The importance of John Williams’ score in transforming Steven Spielberg's Jaws from a B-movie about a killer shark into a truly chilling morality tale cannot be overstated. We all know how the principal theme goes—an iconic musical pulse that suggests a stalking evil. And those quickening rhythms, sudden queasy lulls, and sharp musical stabs are used across the entire soundtrack to keep listeners in a state of unease, so that even a relatively chirpy moment like “Out to Sea” quickly becomes undermined by creeping tension.
