The second attack was a very scary scene because the audience has a feeling of what the shark can do even if we hadn’t seen its size, but Steven Spielberg was still able to build up tension and scare the audience through the use of camera shots and actions, Steven Spielberg focused on closes ups of Chief Brody to show how scared he was because he knew that there was a shark in the water but he could not stop the people from going into the water.
In the scene Brody kept looking at the water and kept seeing different people. We share his view and expet a shark attack but it doesn’t happen so we relax. He starts with a large woman floating on the water and a old man with a black cap pop’s out of the water, Brody was scared, but relaxes when he realises. Spielberg uses a jump shot where people move through the camera and he see the cap that looked like a shark fin in the water, Spielberg was able to use Jump shot to build up tension because as people pass through the camera Brody and the audience do not know what will happen next until the people passing through the camera passes. This builds up tension in the audience by making the camera move closer to Brody as people walk through the camera (jump cut). He also sees a girl screaming this looked like the same way the first attack was carried out but then Brody and the audience found out it was only her boy friend carrying her out in the water, the tension continues until the boy on the lilo and gets killed. We are teased by the director and we relax up until the boy gets attacked.
The director used many different ways to build up the fear of the shark, the shark being the star of the movie, Steven Spielberg had to use the music in the film, the theme music which was created by John Williams and any time the music played it indicated that the point of view of the shark is about to be displayed on the screen and it might attack. The theme music was played and the screen displayed the point of view of the shark as it moved in the water, still it attacked the boy and immediately after the attack the theme music stops playing. This shows the audience that any time they hear the theme music an attack is about to happen and this builds up fear in the audience, and when the audience gets used to the theme music Spielberg stops using it, to increase the tension in the audience.
The director also builds up the fear of the shark by showing the damage the shark can do at different points in the movie, the director starts with the first attack where the girl gets drawn into the water, the audience knew from that scene that the shark is very strong. Also in the science books that Brody was reading there were pictures of sharks breaking boats and it also showed how big the Jaws of a shark where, it contained three medium sized people, the director also build up fear of the shark with the destruction of the jetty this showed the audience how powerful Jaws was bringing down a whole jetty, the audience believe that if Jaws can bring down a jetty then we will be able to tremble on any human being. This is shown to the audience in the third attack where Brody’s son is in the small pool and the shark came to attack a man there, the man’s leg gets bitten off and it falls deep into the water, the director also used the boat attack to build up fear of the shark to the audience, it was a scary part of the movie as fear of the shark is then been built up and at this point the audience knows what the shark is capable of.
The director also builds up the fear of the shark through the reaction of the characters, in the first attack the girls facial expression showed horror, it showed pain and agony. In the second attack there was lots of blood in the water and Brody was scared, as the boy in the water got attacked and people in the water who saw the attack moved quickly out of the water because they were treated and terrified at the attack of the boy. Also during the autopsy Hooper looked disgusted as the he saw the damage the shark had done to the liver, internal and organs of the corpse. Also on the boat when Brody saw how big the shark was he was terrified and quickly went to tell the others that they would need a ‘bigger boat’, this shows the audience that the shark most be look very strong and massive for them to need a bigger boat, it’s also gives the audience a clue that the boat would get broken down at a point in the movie, and this builds up the fear of the audience even more.
The movie Jaws was made to build up tension and fear and this was shown in the plot and ending of the movie, the movie been an horror movie had a plot that built up fear and tension in the audience. Spielberg places the first and second attack close together to build tension and fear in the audience, the audience then have fear that anybody at the point could get attacked. Where the girl in the first attack and boy in the Lilo In the second attack the audience knows someone is going to get killed by the shark, they have the feeling that the shark is territorial and the spot were the first two attacks happened is its territory. After the first two attacks, Spielberg made the third attack to be on the 4th of July which was American independence day and as expected Americans will want to go out and have fun and the Mayor of Amity Island wanted to make sure that all people in his island had fun and even when Hooper and Brody pleaded for the beach to be closed on the day the mayor refused to close it, because of ‘summer dollars’.
On the other hand Brody and the audience felt that the shark will attack at his territorial spot where the first two attacks were, so Brody feels safe telling his own children to go to the small pool to play and the audience fears that Brody’s children might get eaten by the shark is reduced because they think the shark will not go to the small pool to attack anybody. Brody to be on the safe side had people on the beach trying to capture the shark and this also decrease the fears in the audience for anybody getting killed because there where lot of people trying to capture the shark. But before the third attack where two children got a fin and swam through the water to scare people the audience fears for Brodys children were no more because they thought it was safe in the small pool and the shark was already attacking in the big pool.
When the audience saw the shark they began to fear again because they expected the shark not to be near the beach but to be in the deeper end of the water because the people trying to capture it should be louring it away from shore to the deeper ends, so they can catch it. When Jaws attacked the man on the in the small pool the audience were scared and surprised because they thought the shark would not attack in the small pool because they thought it was a territorial shark and would only attack in its territory, this builds up fear in the audience and showed them the shark is capable of anything and should not be underestimated. Also because one of Brodys children was in the water when the shark attacked the audience had pity on him and this builds up their fears because the audience does not want Brody to face any more trouble than he’s already had with the shark, and they felt if his child was attacked he would no longer try to stop the shark and lot more people would die.
The last section of the movie was very scary, it was when Brody, Hooper and Quint in the boat were trying to capture Jaws. It was scary because of the differences between the characters, Quint was a traditional shark hunter and knew a lot about sharks but Hooper was a scientist who studied about sharks and he had modern advance tool to catch the shark while Quint had more of the tradition tools, and the audience knows that Quint has a crazy personality and could stop Hooper from using his tool and it could lead to argument and they would not be able to catch the shark. At the ending of the movie there are lot of scenes that are use to build up tension. Quint breaks the communication box they use to communication to people on land because Brody was about to call them and tell them they saw the shark, this builds up tension because the audience know that there are more argument to come because the three of them have different purposes for capturing the shark. When they shoot the shark with the barrels to be able to know where it was going Jaws was too fast, this build up fear in the audience because they start to get feelings that the mission was not going to the successful. When Brody, Hooper and Quint were singing on the boat and they did not know when Jaws was hitting the boat, this builds up tension in the audience because they know how strong the shark is, it could break the boat and sink the boat with everybody in it.
Hooper got in the cage with an injection he believed would kill the shark, but as he get in the water to hit the shark with the injection it drops and the shark broke open the cage the audience fear builds up as they thought it was the end of Hooper, but Hooper was able to escape from the shark. Then the shark breaks the boat in half and Quint slides into the sharks mouth and he gets eaten. This build up tension as the audience see a character dead they think the same would happen to the rest of the characters. The last scene builds up tenson when the boat broke and Brody was at the top of the broken boat and the shark was coming to him, he takes a gun and shoots at the gas cylinder in the sharks mouth, but he keeps missing, fear in audience is high and all hope is lost, until Brody takes his last shoot at the gas cylinder and it explodes and the shark is finally destroyed. All this helps build up tension and fear in the audience.
The film Jaws as a whole was very scary being a horror and suspense movie where there was war between shark and human. There are lots of scary moment in the film, the first attack was very scary because we the audience knew nothing about the shark and its capability, but after the first attack the audience had realised what type of creature it was being very strong and had a sense of what it could do. The scariest moment in the movie was the scene where Brody, Hooper and Quint were going to capture the shark and they were all in the boat singing without knowing that the shark was breaking through the boat and they were singing so loud trying to get down their fears, because of the strength of the shark I though the shark would break the boat and it would sink with Brody, Hooper and Quint.
