Movies | Today on TV: Killer Shark – Steven Spielberg said he “truly regrets” the consequences of his film

“I I really, really regret it,” said the film director Steven Spielberg In a BBC radio interview a few days ago.

So what?

His own film, from 1975 Killer sharks. More specifically, what the movie did to sharks in real life.

by Peter Benchley based on the novel Killer shark (Jaws) is a classic and one of the biggest blockbusters of its time. After its release, the horror thriller about a great white shark attacking the residents of a coastal town became the most watched film in the world, until Star Wars ousted it from the top spot a couple of years later. Killer shark is considered to have created the entire concept of the modern Hollywood blockbuster.

Film culture in addition, it also affected nature. It instilled in people a huge fear – even hatred – of sharks. The phenomenon has even been given a name, “Jaws effect”.

Sharks, for example, began to be hunted for fun more than ever before.

Already in 1975 The New York Times wrote, how in the coastal village of Montauk, New York, the popularity of shark fishing competitions just exploded Killer shark after the premiere. Montauk fisherman Frank Mundus was reportedly the inspiration for the film’s shark hunter Quint. Since then, sharks were killed en masse in fishing competitions in the coming decades.

At all Killer shark created in people’s minds the idea of ​​sharks as dangerous killers. In real life, out of hundreds of different shark species, only a few, such as the great white shark, can pose a danger to humans. Benchley’s Killer shark-book was inspired by a series of shark attacks in New Jersey in 1916, in which four people died.

In general, shark attacks on humans are very rare, usually they tend to avoid humans.

The killer shark inspired countless other movies where sharks threaten humans. According to some studies the image of sharks created by movies has really harmed shark conservation.

Humans have caused shark populations a catastrophic decline in a few decades. According to the scientific journal Nature, the number of sharks in the ocean has decreased by 71 percent in the last 50 years.

the BBC According to an interview with Desert Island Discs, Spielberg himself believes that his hit movie was one of the reasons for the fate of the sharks. That’s why he said he “regrets it to this day.” Many different media have written about the confession in recent days.

Killer Shark (1974) by Peter Benchley stated the same thing before, before his death in 2006. He said in an interview with the Daily Express that he wished he had never written the book that made him a millionaire. After the turn of the millennium, he had already stopped writing fiction – and devoted himself to the protection of the seas and sharks.

Killer shark in Sub on December 24 at 11:15 p.m.