Alien (1979). Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Dan O’Bannon based on a story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, Bolaji Badejo, and four (4) orange cats.
In the history of cinema, horror and science fiction have never been very far apart.
I’m not terribly fussed about genre definitions, but they do play a role in film history, because they have always had an impact on how movies are pitched, made, promoted, and critiqued. So it’s interesting to me that for a long time, horror and sci fi films were considered to be essentially synonymous, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, when cinema was filled with monsters, mad scientists, and monstrous mad science brought about by man’s hubris.
We can see it in the classic Universal Studios monster films, reaching from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913) to Frankenstein (1931) to The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). And it wasn’t just in Hollywood; German Expressionist Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is a horror film about mind control, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) has some horror elements (the temple of Moloch, the shadowy catacombs) in its sci fi political industrialism. There were always exceptions, such as Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World (1925) or Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), but for the most part we have to get to the 1950s before we start to see films that fully separate the sci fi from horror.
At the risk of stating a point so obvious that it embarrasses all other obviousness, something rather important happened between the monster movie era of early Hollywood and the sci fi era of the ’50s, and that something was World War II. Scary stories that straddled the line between horror and sci fi moved out of drafty castles and dungeon laboratories and into small towns and the nightly news, and the victims of those horrors were no longer isolated individuals but entire communities and nations. There was still monster-centered sci fi horror like The Thing from Another World (1951), but at the same time films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Godzilla (1954), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) were pretty unsubtle in positing that The Real Horror is Human Society.
In very broad terms, sci fi and horror cinema evolved farther apart through the 1960s and early ’70s. Sci fi leaned heavily into the politics of the Cold War, the space race, and the existential ennui of mid-century life. Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972) embraced the idea that humankind heading out into space is also a way of delving into our own inner selves, and other films such as Silent Running (1973) dug into the bleak future people were fearing at the time.
On the other hand, horror cinema tended to stay grounded in a more intimate scale. Films like Psycho (1960), The Haunting (1963), and Night of the Living Dead (1968) locked us into haunted manors and farmhouses and roadside motels with the terrors. Horror turned its focus inward, into people’s homes and intimate lives. There were also early explorations into exploitation and splatter horror, particularly outside of the United States; we can see this in the Italian giallo films, for example, which are often basically thrillers, slashers, and exploitation films all mixed up together.
(Aside: Yes, of course, Night of the Living Dead is technically a sci fi film, but nobody really talks about it that way. Zombie films have always inhabited their own little niche. We’ll do a zombie month at some point.)
When we talk about film history, there is always a risk of oversimplifying things. But sometimes the throughlines of a film’s origin really are quite straightforward, and that’s what we have with Alien.
It went like this: Jaws (1975) made everybody want big, bloody thrillers. Star Wars (1977) made everybody want exciting spaceship sci fi. Halloween (1978) made everybody want moody, dread-filled horror. In the middle of that, a broke and unemployed screenwriter had just returned to the U.S. following the dissolution of the production of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune. Dan O’Bannon had previously been film school buddies with John Carpenter; they made the school-project-turned-indie-film Dark Star (1974) together before O’Bannon went off to France to work with Jodorowsky. When that film fell through, O’Bannon returned to the U.S. and, in his own words, focused on writing something he could sell to a studio, something marketable that would enable him to stop living on a friend’s sofa. That friend was Ronald Shusett, and the story they developed together would evolve into the screenplay for Alien.
We have a tendency, I think, to view Hollywood wanting more of the same thing through a very cynical lens, because it so often leads to tiresome retreads of overdone trends and tropes. But it’s important to remember there is also often excitement and enthusiasm involved. Studios will want more of something to make money, but the people actually making the movies often want more of something because they like it. It might sound a little bit flippant to say that Alien came about because the filmmakers were thinking, “Space is hot right now, and scary monsters are hot right now, so what if… monsters in space?” But I don’t mean it in a flippant way. I mean it in an admiring way. Sometimes in storytelling you have to reinvent the wheel, but sometimes you just have to come up with the right idea at the right time, and put a monster in space.
There is an abundance of writing about Alien and the franchise it spawned, and a lot of the lore is a pretty well-known part of sci fi movie history. It can sometimes be a bit hard to weed out verifiable details, because some of the most vocal members of the production (especially O’Bannon himself, but he’s not the only one) have had a tendency to let facts and memories sort of… evolve, a little bit, as the movie and subsequent franchise grew in success and popularity. But we’ll take what we can get.
O’Bannon mashed together a whole bunch of ideas, both his own and other people’s, when he wrote the early versions of the Alien screenplay. He has never been shy about naming direct and indirect influences, which include a bunch of sci fi literature from the likes of Philip José Farmer and Clifford D. Simak, films like The Thing From Another World and Forbidden Planet (1956), and of course the dark, weird, and—let’s not mince words—extremely phallic artwork of Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, whom O’Bannon had met while working on Jodorowsky’s Dune.
With script in hand, O’Bannon and Shusett started looking for a studio to make the movie. They pitched the film as “Jaws in space,” because this was the latter half of the ’70s and everybody and their brother wanted to capture the blockbuster Jaws magic. They ended up signing a deal with a production company associated with 20th Century Fox but almost immediately clashed with producers David Giler and Walter Hill. Giler and Hill made a lot of changes to the script and, in the end, wrote the version that was used for filming, although the quirky rules of Hollywood means that only O’Bannon got the screenwriting credit.
The timing worked out well, because the studio had this project in the works right when Star Wars came out and everybody was champing at the bit for the next big sci fi film. The studio looked around for a director and landed on Ridley Scott, as they were impressed by his first feature film, The Duelists (1977). I’ve never seen The Duelists; I don’t know what it is about a historical drama spanning twenty years during the Napoleonic Wars that made the producers of Alien and later the producer of Blade Runner (1982) think, “Ah, yes, this is exactly who I want for my bleak, tense futuristic sci fi thriller.”
Whatever they saw, it was the right call. Scott took on Alien with enthusiasm. But where the screenwriters had seen Jaws in space, and the studio had seen the next Star Wars, Scott saw something a little bit different: he saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in space.
And, honestly, I see it. Both films are more well-made than the standards of their genres demanded. They are moody, atmospheric, and marked by the deliberate buildup of dread that leads to an explosion of violence. They both also received a thoroughly mixed response upon release but have since come to be recognized as genre-defining classics and masterworks of the respective genres they helped spawn. Both have that grim, gritty style that exemplifies ’70s realism in film.
They’re also both about some people on a road trip who inadvertently stumble upon a house of horrors where things are made out of bones, which is honestly a rather niche point of similarity, but it counts.
Questions of interior décor aside, let’s focus on that gritty realism, because that is rightfully recognized as one of Alien’s standout characteristics, one that has had a profound and lasting influence on sci fi cinema.
Just to be precise about what that means, let’s do a little compare and contrast with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, because all sci fi movies in the ’70s were compared to 2001, and all sci fi movie directors in the ’70s were well aware of that. 2001 is a beautiful, artful film, with images and scenes that remain just as iconic now as they were when the movie was new. But the visual style of the film is not realistic, nor is it trying to be. Take, for example, the entire sequence set to “The Blue Danube,” including that wonderful scene of the flight attendant walking up the curved wall from one orientation to a perpendicular doorway. Nothing about that scene, from the music to the actor’s movements to the lighting to the camerawork, is meant to immerse the audience in the daily life of a flight attendant in space; instead, the clean, crisp feel of 2001 sets the events on screen apart from the realities of daily life. So too do the odd camera angles, the stilted conversations, the long silences. I like 2001 a lot more than Andrei Tarkovsky did, but he was right about there being a coldness to the film, one that puts an emotional barrier between the film and the audience.
That was deliberate, of course, as everything Kubrick did in 2001 was painstakingly deliberate. It was also deliberate when directors of sci fi films that came after 2001 chose to veer away from that style. Tarkovsky did it with the messy, neglected space station in Solaris (1972); Douglas Trumbull did it with his aircraft-carrier-turned-spaceship in Silent Running; George Lucas did it by aiming for a lived-in feel in Star Wars.
Scott and the rest of the crew made that same choice with Alien, starting from the very beginning. Pretty much everything there is to say about the making of Alien has already been said; that’s the trouble of writing about a movie as beloved by sci fi geeks as this one. There are several books, countless articles and features, and a long documentary called The Beast Within: The Making of “Alien” that you can easily (unofficially) watch with a bit of poking around on the internet. So I’m just going to talk about a few things I find particularly interesting.
The characters were developed from the ground up to be nobody particularly special. They are a working crew, bound together by contractual obligations, grudging familiarity, and the need for a paycheck, not by any higher purpose or ideal. We see this from their very first introduction, when the first thing Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (Yaphet Kotto) do upon waking from cryogenic sleep is to complain about how as maintenance crew their contracts are less favorable than those of the bridge crew, and the rest of the crew is rolling their eyes with the exasperation of coworkers who have long since tired of this conversation.
That ensemble characterization carries through the entire film, even as the characters are picked off one by one. They work together, but they don’t necessarily like their jobs or each other. It’s not just in the writing either; the cast is notably more middle-aged than what is common in American ensemble movies. Tom Skerritt, who plays Nostromo’s Captain Dallas, was in his mid-forties. Sigourney Weaver (who plays Ripley; it was her first major film role) and Veronica Cartwright (who plays Lambert) were the youngest members of the visible cast, and they were about twenty-eight or twenty-nine during filming. (I specify “visible” cast because Bolaji Badejo, the man inside the alien costume, was a couple years younger.) It may seem like a small thing, but casting actors whose ages actually make sense for the crew of a commercial space tug, all of them old enough to come across as a believable working-class crew that smokes and bickers and annoys the hell out of each other, really does add a layer of realism to the film.
But it doesn’t much matter what your actors look like if you stick them in an unconvincing environment, nor does it matter how great your alien and set designs are if the craftmanship and filming don’t showcase them properly. A film is a sum of a million moving parts, and a sci fi film with a non-human monster set in space means that every one of those parts has to aid in immersing the audience in the world of the story. The delicious slow build of dread, the claustrophobic industrial sets, the detailed exterior models, the deliberate escalation of violence, and unnerving creature design are a big part of this.
For the alien itself, O’Bannon showed the director Giger’s work and Scott was immediately taken by Necronom IV, which somehow manages to have even more eldritch penis imagery than the film it inspired, which is quite an accomplishment. That’s the image they pointed to, phalluses and all, when they brought Giger on to develop the alien body forms and alien spaceship in more detail. To bring it to life, however, they needed two things: (1) a tall, thin person to stick inside the suit, and (2) a convincingly scary alien head. The casting team found 6-foot-10 graphic design student Bolaji Badejo at a pub in London, which solved the first problem. For the second, Scott brought on special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who had the mechanical know-how to build a head with a working pharyngeal jaw that was good enough to allow for those delightful extreme close-ups.
I want to mention one more element that contributes to the film’s wonderful, oppressive sense of grim realism. It’s something I don’t often talk about in this column, because I’m not a filmmaker and it’s not generally something I put much thought into as a viewer: the lighting.
Scott was an art director before he directed his own films, so he took on the task of storyboarding the entire movie in extensive detail before any production work began; he used those initial storyboards to convince the studio to provide more money for the production. While filming, he would storyboard each day’s scheduled shots in even greater detail. That’s a lot of drawing to be doing while actively filming a movie; you can see examples of Scott’s Alien storyboards in various places online. Not all film directors are accomplished traditional visual artists (nor do they have to be), but Scott is, and his storyboards are fascinating to look at. Even in storyboard panel format, we can already see how his thoughts about a scene’s arrangement of light and shadows will translate into filming and onto the screen.
Both Scott and director of photography Derek Vanlint have written pieces for the magazine American Cinematographer about all the thought and experimentation that went into figuring out how to light Alien. This is one way in which Scott notes that he was specifically trying to find an approach different from other sci fi movies of the time. The sharpest contrast is once again 2001, in which many of the spaceship scenes are lit in bright, high-contrast light that seems to come from everywhere; those scenes that are darker, with lower contrast and more directional light, stand out in comparison.
Alien takes the opposite approach, because bright light doesn’t set the right mood if your goal is to create a believably cramped spaceship in which a terrifying alien might hide. It also doesn’t quite work if your sets are mostly enclosed on most sides, which the Alien sets were. Scott and Vanlint wanted the lighting to feel like it wasn’t coming from anywhere except what the setting provided. They devoted a lot of trial and error to figuring out how to light the interiors of Nostromo and the alien ship with believably limited sources of ambient light.
That doesn’t mean, as is all too often the case in modern film and television, that scenes should be too dark to see. It also doesn’t mean that Alien is all dark. Some scenes are very well-lit, including the infamous chest-bursting scene, which helps ensure we won’t miss anything. And in those scenes where everything is dark and hard to see, it’s because the movie doesn’t want us to see what’s lurking in the shadows. It turns out what my art teachers all love to say is correct: by decisively controlling where the light comes from and where the shadows fall, you control what people pay attention to in an image and how it makes them feel.
One of my favorite examples from Alien is the scene in which Ripley is confronting Ash (Ian Holm) about allowing Kane (John Hurt) back onto Nostromo in spite of the fact that he has an alien thing stuck to his face. The framing of that scene is fascinating. Ash is placed in the bright, concentrated light from his lab bench, whereas Ripley is entirely in the foreground shadow, even though they are speaking face-to-face at a normal conversation distance. There was a potential practical reason for this; Scott has said they didn’t film another angle focused on Ripley. (I don’t think that means Weaver wasn’t on set that day, which is how some interpret it.) But whether the reason is primarily artistic or practical, the effect is powerful, as we can see Ash and his gestures and expressions clearly, but Ripley is only a voice and a silhouette. Ripley has nothing to hide, whereas Ash is hiding quite a lot. Both of them, as well as the audience, knows this is an interrogation, not a friendly conversation between colleagues.
It’s a striking scene, but it’s certainly not the only one in the film where lighting is used so powerfully. The stormy exterior and murky light of the alien ship, the spotlight-like form of the crew table that leaves the crew members themselves in muted shadows, the computer-lit darkness of the bridge, the unsteady practical light of the flamethrower as Dallas creeps through the air vents—all of these contribute to the feeling of outer space being a physical, grubby, cluttered space where there are so many places for an alien (or a cat) to hide.
So much about Alien thoroughly and artfully helped define a visual language of futuristic sci fi for ordinary people. Not for business-class travelers and secret agents, not for uniformed explorers on noble missions, not for berobed space wizards with glowing swords, but for ordinary people, the ones who work jobs they don’t like, with bickering and annoying colleagues, for a boss back home that couldn’t care less what happens to them. This was noted in contemporary reviews at the time of the film’s release; a few expressed the opinion that it was a haunted house movie more than a sci fi movie, with the difference between the two types of films being one of scale and intimacy, not the rules of the setting or nature of the monster.
What an imagined future looks like will always say something about who is welcome to imagine themselves in it. A lot of sci fi will do that accidentally, but some will do it on purpose, and Alien is doing it on purpose. The filmmakers wanted an ensemble of ordinary workers on a job precisely because it would appeal to a broad audience. That’s not always how sci fi approaches things—there are a lot of characters in sci fi who are uniquely special in the world—but it is how horror often works, by placing regular and ill-prepared people in extraordinary circumstances and ruining their day.
All in all, Alien is made up of a smorgasbord of beloved elements from both the sci fi and horror traditions, all smashed together in a blender with the gritty realism of ’70s cinema, and the result is a brilliant film that is greater than the sum of its parts.
What do you think about Alien? What are your favorite parts? Have your thoughts about it changed over the years? There are so many things I didn’t talk about. I didn’t even get to the themes of corporate callousness or the psychosexual imagery, nor did I mention the cross-stitch currently hanging over my television that says “In space no one can hear you scream.” We will indeed watch Aliens (1986) at some point, because that movie is also great.
Around the World in Animation
We’re going to be combining April and May (because I’m taking a break in the middle) into a single theme: animated films from around the world! Different countries, different languages, different animation styles, because in animation all things are possible…
April 2 — Fantastic Planet (1973), directed by René Laloux
We’ve watched some weird films for this film club, but I think this French-Czechoslovak arthouse classic might be the weirdest one yet.
Watch: Max, Criterion, Roku, Amazon, and more.
View the trailer.
April 9 — The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981), directed by Roman A. Kachanov
I don’t normally like to include films with sketchy availability online, but I really wanted to include some Soviet animation.
Watch: For this one we have to go to YouTube and the Internet Archive. I don’t know if there is a trailer available anywhere, but the film is less than an hour long and was made for children, so let’s not worry too much about it.
April 16 — The Iron Giant (1999), directed by Brad Bird
It remains astonishing to me that this film was considered a crushing failure upon release, as everybody I know (myself included) absolutely loves it.
Watch: Amazon, Apple, Fandango, Microsoft.
View the trailer.
[At this point the Science Fiction Film Club and its columnist will be taking a three-week break.]
May 14 — Boy and the World (2013), directed by Alê Abreu
A beautiful, whimsical Brazilian film that blurs the lines between childlike wonder and the fantastic.
Watch: Amazon, Fandango, Microsoft.
View the trailer.
May 21 — Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), directed by Hayao Miyazaki
The post-apocalypse film that led to the creation of Studio Ghibli and revolutionized animation forever.
Watch: Max, Amazon, Apple, and more.
View the trailer.
May 28 — Watership Down (1978), directed by Martin Rosen
It might not be sci fi, but it is one of the most notable works of speculative fiction around. Also, I make the rules so we watch what I want to watch.
Watch: Max, Criterion, Amazon, and more.
View the trailer.