20 Horror Movie Scenes They Were FORCED To Cut

5. Alex Kintner's Longer Death - Jaws

Steven Spielberg's Jaws is basically cinema's ultimate expression of "less is more," even if the less largely came about because of a malfunctioning shark prop.

This caused many sequences involving the shark to be truncated or have their focus shift away from the shark prop itself, but one that was actually filmed in its entirety was an extended death scene of young Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees).

The scene in the final film is already plenty horrific, the fleeting glimpses of Alex thrashing around in bloody water imprinted on the subconscious of an entire generation.

But during shooting Spielberg filmed a far more elaborate version where a dummy of Alex was eaten by the shark, in turn delivering a more brutal death scene in line with the more graphic description in Peter Benchley's original novel.

Yet it was agreed during post-production that this was too graphic for a four-quadrant blockbuster film, and so the shots of the dummy were largely removed from the final cut, leaving a little more to the imagination.

It'd certainly be interesting to see the full graphic version, but it's also totally understandable why the decision was made to scale the violence back.