Alien

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.

2001 established the used, industrial spacecraft that Alien took as its starting point and then made shabby. Kubrick's ships are clean and corporate; Ridley Scott's Nostromo is the same design language after twenty years of wear, with crew who complain about shares rather than marvel at the void. The silent exteriors and the slow docking grammar carry over intact.

Dan O'Bannon acknowledged the Lovecraft debt, and the derelict is where it shows:

• An abandoned structure built by a vanished species, entered by a small expedition
• Its architecture is the exposition: the crew read the dead pilot rather than being told about it
• Both stories put their horror in what the builders were fleeing, not in the builders