Martha’s Vineyard is a peaceful summer retreat off the coast of Massachusetts. It is also the place where cinema’s most terrifying shark story came to life and where the real sharks still swim.
In the summer of 1975, audiences around the world learned to fear the ocean. The film was Jaws. The town it depicted – Amity Island, a cheerful New England resort paralysed by a great white shark – felt disturbingly real.
Families cancelled beach holidays. Public swimming pools reported increased attendance. A generation of children refused to enter the sea, the lake, even, as the joke went at the time, the bathtub.
That realism had a reason: almost everything you see in Jaws was real. The harbour, the beach, the bridge, the panic in the water – all of it was filmed on location on a real island off the coast of Massachusetts, with real local residents as extras, in real ocean water that turned out to have its own shark problem.
The island was Martha’s Vineyard. And fifty years later, it is still haunted by the film – and by something that swims beneath the surface of the water that has nothing to do with Hollywood.
Why Martha’s Vineyard? The Decision That Made History
When the 27-year-old Steven Spielberg began filming Jaws in May 1974, he made a decision that had never been attempted at this scale in Hollywood: he would shoot the ocean sequences in the actual ocean. No water tanks. No studio sets. The open Atlantic.
The search for a location took the production team up and down the entire U.S. East Coast, and reportedly as far south as Jamaica.
Martha’s Vineyard was not even the original plan – the production designer had his eye on Nantucket. According to island lore, it was a storm that forced his ferry to divert to Martha’s Vineyard that changed everything. [1]
Once there, the technical case was overwhelming. Spielberg needed shallow water that would look like open ocean on camera.
Martha’s Vineyard had exactly that: a sandy seabed that remained just 20 to 30 feet deep for up to 12 miles offshore, allowing the mechanical shark platform to operate while the cameras could turn in any direction and see nothing but water.
The harbour at Edgartown had a tidal range of only three feet – critical for matching continuity between shots filmed days apart.
“It was the only place on the East Coast where I could go 12 miles out to sea and still have a sandy bottom only 30 feet below the surface… no matter what direction my cameras turned, I didn’t want to see land.”
– Steven Spielberg, A Look Inside Jaws [2]
The island’s geography matched the story’s psychology, too. The filmmakers needed a small, self-contained seaside resort – a place where the mere rumour of a shark attack could devastate the local economy and split a community.
Martha’s Vineyard, accessible only by ferry or small aircraft, isolated in the Atlantic, home to a tight-knit year-round population of around 6,000 that swelled to 40,000 in summer, was exactly that place.
Principal photography began on 2 May 1974 and ran until October of that year – far longer than the scheduled completion before summer season.
Jaws was the first major motion picture to be shot on the open ocean, and it showed: the production became, in Spielberg’s own words, “a mathematician’s dream and a filmmaker’s horror.”
The mechanical sharks – collectively nicknamed Bruce, after Spielberg’s lawyer – malfunctioned constantly in the salt water they had never been tested in before filming began.
Spielberg’s solution was to suggest the shark rather than show it, using the now-iconic two-note theme composed by John Williams to signal its approach.
The malfunctions that plagued the production accidentally created one of the most effective techniques in horror filmmaking history.
| Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard: Production Facts ▪ Filming period: May – October 1974 [2] ▪ Director: Steven Spielberg, age 27 at time of filming [3] ▪ First film shot on open ocean: Yes – unprecedented at the time [4] ▪ Mechanical sharks: Nicknamed ‘Bruce’ after Spielberg’s lawyer; malfunctioned constantly [2] ▪ Water depth used: 20-30 feet, up to 12 miles offshore – sandy bottom [2] ▪ Edgartown tidal range: Only 3 feet – critical for continuity matching [5] ▪ Local extras: Most minor roles played by actual Martha’s Vineyard residents [3] ▪ Mrs. Kintner actress: Lee Fierro, a local acting teacher – her famous slap took 17 takes [1] ▪ Alex Kintner actor: Jeffrey Voorhees, a local boy; later worked at Edgartown’s The Wharf restaurant [6] ▪ Release date: 20 June 1975 – island premiere in Oak Bluffs; tickets benefited MV Hospital [7] ▪ 50th anniversary: June 2025 – islandwide celebrations and museum exhibition [6] |
Walking Through Amity Island: The Real Filming Locations
The genius of Jaws – the quality that made it feel so much more real than a studio production – is that almost everything you see in the film was already there.
The buildings, the harbour, the bridge, the beach. Quint’s shack was the only major set construction, and local zoning laws deemed it too tall for a permanent structure. It was torn down when filming ended. [2]
Today, nearly all the original locations are accessible to visitors, and most are unchanged.
| The Real Locations of Amity Island ▪ Edgartown (town centre) – The fictional town of Amity itself; buildings still standing [8] ▪ State Beach (Joseph Sylvia) – The beach scenes; the Kintner boy attack [8] ▪ American Legion Memorial Bridge – The ‘Jaws Bridge’; lagoon attack scene; locals still jump from it [1] ▪ Menemsha Harbour – Quint’s fishing shack location; shack itself was demolished [2] ▪ Chappaquiddick Island Ferry – Mayor’s quiet word with Brody; still runs today [8] ▪ Aquinnah (Gay Head Cliffs) – Scene between Hooper, Brody and the Mayor [1] ▪ Lucy Vincent Beach – Final showdown shark feeding scenes [1] ▪ Edgartown National Bank – Now Rockland Trust; original prop still on display [1] ▪ Edgartown Hardware – Displays the original AMITY HARDWARE store sign [1] ▪ Martha’s Vineyard Museum – Full 50th anniversary exhibition until September 2025 [6] |
The bridge – the American Legion Memorial Bridge on the road that borders State Beach – has taken on a life entirely its own.
Despite signs warning against it, jumping from the bridge into Sengekontacket Pond below has become a summer tradition on the island, performed by locals and tourists alike, often by people who have just seen the film and want to recreate the frisson of standing exactly where a mechanical shark once lurked.
Standing on it at dusk, watching the light fade over the lagoon, is a genuinely strange experience.
The Fear Was Already Real: The 1916 Jersey Shore Attacks
Although Jaws is fiction, it did not emerge from nothing. The fear it depicts – a populated beach resort paralysed by a predator in the water, an economy destroyed by the mere rumour of danger, a community arguing about whether to close the beach – had already happened in real life, sixty years earlier, in a story so similar to Benchley’s novel that it is impossible to read about one without thinking of the other.
In the twelve days between 1 and 12 July 1916, a series of shark attacks along the New Jersey coast left four people dead and one critically injured.
The attacks unfolded in a pattern of escalating horror: the first victim was 25-year-old Charles Vansant, killed at Beach Haven on 1 July.
Five days later, bellhop Charles Bruder, 27, was attacked at Spring Lake and died before reaching shore – witnesses on the beach described the water turning red around him. [9]
What made the third and fourth attacks genuinely shocking – and what gave the events their permanent place in American popular culture – was where they occurred.
On 12 July, eleven-year-old Lester Stillwell was swimming with friends in Matawan Creek, an inland freshwater waterway eleven miles from the open ocean. He was pulled under.
When 24-year-old Stanley Fisher dived into the creek to search for the boy’s body, he was attacked in full view of a crowd gathering on the bank.
He died that evening. A 14-year-old boy was attacked thirty minutes later, half a mile away. He was the only survivor of the Matawan Creek attacks.
The panic that followed was, as one historian described it, unrivalled in American history – spreading along the coasts of New York and New Jersey by telephone, wireless, letter and postcard.
Resort owners lost an estimated $250,000 (equivalent to roughly $7 million today) in a single summer. The White House pledged federal aid to drive away the man-eating sharks.
Communities installed steel nets around their beaches. Scientists who had previously insisted sharks were harmless were forced to revise their assumptions entirely.
“It is beyond the power even of the largest shark to sever the leg of an adult man.”
– Frederic Lucas, Director of the American Museum of Natural History, July 1916 – days before the Matawan Creek attacks proved him completely wrong [10]
Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel that Jaws was based on, drew clear inspiration from these events – particularly the idea of a rogue shark terrorising a small coastal community and destroying its economy.
The species responsible for the 1916 attacks has never been definitively confirmed. Scientists still debate whether the New Jersey attacks were carried out by a great white shark or a bull shark – the only species capable of surviving in both saltwater and freshwater, which would explain the Matawan Creek attacks. [10][11]
The Sharks Are Real: Great Whites in New England Waters
Here is the detail that gives Martha’s Vineyard its particular edge as a dark tourism destination: the island was not chosen as a location because it had shark problems. But it does.
The waters around Martha’s Vineyard and the wider Massachusetts coast are part of the natural range of the great white shark. These are not incidental visitors.
They are seasonal residents, drawn to the region by one of the most significant ecological recoveries of recent decades: the rebound of the grey seal and harbour seal populations along the Massachusetts coast.
Grey seals were hunted nearly to extinction in New England in the 19th century. Following federal protection under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, their numbers have recovered dramatically.
Large seal colonies now occupy beaches along Cape Cod and the islands. Where seals gather, great whites follow. The food source that makes Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard so attractive to sharks is now measurable, predictable, and growing.
Warming ocean temperatures have extended the period during which sharks remain in the region. Tagging programmes run by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy have tracked individual great whites returning to the same Cape Cod and island waters year after year. The sharks are not lost or unusual. They are local.
“The same type of predator that terrified movie audiences really does patrol the waters where Jaws was filmed.”
– Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, tag tracking data [12]
Actual attacks remain statistically rare. But the knowledge that large predators genuinely move through these waters – the same waters where a film about large predators was shot fifty years ago – is enough to make the experience of swimming here feel qualitatively different from swimming almost anywhere else.
From Horror Film to Dark Tourism: The Strange Afterlife of Amity Island
The film that was supposed to terrify people away from the ocean had an opposite effect on Martha’s Vineyard. After Jaws was released on 20 June 1975 – the first wide-release summer blockbuster in Hollywood history, opening in over 400 cinemas simultaneously – the island’s reputation was transformed. It became, and has remained, what locals half-affectionately call “Jaws Island.”
The appeal is not difficult to understand. There is a specific pleasure in standing in a place where something frightening was made to seem real, knowing that the fear was manufactured but feeling it anyway.
The Jaws Bridge delivers exactly this: a perfectly ordinary concrete bridge over a perfectly calm lagoon, where generations of tourists have stood looking down at the water and felt, absurdly but genuinely, a flicker of something that the film planted in the cultural nervous system fifty years ago.
The Martha’s Vineyard Museum has built a full exhibition around the film’s 50th anniversary in 2025, drawing on photographs, props, oral histories from islanders who worked on the production, and a built-to-scale replica of the cabin aboard Quint’s boat, the Orca. Guided film location tours operate throughout the summer season.
| Planning Your Visit: Martha’s Vineyard Jaws Tourism ▪ Getting there: Ferry from Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven (45 min); or fly into MV Airport ▪ Martha’s Vineyard Museum: Full Jaws 50th anniversary exhibition through September 2025 [6] ▪ Self-guided tour: Frommer’s publishes a detailed driving route of all filming locations [6] ▪ The Jaws Bridge: American Legion Memorial Bridge, Beach Road, Oak Bluffs – locals often jump from it, although signs warn against it [1] ▪ Edgartown town centre: Original buildings still standing; hardware store sign on display [1] ▪ Best season: Summer (June-August) for full atmosphere; shoulder season for fewer crowds ▪ Shark awareness: Atlantic White Shark Conservancy app tracks real-time sightings [12] ▪ Summer 2025 was marked by a number of 50th anniversary events and islandwide celebrations on 20-22 June 2025 [6] |
The Water Is Still There
Standing on a quiet beach at dusk on Martha’s Vineyard can feel strangely cinematic. The waves are gentle.
The light turns the water the colour of pewter. Families make their way back up the sand toward the car parks. A seal surfaces, briefly, fifty metres offshore – and then disappears.
The film that was made here fifty years ago understood something that takes a moment to articulate. It is not really about a shark.
It is about the particular terror of not being able to see what is beneath the surface of something beautiful – and the way that terror can split a community between those who want to pretend it isn’t there and those who cannot stop thinking about it.
Martha’s Vineyard is still playing both parts. The island that became Amity is also the island where the real great whites swim, where the seals haul out on the beaches, where the tagging buoys blink offshore in the dark.
The fear that Spielberg manufactured here was drawn from something genuine. And out beyond the sandbars, in the cold Atlantic that has no interest in cinema anniversaries or tourist seasons, the genuine thing is still there.
“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
– Chief Brody, Jaws (1975)
Sources:
[1] MV.com – Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard: filming history and locations. mvy.com/jaws-on-marthas-vineyard
[2] NBC / Frommer’s – Where Was Jaws Filmed? The Real Locations. nbc.com; frommers.com/slideshows/848615
[3] Wikipedia – Jaws (film): full production history. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_(film)
[4] Encyclopaedia Britannica – Jaws: film by Spielberg. britannica.com/topic/Jaws-film-by-Spielberg
[5] American Society of Cinematographers – On Location with Jaws (1975). theasc.com/articles/on-location-with-jaws
[6] Frommer’s – Martha’s Vineyard Jaws Tour: Hunt Down Filming Locations (2025). frommers.com
[7] Sandra’s Town & Country – When They Filmed Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard. sandrahutchinson.com
[8] Movie-Locations.com – Filming Locations for Jaws (1975). movie-locations.com/movies/j/Jaws.php
[9] National Geographic – 1916 New Jersey Shore shark attacks inspired Jaws. nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/150702-shark-attack-jersey-shore
[10] Encyclopaedia Britannica – The 1916 Shark Attacks That Gave Sharks a Bad Rap. britannica.com/story/the-1916-shark-attacks-that-gave-sharks-a-bad-rap
[11] Wikipedia – Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Shore_shark_attacks_of_1916
[12] Atlantic White Shark Conservancy – Shark tagging and sighting data. atlanticwhiteshark.org
