One summer evening in late June on the New England island of Amity, teenager Chrissie Watkins invites a drunken fellow student, Cassidy, to skinny dip in the ocean. Although enthused, Cassidy passes out a few feet from the shore, while Chrissie strips and dives into the sea only to be brutally attacked from underwater. The next morning, police chief Martin Brody meets Cassidy, who has reported Chrissie missing, on the beach just as Deputy Hendricks discovers the mutilated remains of a female ...