Jaws

Alien was pitched as Jaws in space, and that was not a critic's summary but the line used to sell it. Everything structural came with the phrase:

• The creature is withheld for most of the running time and glimpsed in pieces
• The first victim establishes the rules and is somebody the audience had started to like
• Working people in a confined vessel, arguing about money, with no authority coming
• A company or a mayor who knew and decided the risk was acceptable

The graph already holds 2001 and Dark Star pointing at Alien, for the ships and for the crew. This is where the horror grammar came from.

Bong's creature film runs the Jaws structure and then breaks the part of it everyone expects: a monster in the water at a public riverside, an authority that suppresses the news to protect business, and an ordinary family who act because officialdom will not. The deliberate break is the reveal. Jaws withholds the shark for an hour; The Host shows the creature in full daylight in its first ten minutes, because the film's real subject is the quarantine and the official lying that follows, not the animal.

The same director learning from his own accident. Spielberg has told the story often: the mechanical shark failed so constantly that he shot around it, and the withholding turned out to be the film. Jurassic Park applies the lesson deliberately rather than by necessity, and the quotations are exact: a surface disturbed before anything is seen (the water in the glass for the ripples in the sea), a long absence before the animal arrives, and the first full reveal saved for the middle of the film.

The Duffer brothers have said Chief Hopper was modelled on Roy Scheider's Chief Brody: a small-town police chief who has come there to get away from something, is not taken seriously, and turns out to be the one who sees the threat for what it is. The show's early pitch was a Spielberg-style monster in an ordinary town, and Jaws is the purest version of that.

Spielberg made both, and Jaws is Duel's method applied to a different animal. He has said so plainly, and Universal gave him Jaws on the strength of Duel. The method: an ordinary man, an implacable pursuer that is never explained and barely seen, and suspense built out of the pursuer's absence. The truck's driver is never shown; the shark is kept off screen for most of the film, first because the mechanical one did not work and then because Spielberg had already learned in 1971 that it was better that way. Carried across:

• The low camera, at the height of the thing hunting rather than the person
• Point-of-view shots from the predator's position, approaching
• A sound cue standing in for the creature, so the audience knows before the character does
• A long final act stripped to one man and the thing, with the rest of the world out of reach

Filed HIGH: this is the same film-maker solving the same problem twice, and the second time with a budget.

Quint is Ahab, and the film knows it: a captain who has made the hunt personal, a crew of three on a boat too small, a refusal to turn back, and a death inside the animal's mouth. Robert Shaw played Quint reading Melville in an early draft, and Spielberg has talked about the Melville frame while explaining what he cut. The Indianapolis speech is the film's own version of Ahab's history with the whale, a wound that explains the obsession.

The shark in the water is a real shark. Ron and Valerie Taylor shot the live great white footage off Dangerous Reef in South Australia, using a scaled-down cage and a short actor to make the animals look larger, and that footage is cut into the film because the mechanical shark kept failing. The animal's behaviour is the film's subject and it was researched as behaviour: the approach from below, the roll of the eye, the bump before the bite, the fact that a shark does not reason and cannot be reasoned with. Hooper's dialogue is a marine biologist's. Behind it, Peter Benchley has named the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks and a 4,550-pound great white landed off Montauk in 1964 as what made him write the novel. He spent his later life campaigning for shark conservation, partly in answer to what the film did to them.