Iconic Images: Jaws (1975)

Jaws is a film that creates fear in the audience through character reactions to the terror before them. In one of the most iconic scenes, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) gets the shock of his life..

When your chief monster – in this case Spielberg’s mechanical shark – decides not to work, you have to come up with another way of scaring your audience. Partly by design, partly enforced by broken special-effects, Spielberg employs a number of techniques to show us the shark without showing us the shark. One of the ways he achieves this so effectively is through the reaction shot. In this iconic image from the 1975 classic, marine specialist Matt Hooper discovers something rather nasty during a nighttime diving excursion just off the coast of Amity Island.