I remember quite well the summer that Ridley Scott’s Alien came out. It was 1979, and I was eleven years old. The ads for the film were spectacularly creepy, in part because they didn’t show much of the actual movie – just an ominous shot of an egg, followed by the now-legendary tag line, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Honestly, it gave me chills.
As was the case with many of the R-rated movies I was too young to see, I learned about Alien by reading Mad Magazine’s parody of it. That was how I found out about the face-hugger, and the chest-burster, and the grisly, liquidy fate of the character Ash. Although Mad’s take on the material was comical, I was sufficiently disturbed by the idea that the film had such gruesome content.
It was about a year later that HBO ran the picture. By that time, it was par for the course for me to see R rated movies at home…provided they were comedies. My folks didn’t care if I heard foul language, but they largely sheltered me from violence and gore. Nevertheless, I somehow pursueded my mom to make an exception just this once and let me watch Alien. She agreed and, like any responsible parent, watched it with me in case things got too inappropriate.
Having never seen anything quite so icky before, it didn’t take me long to get physically sick to my stomach. The slimy alien eggs opening up, the spider-like creature sucking onto John Hurt’s face, and of course the famous moment where an alien spawn explodes through his chest, spurting blood everywhere – all these things conspired to turn my fragile stomach. Honestly, I can’t remember if I even made it all the way through. I don’t think I did.
As I got older and became more immune to guts and gore on screen, my interest in the Alien series grew. Of course, the quality of the sequels varied, but they still had an appeal. What I never did, however, was revisit the original. The trauma it caused me as a child was too much. And then an extraordinary DVD box set called Alien Quadrilogy was released. The set, which remains my favorite DVD in my entire 800+ title collection, had all four of the original movies, as well as hours and hours of bonus material. I knew immediately that it was time to revisit the series – starting with the one that kicked it all off.
To say the least, I was floored. I don’t scare easily, but Alien is one of the few films to accomplish this task. Ridley Scott does a very smart thing: he delays the payoff. In doing this, an atmosphere of dread is created, one that firmly ties your stomach in a knot. Most horror movies are in a rush to hit the scare beats. Scott went the opposite direction, dragging out the tension to unbearable levels, then dragging it out some more. The result is that you know something awful is going to happen. And then it doesn’t, and doesn’t, and doesn’t. Until it does.
Watching Alien as an adult was a revelation. The gory bits have not lost their power to shock, yet I was taken by how seamlessly Scott weaves them into the story. They are not here for mere shock value, but rather to convey the idea that this alien creature will put the humans through a fate much, much worse than death. That’s powerful.
The reason why I think I never made it through the whole movie as a kid was because when I rewatched it, I remembered nothing about the last half hour, when Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is stranded and alone with the alien. As she runs through a deserted space ship, alarms sounding and warning lights flashing, every muscle in my body tightened up. I knew Ripley would survive – she was in three sequels after all – but I feared for her nonetheless.
Alien is a masterpiece of mood. It creates a palpable sense of doom and sustains it for two straight hours. In the pantheon of horror cinema, it is one of the most effective pictures ever made. So few fright films ever achieve the perfection that this one does. Alien scared me as a kid and it scares me just as much as an adult.
Next time: My favorite movie of the past ten years, one that I identify with on a very personal level.
