A dramatic turn in Jaws sees the shark eat a little boy named Alex Kintner, but in the original version of the scene, the child was devoured onscreen. Thanks to ridiculous B-movies like Sharknado, Sharktopus, and other movies starting with shark, the creature feature genre isn’t exactly in the highlight of its life. Of course, there are still gems like Crawl, and decently fun if underwhelming fare like The Meg, but it doesn’t seem like fans of giant rampaging beasts will ever get something on the level of Jaws again.
Jaws should need no introduction at this point, serving as it did as Hollywood’s first “summer blockbuster” release, and launching the career of now legendary director Steven Spielberg. One of the reasons Jaws succeeds though is that it works as both a frightening horror film and a high seas adventure story, as police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and grizzled shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) team up to take down the huge great white that’s terrorizing Amity Island.
One of the biggest plot developments in Jaws is the death of Alex Kintner, a boy that’s snatched up by the shark right off his floating raft. Alex’s mother than places a bounty on the shark that killed her son. The actual death scene - while still very disturbing - is mostly left up to the imagination, but it turns out audiences almost saw much more.
Jaws Deleted Scene Showed a Child Being Eaten
Last year, a rare photo surfaced online from the making of Jaws, depicting a scene not featured in the film. The rather shocking image can be seen above, and inspired many fans to dub it everything from terrifying to nightmarish. It’s not hard to see why, as it’s basically the worst thing anyone swimming in the ocean could possibly imagine. The story behind the photo is that it’s from an alternate version of Alex Kintner’s death.
Originally, the boy’s demise was to be depicted onscreen in a much more gruesome fashion, with Jaws’ titular shark rising up out of the water and snatching the boy in its massive mouth. The shark would’ve then bitten down on Alex’s body, resulting in a torrent of blood. This more upsetting take on Alex becoming shark food is said to have been deleted from the final cut of Jaws for two main reasons. The first is, as one might imagine, it was determined to be too graphic and shocking. Secondly, Spielberg decided he didn’t want to give away the shark’s full appearance until later in the film. Sadly, no known footage of this alternate death is known to exist, although brief snippets of its filming can be seen in a documentary on the Jaws Blu-Ray release.
More: Jaws: Where Amity Island Is Supposed To Be (& Where It Was Filmed)
