There is a term in shark parlance called the Jaws Effect. It was coined by Dr. Christopher Neff—a public policy professor at the University of Sydney—to describe the enormous and negative impact the movie Jaws had on the public's perception of sharks.

The groundbreaking film was released 50 years ago today.

It quickly became the first summer blockbuster, swimming menacingly into our collective consciousness. 

Hearing just the first two notes from John Williams’ classic score is enough for many to recognize it—and to immediately start mentally kicking their feet to swim away.

Victoria author and journalist Mark Leiren-Young remembers seeing Jaws as a kid in a movie theatre in Vancouver and being “frigging terrified.” He wasn’t alone. 

“No one wanted to go into the water on the beach,” he says. “I had so many friends who were like, ‘I'm not going in the swimming pool—there might be a shark there.’ Like, as a kid, the utter fear like this was amazing.”

That this fear has stuck for 50 years, Leiren-Young says—as he references Shark Week on the Discovery Channel—is astounding. And unfortunate. 

“I'll go into schools, to do readings of my book, and I will see little kids wearing Jaws shirts. I'm like, ‘How in the world do you know this movie?’”

The collective noun for a group of sharks is “shiver,” from the word “shive.” It's believed to describe how the shark slices through the water (and has nothing to do with how people react when frightened).

“Sharks don’t freaking kill people,” Leiren-Young exclaims.

That’s something author Peter Benchley spent the rest of his life trying to convince the world of, well after his novel remained on the bestseller list for 44 weeks following its 1974 release.

It was the following June, in 1975, that the film would turn Hollywood upside down, beachgoers into frightened poodles, and sharks into the scariest animal on the planet.

‍The making of nature’s ‘villain’

It didn’t appear headed that way. Director Steven Spielberg, just 28 at the time, was convinced his first major release would flop.

Filming had been difficult. Keeping a consistent balance of the colour of the sky as it merged with the water proved challenging.

Actors quarrelled—the back-and-forth between the classically trained Robert Shaw, who played cantankerous shark hunter Quint, and Richard Dreyfuss, an up-and-coming actor in the role of marine biologist Matt Hooper, is epic.

Pages had to be rewritten.

It was, from all accounts, a nightmare production, chewing through its modest $12 million budget like, well, a shark through a plump elephant seal sandwich. 

The big problem—which turned out to be a blessing in fish's clothing—was the mechanical shark kept breaking down.

Days dedicated to filming the beast were scrapped.

By the time the overbudget, out-of-time filming had wrapped, Spielberg didn't get the shark footage he envisioned.

That turned out to be a stroke of luck/genius, because less screen time for Bruce—the mechanical shark was nicknamed after Spielberg's lawyer—allowed the suspense to build and the audience to anticipate and scare itself.

It was Spielberg’s idol, the legendary director Alfred Hitchcock, who said, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." 

Summer films weren’t big moneymakers back then, but early word of mouth was good, so Universal Pictures decided to take a chance by supporting Jaws with extensive TV advertising and newfangled tie-in promotions.

The movie opened simultaneously on 400+ screens across North America, and moviegoers flocked to it. Soon, sharks were everywhere: on T-shirts, coffee mugs, lunch buckets, and beach towels.

It would go on to win three Oscars and, according to Business Insider, has grossed $477.92 million and counting.

The summer blockbuster was born. And man’s already tenuous relationship with the shark pretty much died.

‍There’s something in the water: fear

“We could see the fear it was stirring up," Wendy Benchley, Peter’s wife, told National Geographic in 2022. "It was horrifying."

Benchley, who in 2006 died at 65, famously lamented the negative influence his book had on sharks.

Leiren-Young, has studied Benchley's significant place in the plight of sharks. He says the New York author and his wife “dedicated so much of their time since Jaws trying to save sharks, because they never imagined that people would go, ‘Oh, wow, these are so fierce, we must go ahead and kill them.'"

So, how often do sharks bite people?

According to the International Shark Attack File (ISAF), worldwide over the last 20 years, on average 67 shark bites are recorded annually. An average of six people die each year as a result of a shark bite.

Are great whites in our waters?

Generally, great whites don't inhabit our cooler ocean waters, although a dead one washed ashore on Haida Gwaii last October.

Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) says 14 kinds of sharks live in BC waters. Seven of them are listed as rare, including the great white. 

But that doesn’t mean BC doesn’t have its own shark horror story.

According to the DFO, the basking shark is the second-largest fish in the world, after the whale shark. They can grow up to 12 metres—about 40 feet.

The DFO said basking sharks were once abundant off BC's coastline, but as the commercial fishing industry expanded in the 1940s and 1950s, the sharks were coming into contact with fishing nets.

They would become entangled in salmon gillnets, which made for a lot of physical and financial damage to the fishing industry. So when fishers urged the federal government to bring in a bounty, it responded with an "eradication program" that was in place from 1955 to 1969.

Leiren-Young calls it a good example of early shark hatred. “Like, it’s not even a fear thing," he says.

Basking sharks are hardly dangerous, Leiren-Young says. They basically just hang out at the top of the water. “They're filter feeders. They leave their mouths open. They eat plankton,” he said. 

“Sometimes they ran into fishing nets, and so the local fishers were all in favor of getting rid of all the basking sharks.”

Leiren-Young calls it “mind-blowing,” the way these sharks were treated.

“People were waterskiing over them,” he says. “And once they were declared 'dangerous pests,' it was 'OK to just kill them.'”

He recounts how the federal government placed a Canadian Coast Guard vessel in our waters to protect the nets.

“It was equipped with a spike, and the Coast Guard went out and wiped out the entire population of basking sharks. So, occasionally you see them, but the reason you don't see them is we killed them all.”

In 2010, the basking shark was listed as endangered under Canada's Species at Risk Act, the DFO said.

Leiren-Young has written extensively on creatures of the sea. His Sharks Forever: The Mystery and History of the Planet’s Perfect Predator studies the threats they face, including pollution and overfishing‍.

His children's book, Big Sharks, Small World, introduces children to the beauty of sharks.

‍The Jaws Effect rippled to include other apex ocean predators

“I actually learned about [the basking sharks] when I was learning about orcas, because the next animal that was going to be declared dangerous pests was the orca, also for messing with the salmon," says Leiren-Young, who also wrote The Killer Whale Who Changed the World, the sorrowful story of the first orca to survive for two days in captivity.

Leiren-Young recounts the time in 1960 the federal fisheries department got real serious about their new villains.

“Again, the government set up a machine gun roost in Campbell River—to take out the orcas,” Leiren-Young said.

The machine gun was never fired.

"They’re like, ‘Oh, there's a machine gun. I don't think we're gonna go near that.’ So the orcas did not show up near Campbell River that summer,” he said.

“Orcas just blow my mind. But the basking sharks didn’t get the memo, and we wiped them out.” 

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Mark Leiren-Young is a multi-platform artist, playwright, and novelist. He is the host of the Skaana podcast, which discusses oceans, eco-ethics, and the environment. (Skaana means killer whale in the Haida language.) Mark's latest offering is the children’s book Octopus Ocean, now available at most bookstores.