9 Movies That Were Improved By Having No Money

4. Jaws

Steven Spielberg's Jaws is one of those rare disaster movies that doesn't rely on an overabundance of special effects and a constant barrage of jump scares. No, Jaws is actually a tense, slow-burning thriller that rarely shows the titular "monster" in earnest.

Instead, Spielberg utilized brief shots of the shark's fin sticking out of the water and quick cuts away from its face. This wasn't intentional. And, in fact, if Spielberg had a bigger budget for the film, he would have certainly featured the shark a lot more. The three mechanical sharks used (all nicknamed Bruce) malfunctioned on a regular basis, short-circuiting and requiring routine maintenance. But production was already going over budget, and they couldn't afford to build new, longer-lasting props.

According to Spielberg, this is where the idea of the "unseen enemy" came into play. Thinking like his hero, Alfred Hitchcock, Spielberg used whatever creative solutions he could muster to show the shark without actually showing the shark. So you get a few shots of the fin sticking out of the water, and you see the lower half of the victim wading from the shark's POV, and then see them getting thrashed around on the surface of the ocean. And it's undoubtedly more terrifying than watching 45 minutes of a fully-exposed, mechanical shark.