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.

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.

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.