The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Science fiction, horror

DIRECTOR

Ridley Scott

WRITERS

Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett

STARS

Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Ian Holm

BEFORE

1974 The concept for Alien originates in Dan O’Bannon’s student movie Dark Star.

1975 In Jaws, Steven Spielberg builds up dread with only brief glimpses of the shark.

AFTER

1986 The sequel to Alien, James Cameron’s Aliens has multiple monsters.

1992 In Alien 3, Ripley crashes on a prison planet, where the aliens wreak havoc among the grizzled inmates.

Alien was released two years after Star Wars, which had rekindled Hollywood’s appetite for space. Like Star Wars, it featured spaceships, distant planets, and innovative special effects. Unlike Star Wars, however, it was terrifying—a nihilistic nightmare story spun around cinema’s most disturbing alien.

The project was originally called Star Beast. It had a B-movie script about an alien stowaway onboard a spaceship full of humans. In the hands of director Ridley Scott, however, this seemingly unoriginal concept became something new in the science-fiction genre: a dark, sinister horror movie with gore, violent deaths, and weird, psychosexual imagery. Scott brought groundbreaking, grimy realism to the design of the spacecraft, engaged Swiss Surrealist artist H. R. Giger to design the alien, and cast a woman (Sigourney Weaver) in the role of the tough-as-hell protagonist Ripley. Audiences who went to the movie expecting laser guns and amusing robots were in for a surprise.

The poster was designed to give nothing away to audiences, and the movie reveals the alien’s form only bit by bit in order to ratchet up the tension.

Terror of the unseen

The alien is the story’s real star, in spite of the fact that Scott keeps his monster hidden for most of the movie. The viewer glimpses its spiny hand, its quivering drool, the black shine of its skull. The audience’s imagination fills in the rest. The terror comes from its dread and unbearable silences, and the knowledge—thanks to Alien’s iconic tagline—that “in space, no one can hear you scream.”

What else to watch: It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) ✵ Jaws (1975) ✵ The Thing (1982) ✵ Aliens (1986) ✵ Prometheus (2012)