seemed to hammer home the idea that sharks were an imminent threat. All of this resulted in the ‘Jaws effect’, which was a neat way of describing the collective hysteria that eventually led to shark slaughterings and shaped government policies.
Dr Christopher Neff coined the term in 2015 in an Australian Journal of Political Science paper titled The Jaws Effect: how movie narratives are used to influence policy responses to shark bites in Western Australia. It was Neff’s argument that after the film was released, sharks had suffered some tragic PR that had terrible ramifications in the real world.
The research said that when Speilberg capitalised on the universal fear of being eaten and drowned to death, it led people to think they were extremely dangerous and could be stopped only by being hunted and killed – à la Martin Brody in the movie.
Wildlife photographer Thomas P. Peschak echoed these fears. He considered the film “a seminal turning point” in the way the public perception of sharks. “Almost overnight,” he wrote, “The white shark went from being considered an obscure ocean dweller to a man-eating monster with a lust for wanton killing, best eradicated from our planet forever.”
The release of the movie had almost unprecedented political power. In the 2015 article, Neff covered how Western Australia has a policy overhaul following the blockbuster. Although it’s been well-covered that shark cullings did little to protect humans from rare attacks, the government implemented aggressive culling programmes after an unfortunately timed string of shark attacks. It seemed to be a governmental attempt at revenge and a way of soothing the public that the big bad Great Whites were being dealt with.
The revenge element was a dominant theme in the aftermath of Jaws. Aside from the over-enthusiastic efforts of government agencies, groups of vigilante shark killers started forming in the US. Entire tournaments were set up to kill sharks on fishing trips, which had the obvious consequence of indiscriminately killing many endangered species, all because Spielberg had effectively done too good a job.
Sharks became the scapegoat of the moment in 1975, which was a wholly unintended consequence of the film. When Spielberg appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2022, he said it still haunted him. “That’s one of the things I still fear,” he explained. “Not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen which happened after 1975.”
