50th anniversary of 'Jaws': How the film impacted public perception of sharks

A theme song consisting of a simple two-note motif has kept swimmers terrified of open water for decades.

John Williams' iconic score for the movie "Jaws," which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its release later this month, is instantly recognizable -- the sound of which is enough to prompt people to look around for a monster of the sea to emerge from the surface, even if they are nowhere near the ocean, shark experts told ABC News.

The movie, one of the first feature films directed by Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg and based on the book of the same name by Peter Benchley, shifted the collective consciousness surrounding sharks and the danger they present for the past 50 years, some experts said. Based in a coastal town in New England, residents are terrified after a woman is killed by a great white shark that seems to want to continue raising its number of human kills as it stalks boats and swimmers.

"Jaws" is almost synonymous with the American summer -- similar to Fourth of July and apple pie, Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University Long Beach, told ABC News. The film tapped into humans' primal fear and became a social phenomenon in the U.S. and abroad, grossing over $470 million at the box office, adjusted for inflation.

Shot at water level, which is where humans see the water, "Jaws" instilled a fear of the unknown -- which is why it is still relevant today, Ross Williams, founder of The Daily Jaws, an online community dedicated to celebrating the movie, told ABC News.

"It villainized sharks and people became absolutely terrified of any species that was in the ocean," James Sulikowski, director of the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station at Oregon State University, told ABC News.

'Jaws' transformed sharks into the new marine villain

When "Jaws" was released on June 20, 1975, it transformed the apex predator into an underwater villain whose presence made water unsafe, Sulikowski said.

Whales were the most feared marine animal in the generations before "Jaws," said Lowe, who grew up in Martha's Vineyard, where the movie was shot.

Lowe's grandfather was a commercial fisherman, and his grandfather's uncles were commercial whalers, who passed down the terror of whales to the subsequent generations, Lowe said.

The fear was based on stories of sailors coming back from whaling expeditions where friends and family had died, Lowe added. "Moby Dick," the 1851 novel by Herman Melville about a whaling ship captain named Ahab and his quest to get revenged on the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg, likely contributed to the trepidation as well, Lowe said.

But the anti-shark propaganda had been brewing long before the movie was released, Williams said. Horror stories published during World War II and films that preceded "Jaws" did not paint sharks in a nice light, Williams said.

Chapple, who started his career in Cape Cod, knew people who saw the movie as a kid and still refused to enter ocean waters as an adult.

"It was really in the psyche of the community," he said.

Misconceptions about sharks due to 'Jaws'

Like many fictional films, there were several exaggerations or dramatizations about sharks included in "Jaws" for cinematic effect.

The most glaring inaccuracy is that sharks want to attack or eat people, the experts said. The notion that sharks are some "mindless killer" that are going to kill anyone who is swimming in the water or on a boat is inaccurate to the nature of the predator, Taylor Chapple, co-lead of Oregon State University's Big Fish Lab, told ABC News.

"We're not on a shark's menu," Sulikowski said. "They don't want to eat us, and if they did, we'd be easy pickings. It'd be a buffet."

Shark research began in the 1970s, so at the time, scientists -- and especially the public -- didn't know a lot about them, Chapple said.

There are also anatomical inaccuracies in the shark animatronic itself -- including bigger teeth, larger "dark, black" eyes and an unrealistic 25-foot body, Sulikowski said.

Technology at the time made it difficult for the filmmakers to get actual footage of the sharks, so there are barely any glimpses of real sharks in the movie and filmmakers largely relied on the animatronic as well, Lowe said.

"When the movie came out, it was probably the most deceptively but brilliantly marketed movie ever," Williams said.

The biggest misconception that still reverberates among public fear is that a shark sighting is a "bad thing."

But the presence of sharks is actually a sign of a healthy ecosystem, Sulikowski said.

"To see sharks in an environment is a good thing," he said. "...we just have to learn how to coexist with them."

After the movie was released and permeated society's awareness of the dangers that lurk beneath the surface of the water, there was a direct correlation of shark population declines due to trophy hunting, Sulikowski said.

"Because people's perceptions of sharks were negative, it made it easier for them to allow and justify overfishing of sharks, regardless of the species," Lowe said.

Both Spielberg and Benchley have expressed regret in the past over how "Jaws" impacted the public perception of sharks.

But Chapple has noticed a shift in the past two decades, where sharks have transformed from a "terrifying" creature to one people are fascinated by, instead, he said.

"The fascination has outlasted and outpaced the fear," Williams said.

Humans are actually a much bigger threat to sharks, killing up to 100 million sharks per year as a result of overfishing, according to the Shark Research Institute.

Climate change and shifting food sources are also causing species-wide population declines, the experts said.

Sharks are crucial for a healthy ocean ecosystem. The apex predators maintain balance in the food web and control prey populations.

"If we lost sharks, our marine ecosystem would collapse," Sulikowski said.