10 Worst Horror Movie Decisions With Unbelievable Consequences
6. Keeping The Beaches Open - Jaws
Though the primary antagonist of Jaws is of course the shark prowling around the shores of Amity Island, there's also a human villain of-sorts in Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who infamously refuses to close the beaches for the sake of raking in that lucrative tourism money.
This decision ends up causing numerous deaths as the shark continues to terrorise the area, and while that's hardly an unforeseen consequence of Vaughn's actions, things get much weirder later in the franchise.
As a result of Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) dispatching the sharks in the first two movies, in Jaws IV: The Revenge it's posited that the new killer great white is - get this - intentionally targeting the Brody family in an attempt to avenge its fallen forebears (who, in the novelisation, were the shark's parents).
This leads to a wealth of additional carnage, including the death of Brody's son Sean (Mitchell Anderson). But had Vaughn taken Brody's initial pleas to temporarily close the beach seriously, this all could've been quite reasonably avoided.