Spielberg Had to Cut One Scene From His Most Iconic Movie As It Was Too Brutal

Spielberg knew he had a hit on his hands when he overheard an enthusiastic dialogue between two students at a gas station in which one confessed to the other that he had seen Jaws six times and would see it again.

The movie about the man-eating shark became a real phenomenon and set the laws and rules by which the film industry would exist for the next 40 years.

Spielberg's film was a bolt from the blue – no one before had ever made a horror movie about sharks, few people had ever shot such films in the water, and certainly no one before Universal had ever invested so much in promoting and advertising.

Jaws gave birth not only to blockbusters, but also to horror films about sharks. One of the features of Spielberg's movie was the bloody attacks of the shark then repeated in many other similar movies.

However these scenes, as it turned out, could be even bloodier.

One of the scenes was so gruesome that it seriously scared the director himself, who felt that the episode had crossed the line and was definitely not something to be shown in theaters. Spielberg himself commented:

“I cut the scene down because it was too bloody, too gory. […] He [stuntman] was riding in the mouth of the shark like a maidenhead of a ship, toward the kid in the water, vomiting blood. That was much more horrible than anything else that came in the first third of the movie, so I took it out.”

The peculiarity of Jaws is a gradual increase in horror. At first we do not see the shark at all, then we watch it attacking the victims and their horrible deaths, with the gore and cruelty of the shark attacks also gradually increase.

Then the shark appears in the pictures in the sheriff's book, in the scope of the slot machine, then in the form of a falsely caught shark, and then finally viewers see part of the real monster. The shark appears in all its glory only at the end, during the hunt.

Source: Vanity Fair