Here’s where Jaws’ Amity Island was supposed to be located and where the location in the movie was actually filmed. Spielberg’s shark thriller is one of the greatest movies ever made. Nearly 45 years have passed since its release and it still terrifies people enough to reconsider swimming in the ocean. The setting for Jaws’ shark attacks, however, is a little murky.
Setting Jaw in a smaller resort town was incredibly important to Spielberg because he wanted to make audiences feel like this horrifying event could happen anywhere. He also wanted to show how one shark could destroy tourism for a town that relied on vacationers. Jaws took place in the fictional beach town of Amity but it was also referred to as Amity Island. The deadly shark attacks took place along Amity’s beach before the focus shifted offshore. So where was Amity Island in Jaws intended to be located?
Amity’s Chief of Police, Martin Brody (Roy Schneider), was said to have come from New York City. He hated the water since he was a kid but still took the lead in gathering a team to hunt down the infamous shark. Peter Benchley’s novel indicated that Amity Island was a seaside town off of Long Island, New York. That was never directly clarified in the movie but it would make sense that Chief Brody took his family to spend the summer at a New York beach.
The confusion about the setting of Jaws has stemmed from the fact that the Jaws was filmed in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusettes. The crew behind Jaws considered filming in Long Island to match the novel but they decided on Martha’s Vineyard because of the demographic that vacationed there. They also noticed that the island was less crowded, which made it easier to shoot on location and in the water. Even though the movie doesn’t identify it’s exact location, many New Englanders, specifically those who live in Martha’s Vineyard, still take pride in their connection Jaws.
The town of Amity may have been fictional but some of the details come from real events. Quint (Robert Shaw), the experienced shark hunter, was based on Frank Mundus, a shark fisherman from Montauk, New York. Benchley used Mundus’ experience catching a gigantic great white shark off of the New York coast as inspiration for writing Jaws in the ’70s. The story itself was also loosely based on the Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916, a time when five people fell victim within two weeks in early July. Similar to Jaws, the Jersey Shore beach town paid people to hunt down the shark responsible as it was affecting tourism.
Despite the confusion surrounding where Jaws was filmed and where Amity was intended to be located, which is hopefully now cleared up, anyone looking to relive the Jaws franchise and get another look at Amity onscreen can easily do so. All four Jaws movies are now available to stream on Netflix and, while Jaws’ sequels aren’t remotely as good as Spielberg’s original, all are at least worth one watch for shark movie enthusiasts. Note though that only the first two Jaws films are set on Amity Island, as Jaws 3 goes to SeaWorld and Jaws 4 to the Bahamas.
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