“I admire its purity.”
Like a lot of classic horror films – The Exorcist, Friday the 13th, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, Children of the Corn, The Blair Witch Project, A Nightmare on Elm Street – Alien became an unlikely franchise, with each of its subsequent installments, seven as of this writing, experiencing a drop-off in quality (Aliens, however, remains a classic in its own right). Somehow that hasn’t tainted the original. I chose that quote above because it not only speaks to the titular monster, but to the film itself.
The film follows the crew of the Nostromo, a commercial towing rig, which is the first big difference between Alien and other science fiction of the day. The men and women of Alien aren’t astronauts or smugglers, they’re space truckers. It’s impressive how far the films strays from the Star Wars prototype (although the hexagonal hallways of the Nostromo are right out of A New Hope). The closest thing this film has to a rakish Han Solo type is Tom Skerritt’s Dallas, and if you really look at it, Dallas is just a company man put in an impossible situation. Upon waking up, the crew sits around the table, smoking, eating cereal; tellingly, the first thing Brett and Parker (Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto) are concerned with are their bonuses. There are no romantic subplots, and the only time a character is remotely sexualized is at the very end. (The script, by Dan O’Bannon from a story by him and Ronald Shusett, didn’t list any specific genders.) The ship itself is functional and little else; it’s deliberately analog, with little in the way of sleekness or aesthetics.
When the crew answers a distress call on a planet named LV-426 (even the planet names don’t have the romance of Tattooine or Yavin IV), they find a derelict alien ship, filled with massive, unimaginable architecture that wouldn’t be out of place in Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’lyeh. An alien bursts out of an egg and latches onto the face of Kane (John Hurt), and it’s at this point that Alien becomes not just frightening but genuinely upsetting.
A lot of horror – most of it, actually – is invasive in nature, but Alien is one of the few films that is penetrative in nature. The whole film – and really just this one, because Aliens is an action film, and the franchise goes off the damn rails after that – is about male rape, and is designed to make its male viewers uncomfortable. When the facehugging alien attaches itself to Kane, it keeps him alive by inserting a phallic oxygen tube down his throat. Later, when Kane has seemingly recovered, he dies one of film’s most memorable deaths, as a larval xenomorph bursts through his chest (this had to be shot in one take, with four cameras, to ensure a genuine reaction from the cast). Kane’s death is also Alien‘s cruelest twist.
Alien has often been called a haunted house movie in space, and the comparison is apt. Director Ridley Scott constructs the Nostromo to be confining (look how Parker has to duck when walking through the halls) and confusing. The layout of the ship is never made clear, and the multi-tiered structure makes it impossible to know from which direction you’ll get attacked. The strange geography is a staple of Gothic horror, and goes back to the cantilever doors and odd angles of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. When Brett finds himself in a room full of hanging chains and dripping water, we don’t question why it’s there; Scott has established the Nostromo as a grimy dreamscape, the geometry of which is only known by one organism. (The xenomorph moving through the air ducts is another way for it to invade and penetrate the crew; O’Bannon’s screenplay is at times not very subtle.)
Rewatching Alien, I found myself wondering: is this the best alien design in film? The only other contender I could think of was Predator, but I have to give this the edge. Major credit is due to H.R. Giger, whose bio-mechanical art style is part of the reason that Alien has endured for so long. The mouth-within-a-mouth is one of Giger’s ingenious flourishes that turns the title into both a noun and an adjective. The xenomorph defies comprehension and is truly the stuff of nightmares.
Scott could have made a brilliant, unsettling, claustrophobic haunted house movie and called it a day, but I feel like not enough attention is paid to Alien‘s world-building. The Weyland Corporation, employers of the Nostromo and its crew, has a horrific plan to bring the xenomorph back to Earth to study it, a plan almost brought to fruition by the android Ash (Ian Holm). In the character of Ash, Alien distances itself even further from the funny, quirky droids of Star Wars. He is cold and unemotional when Kane dies, and the methodical way in which he tries to kill Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is squirm-inducing – he shoves a rolled-up instruction manual down her throat, in one of the film’s few instances of man-on-woman violence. And on a logistical note, Ash’s beheading at the hands of Parker is a triumph of practical effects.
Alien is a top-to-bottom triumph that lets Scott, at the top of his game, show off his considerable powers of storytelling and staging. To watch it is to experience the vastness, the isolation, and the indifference of the universe. It’s no surprise that the ship is called the Nostromo – the name is taken from a novel by Joseph Conrad, who wrote about men venturing into an unfeeling darkness, unprepared for what waited there.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead (2004)
10/2: The Exorcist
10/3: Pontypool
10/4: Hocus Pocus
10/5: The Orphanage
10/6: Rosemary’s Baby
10/7: Alien
10/8: Scream series
10/9: Scream series
10/10: Cujo
10/11: The Cabin in the Woods
10/12: Pulse
10/13: The Babadook
10/14: Friday the 13th
10/15: The Last House on the Left (both versions)
10/16: The Thing (both versions)
10/17: Little Shop of Horrors
10/18: Hush
10/19: Silent Hill
10/20: The Shining
10/21: Funny Games (2007)
10/22: Evil Dead series
10/23: Evil Dead series
10/24: The Mist
10/25: The Ninth Gate
10/26: The Fly
10/27: A Nightmare on Elm Street
10/28: The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/29: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
10/30: It
10/31: Halloween (either version)
Related articles
About Author
