In Chapter Five Benchley employs a narrative trope common to horror and mystery genres: the discovery and search of an abandoned area. Ben Gardner has been hired to catch the shark and has gone out on his own. When Brody spies the fisherman's boat through binoculars with no apparent sign of activity on board, he and his deputy go out to investigate. Their exploration of the abandoned craft draws on the ghost ship tradition, in which the discovery of certain signs (a cleat torn from the gunwale, scarred woodwork, bloodstains on the transom, and - the big reveal - a tooth embedded in the hull) point to one inevitable conclusion. As written, the scene has a certain cinematic quality to it. Benchley even inserts a classic Jump Scare when the radio crackles into life and startles Brody, and you can almost hear the ominous music that by rights should underscore the moment when Hendricks leans over the side to retrieve the tooth.
The pages are liberally sprinkled with maritime vocabulary (gunwale, prow, transom, stern, bow, cleat, cockpit, port and starboard), but Brody himself seems all at sea when it comes to boats - even his question to his deputy ("Do you know how to drive this thing?") betrays his ignorance. The filmmakers took this to its logical conclusion by making the character a New York City cop transplanted to an island community, but in the book Brody is a local, though clearly not one with seawater running through his veins.
By the time it reached the movie, the scene too had changed significantly: from day to night, from on board to underwater, from Hendricks to Hooper. The jump scare is turned up all the way to eleven, with a suddenly squawking radio being replaced by a one-eyed severed head. And yet Benchley's original scene was, at least in part, filmed. When British TV reporter Iain Johnstone visited the Martha's Vineyard set in 1974 he witnessed the filming of one boat drawing up alongside another, a scene that was cut short (and probably inevitably scuppered) by one of the actors falling into the water. Johnstone's report, which can be seen as a DVD extra, also eavesdrops on Spielberg and screenwriter Gottlieb riffing on the elements of the ghost ship trope. By setting the discovery of Ben Gardner's boat at night Spielberg was able to kill two birds with one stone: he increased the spooky atmosphere by adding fog and shadow, and also gave himself more control in being able to hide his studio tank work under cover of darkness.
