How the Alex Kintner shark attack in JAWS was filmed
Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975) still has the power to chill, even almost 50 years after its original release, with the shark attack sequences still making audiences stop and be transfixed by what is unfolding in front of them.
One of those to still make the viewing audience audibly gasp at the sheet ferocity of the sequence is that of the death of young Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees). Less than 20 minutes in and you know all bets are off for the rest of the movie after the one-two death of Pipit the dog and Alex, aged just 11, on his inflatable raft.
But it isn’t just the death of Alex that is shocking, but how it unfolds as a masterpiece of tension and visual storytelling thanks to Spielberg and Editor Verna Fields delivering a sequence that Alfred Hitchcock would be proud of, that just keeps on racking up the tension and anticipation until the scene quite literally explodes.
The demise of Alex Kintner on his bright yellow inflatable raft – yum yum yellow not a wise choice with the colour acting as a key signifier of the shark throughout the film – was shot over a period of three days on State Beach, in Oaks Bluff.
Filming began on June 17. 1974, and concluded on June 19, with 12-year-old local Jeffrey Voorhees – who had moved to Martha’s Vineyard from Connecticut the year before – paid $138 a day for filming the sequence, which involved him asking his mum (Lee Fierro as Mrs Kintner) for just ten more minutes in the water, him swimming out on his raft and finally being attacked by the great white shark on a packed beach in broad daylight.
Proof, if proof were needed, that sheer horror doesn’t just unfold in the darkness, making it all the more an assault on the senses and all the more realistic.
Recounting the filming of the sequence off the beach in the excellent JAWS Memories From Martha’s Vineyard, Jeffrey Voorhees said: “Once they were ready to shoot the attack, I swam out to a half raft they had placed over an underwater tank in about five feet of water. The tank was controlled from shore (by compressed air) and looked like a giant cone with effects blood. The top of it was just beneath the surface, so you couldn’t see it. I’d get up on this half raft, and they’d say ‘Okay, when that thing goes off, it’s gonna shoot the blood into the air. Go underwater and just stay there for as long as you can.’ From the beach, they’d hold up signs painted with big, bright letters indicating what was about to happen. They’d say, Action or Cut, I remember seeing the one that said Rolling and thinking. ‘Oh, shit, here we go.”
And Voorhees would have to go time and again as they weren’t able to perfect the sequence, with either a leg or arm sticking out where it shouldn’t, meaning it all had to be reset again and give time for the prop blood to wash away with the tide, which would add another hour before they could attempt the shot again.
The spurting fountain of crimson was achieved by having a pneumatic hose connected on an air tank on the beach with a submerged, blood-filled cylinder positioned 30 yards from shore.
When the signal came to trigger the blood effect compressed air raced up the cylinder creating the rain of blood from the water.
To perfect the scene, divers were deployed to pull Voorhees safely down and hold him there – armed with extra oxygen tank - to create the desired effect and maximise impact.
Voorhees said: “When you watch the movie, I don’t just go under. They’re lifting me and pulling me up and under. Instinctively, I was trying to stay afloat.”
It even had an impact on his screen mum, who watched the filming of the scene unfold from the beach. Interviewed for documentary The Making of Jaws – The Inside Story, Lee Fierro said: “I wasn’t being looked at, I wasn’t acting, I was just sitting on the beach…and I saw that happen and I was just sick. It could have been really happening and it made me ill.”
That initial assault on Alex in the film by the great white was filmed by Production Designer Joe Alves with the second unit at a later date, with the mechanical shark chomping down on a mannequin, the shark and inflatable doing that chilling roll as it strikes.
Alves, in Just When You Thought It Was Safe: A JAWS Companion by Patrick Jankiewicz, said: “Steven shot the sequence and there were a few shots he hadn’t gotten that he asked me to get…One was a shot of the shark coming up under the kid and another of the shark breaking the water’s surface back-lit by the sun.”
Those prolonged death gargles of Alex Kintner as he is pulled under the water, never to be seen again, remain long after the image of the ripped and bloody remnants of the yellow inflatable is permanently singed in your mind from that very first viewing. Never to be forgotten.
It’s a scene that has lost none of its power and hold, only amplified when you next see it on the big screen, it almost like you are seeing it again for the very first-time a with the enhanced sounds and larger visuals. It still remains a breathless tour de force that still has audiences gasping in horror today.
Words by Dean Newman
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