31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 12: Alien

Day 12: Alien (1979), dir. Ridley Scott

Streaming Availability: Hulu

"PRIORITY ONE

INSURE RETURN OF ORGANISM FOR ANALYSIS.

ALL OTHER CONSIDERATIONS SECONDARY.

CREW EXPENDABLE."

The late-Seventies, early-Eighties are the most glorious years for horror fans. This was a revolutionary period in special effects, in gore, in storytelling. Importantly, this is the time that sees the birth of the blockbuster film. These movies will end up defining the canon of the male nerd for another forty years. Poll any horror fan, any horror filmmaker too, and their personal top 10 will almost certainly include two or three movies from this period, if not ten for ten. Just to name a few: Halloween, The Shining, Jaws, The Evil Dead, Suspira, Dawn of the Dead, Carrie, The Thing (just you wait), and of course... today's movie, Ridley Scott's Alien. This is where the modern monster movie begins, this is where slashers begin, this is where Cronenberg and Carpenter and dozens others get going. This is where horror franchises really get moving in their modern assembly line processes, with sequel after sequel. Alien uniquely being up there as an all-time great horror and blockbuster franchise.

If I were to tell you that the first Alien is one of the greatest movies ever made, I would be wasting my breath. I might as well be writing an essay about how fire is hot. What else is there to add? There is nothing I could say that would increase this film's reputation. It's influence is unmistakable across films, there will an entire subgenre of rip-offs to follow. It's influence is massive in video games as well, the entire Metroid franchise is born here, along with a thousand other NES games stealing their enemy design from this film.

20th Century Fox put a considerable budget behind Alien, which is a stark difference from what we've been seeing all month so far. This is no indie film, this is no skin of your teeth production, it was a big deal. Fox invested somewhere between $11 and $14 million, which was not a lot today, but went a lot further back in 1979. That's roughly equal to the movie that made this all possible: Star Wars. After Lucas showed the world Jedis and Death Stars, genre pictures were not the embarrassing crap your studio made on the side, they were the centerpiece of your business. Plus Jaws was only a few years earlier, creature features were in vogue too. A lot of doors could open for you if you had a script that promised to be "Star Jaws". Well, one guy did.

The development of Alien is legendary, everything about this movie is. There is much more interest in this movie than everything that's come before. Nobody will write whole books about Horror Express like they have for the Alien franchise. People such as H.R. Geiger and Dan O'Bannon are still known primarily for their relationship to this very movie. O'Bannon, the original screenplay writer, had previously written and starred in Dark Star, a bad joke of a movie, directed by John Carpenter right out of film school. The guy had a ton of interest in space SciFi. You can clearly see inspiration from The Thing from Another World in the concepts, also the 1965 Mario Bava movie Planet of the Vampires. (Which I probably should have covered for this series, but... it looked bad and cheesy.) O'Bannon and Geiger had been connected to Alejandro Jodorowsky's hallucinatory Dune film, which never was shot and probably never could have been. Well-known director Walter Hill was involved with the production everywhere, writing more of the actual shooting script than O'Bannon did. Hill will remain involved all the way to Alien³. Yet the final director's chair went to a mostly-unknown forty-something advertising director named Ridley Scott. Surely he won't amount to anything.

The thing about Alien is that it is a monster movie, a haunted house in space, a SciFi thriller, but also, this is a patient movie. This was part of the thing back in the Seventies, we were so impressed by and proud of our ability to finally film spaceships with such detail and clarity that we would luxuriate in it. Personally, I love this. The best part of any Star Trek movie is the ten minutes in The Motion Picture we spend watching Kirk almost cry while approaching the Enterprise in dry dock. And it works great for establishing a mood in Alien, the slow builds are as impressive as Kubrick's work building the Overlook. Honestly the best part of Alien might happen in these first shots, before the crew even wakes up.

The title character (Bolaji Badejo) does not appear until an hour in. Jonesy the Cat does not appear for an hour in either. Our heroine, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is not the central character until almost ninety minutes in. We do not land on the alien planet to start the plot rolling for quite awhile. We spend the first few minutes just floating around the spaceship, staring at set design. The only moving piece is a little drinking bird toy on the kitchen table, and then a computer humming to life. The toy is a great detail, this one bit of homeliness tossed in around all this endless confounding machinery, rows and rows and rows of blinking lights, dozens of beeps and bloops running without its human masters, like the dead Midwich at the beginning of Village of the Damned.

Alien and Star Wars share very similar energies in their ship concepts. I could see Han Solo stepping out of his cockpit and then walking into the kitchen of The Nostromo. Today when films are trying to emulate Seventies SciFi, they cannot match the lived-in working class qualities of this vision of the future. The first rift in the crew is "the bonus situation", and who gets how much of a share. The details are not clear, nor do they matter, just these guys on a job, not clean professionals or brilliant scientists. This is a shift. Han Solo and Ellen Ripley share one thing: they're space truckers.

The thing that breaks up this normal every day drive across space comes once the crew are forced by their Company (not ever named yet) into a side mission. That takes them to an alien world to investigate the abandoned gothic castle that is a crashed ship. That's where you see the Geiger designs in every ribbed wall and oily black texture. The alien itself - not yet called a "xenomorph" - looks like a living, walking part of this castle. It also blends in with the random ductwork and mechanisms of the human ship. 

In Alien the titular villain is just an animal. It's big, it's hungry, it goes "boo!" once to Dallas (Tom Skerrit) before eating him. However, it's movements in this film are strange, kabuki-like at times. In all the sequels the xenomorphs will be much more bestial and direct. The art design tells a lot though: the creature is machinery in the shape of a man. Humanoid only so far with its long head, with pipework in its shoulders and metallic skin. Continuing that metaphor is the science officer Ash (Ian Holm), a more literal machine man since we discover he's a robot built by the Company to collect the specimen. He's a remake of Dr. Carrington from The Thing from Another World, even repeating a similar love for the monster's "simplicity". Once revealed to be a construct, Ash's own movements and gestures become exaggerated and operatic. Holm's expressions while trying to murder Ripley are remorseful, maybe sad, but who can say what he's thinking? If he's thinking.

The attempts to humanize the ship computer by calling it "Mother" ends up merely creating a hateful traitorous parent for the crew. At every turn, Mother fails the heroes, even not stopping the self-destruct sequence in a final act of spiteful cruelty. At all turns, our technology has betrayed us. It desires a species to replace us, one more suited to its worldview.

We must also discuss the sexual element. Alien is one of the great Mpreg movies, in the most terrible way possible. Kane (John Hurt) is violated by the Facehugger creature and births the creature out of his chest. The Alien franchise never becomes explicitly about sexual violence until Alien³, but a lot of its cheaper imitators like Galaxy of Terror were a lot less tasteful. Roger Corman and Italian filmmakers got a lot of mileage out of making Alien rip-offs, including one shamelessly calling itself Alien 2: On Earth. There was a movie called Inseminoid in 1980 for god's sake. I'm going to avoid as many of these as I can in this series, I don't need to talk about rape for a week. But the body horror is core to this franchise, so is a theme of motherhood as perverted as that sounds. Kane's chest exploding is up there as one of the greatest horror moments ever.

My family has a legend that my little uncle at nine-years-old ran out of the theater once the baby alien popped out. I think there's a million similar stories for audiences everywhere.

Alien is simply a masterpiece, forty years later I do not think Ridley Scott ever shot a better movie. The script is great too. Rewatching this movie and watching Ash is fascinating since every move he makes is always in service of the creature, and he's not a good liar either. Ripley becomes the hero mainly due to her strength in daring to question him. Sigourney Weaver does not have a lot early on, but when she's on camera, she's great. You can see her struggle not to sob when Mother reveals how doomed the crew had been the whole time. There's a great cast all-around: Veronica Cartwright, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, these are people I celebrate seeing in any movie. Even the effects hold up great. They wisely keep the alien off-camera as much possible, so what angles we get are iconic. The close-ups of it smiling as fluid pours down from its two sets of teeth are as iconic as the shark's mouth biting down in Jaws. The scene where Stanton gets eaten is something every filmmaker should study that wants to shoot a monster movie.

This will be very hard to top. Maybe the production designer for Galaxy of Terror has some ideas for a sequel...

Next Time! I thought one Alien was scary enough, now its plural?? Aliens!