Primal fear is the key

The best suspense movies can be simple. There's a lot you can do with a babysitter, a telephone and a threatening phone call. Or two people abandoned at sea.

The chill factor of Open Water, playing now in cinemas, comes from a combination of primal fear and an invisible threat. We have a deep fear of sharks and the fact they might be somewhere down there beneath our feet is enough to terrify us senseless. It certainly terrifies the couple in Open Water. Then they see the fins.

Open Water has some obvious parallels with Steven Spielberg's Jaws of 30 years ago and yet a re-viewing of that movie - now on midprice DVD with a 50-minute making-of doco and deleted scenes - shows how much more rounded it was.

There is more than just a shark in Jaws; there were conflicting egos, the stand-off between the reasonable man of science and the aggressive man of instinct, and the faces of greed and bloodlust among the townsfolk and tourists.

A better point of comparison for Open Water, in terms of creating suspense with minimal elements, is Spielberg's first movie, Duel from 1971. Available in special edition DVD, it comes with excellent extra features which include the director and writer reflecting on a film which started off as a television-movie and was expanded by 15 minutes for theatrical release.

At the time Spielberg was a young director on his way up. He'd made episodes of Colombo, Marcus Welby MD and a few other tele-series, then was signed up to adapt into a tele-movie Richard Matheson's short story, which had appeared in Playboy.

He shot it in less than a fortnight. He says he couldn't do that today but back then he was young and hungry. What he doesn't say is that he was also enthusiastic and gifted, and used every cinematic trick and technique available. He didn't make a movie for television, he made a movie which appeared on television.

And what a movie: just one man on the open road up against a monster truck driven by a man out to kill him.

"What I learned from Hitchcock," says Spielberg, "is don't ever let the audience off the hook. Take your time and draw out the suspense as long as possible."

Duel certainly does that.

Mild-mannered David Mann is on the road to a business meeting when he pulls in behind a battered, smoke-belching truck. He passes it, then suddenly it passes him. The truck driver, whom we never see, waves him past again - right into an oncoming car.

From there on it is a game of David versus the Goliath of a truck on the deserted desert highway. There's a lot you can do with two men on an open road.

Spielberg, who reflects on the film with great affection as the one which gave him a career in movies, likens it to "Psycho with The Birds, only it's on wheels".

He repeatedly uses low angles to make the battered truck look even more monstrous, and you can tick off enough tracking, close-up and framing shots to fill any film studies curriculum. And even if the metaphor of Mann versus machine is a bit strained, it is there to be explored.

The tension is amplified by Billy Goldenberg's atmospheric, experimental soundtrack.

Spielberg says Europeans saw in Duel a metaphor of class struggle in America which taught him early on that his films might not be received in the way he created them; that they would belong to his audience to interpret.

Duel is a terrific thriller and, being made for the small screen in the first place, it still stands up. For a debut it was also an impressive calling card. Yep, there's a lot you can do with a few simple elements - and primal fear.