Film Friday: Alien (1979)

Alien is one of my favorite horror movies. It’s also one of my favorite science fiction movies. This is a film which does everything right in both genres, and that’s really impressive. It’s also really rare. And what makes this film work is what Ridley Scott doesn’t show us. Let’s talk about this classic film.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Alien is the story of the crew of the commercial towing vessel Nostromo. They are returning to Earth with a cargo of twenty million tons of ore. As the film begins, the crew is awoken from stasis when the ship detects lifesigns on a nearby uninhabitable planet. They are required to investigate. On the planet, one member of the crew has an alien creature break through his helmet and attach itself to his face. It appears to die, but as the crew is about to find out, they now have an alien problem.

The Perfect Horror Movie

What makes a film the perfect horror movie? The obvious answer is that it scares you. But there’s more to it than that because there are three different types of fear. The first is shock, such as when something jumps out at you. Horror movies need this to give the film a pulse. Alien does this extremely well. In fact, Alien is full of surprises and Ridley Scott often manipulates the level of surprise by teasing the audience with false tension, which he releases right before landing the real surprise. This catches the audience right after they’ve let their guard down and makes these shocks all the more effective.

The second is akin to dread or instinctual fear. This is achieved by putting the audience in a position where our natural instincts cause us to feel uneasy. Examples of this include our fear of the dark, fear of being in tight spaces or being trapped, fear of being in spaces that are too large for us to monitor and control, and fear of the unknown. These are harder to achieve on film because it requires pulling the audience into the film. But once again, Alien does this perfectly. In fact, the ship is perfectly designed for this. It is far too vast for the crew to monitor and control, yet at the same time, wherever the crew is at the moment feels confined, with no easy escapes. What’s more, Scott was smart enough to never show you enough of the creature to take away the mystery or to let you get accustomed to it. Thus, the full extent of the threat itself remains unknown, and that scares us.

The third is a true sense of terror. This is the kind of thing that sticks with you and makes you shiver days later. This is the Holy Grail of horror and few films achieve it, with Jaws and The Exorcist being notable examples. One would think Alien couldn’t really achieve this because its subject matter isn’t something to which we can related. Indeed, while any of us can imagine being eaten by a shark or possessed by something demonic, few of us think we’re going to end up fighting aliens in deep space. But Alien cleverly gets around this problem by giving the audience moments to which they can relate. For example, having the alien burst out of Kane’s chest is something humans can imagine because it fits right in with any number of urban legends about creatures laying eggs inside someone. This lets the audience relate to the horror, and the strength of this vision has been proven by the fact everyone continues to talk about that moment thirty years later.

This is why Alien is such a phenomenal horror movie, because it hits on all three types of fear. Few films manage to achieve this, and those that do tend to be remembered as classics. Alien is one of these elite few.

The Perfect Science Fiction Movie

Not only is Alien the perfect horror movie, but it’s also the perfect science fiction film. The most critical aspect of any science fiction film is that it presents a world the audience can believe is real. Too often, the worlds presented are shallow or make no sense. They include technological changes that would remake society, yet society hasn’t been remade. They present a world without laborers and people who own no personal effects. They talk about the elimination of money, yet still show people having jobs. And sometimes, they’re just dated, where our own society is now more advanced. Alien falls into none of these traps.

Despite the entire film taking place on only one ship and involving only seven people, Alien gives us an incredibly rich and detailed glimpse of their universe. Indeed, Alien tells us everything we need to know about their society. They have blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, and bosses. The interaction between the computer and the crew tells us that society very much remains a society which humans run, it is not automated. The suits at corporate still run the world. The crew worry about money and their contracts. They talk about food and grouse about work. They still think about sex and haven’t been “pair bonded” or some crap like that. The Nostromo is crawling with personal knickknacks. Their clothes are dirty. Their equipment is used. This is a real world, and we can visualize it, and these are real people with real lives, not science fiction prop-people.

Moreover, we get tantalizing glimpses of the rest of the universe. We see there are aliens in this universe, as we see two species – the alien itself and the alien corpse on the ship where they find the alien. We discover there are robots, and they look just like people. We know from the Nostromo that the universe is crawling with advanced spaceships. How do we know? To us, the Nostromo would be stunningly fantastic, but to her crew, the Nostromo is a piece of junk. It is a tired, common workhorse of a spaceship. That tells us there must be larger, more modern vessels ferrying people, exploring space, or even defending worlds. We know all these things without ever seeing them.

And that is the key point: what makes Alien such great science fiction is actually not what Ridley Scott shows us, it’s what he doesn’t show us. He shows us the usual things every science fiction film shows us: aliens, computers, and spaceships, but he never shows us too much.

We see enough of the alien to understand its more terrifying aspects, such as its acid blood, its murderous instincts, and its being impervious to extreme atmospheres. We are even given a hint of its life cycle. That makes this creature very real to us. But beyond that, we really only get glimpses and little real knowledge. That make the creature real and yet simultaneously keeps it a mystery. This results in a very satisfying creature because we feel we know it, yet we don’t know enough about it to disbelieve it. To the contrary, we know just enough to leave us hungry for more.

The Nostromo is the same. Spaceships often feel fake because they are designed for the sleek visual or built like mazes to accommodate the horror plot. . . cough cough Event Horizon. The Nostromo isn’t. It is built for a genuine task and its design is ergonomic. The part where the crew lives is bright and well lit. Its style and shape make sense. All of this makes the ship real to us because this is very much a ship that real people would take into space. Yet, at the same time, we know nothing about the ship’s size, shape or technology. This lack of knowledge actually helps us believe the ship is real because we don’t have anything to criticize and thus we can’t poke holes in the design.

This lack of knowledge also keeps the film from feeling dated. Consider the computer. While the computer interface feels somewhat dated, Scott does enough to make us think we aren’t seeing “the whole picture,” so we never get a chance to compare the supposed capabilities of this computer with our own. Moreover, since the Nostromo is a piece of junk, we know the computer is not the high end. All of this prevents us from laughing at the film when our own technological achievements surpass those in the film. Had Scott tried to show off how great this computer was, the film probably would be dated by now.

These were brilliant choices. By focusing on the personal relationships of the crew, while only teasing us with glimpses of the science fiction and leaving the rest to our imaginations, Scott lets the audience fill in the blanks and build the world in their heads. This makes the film remarkably adaptable because everything outside of the story itself can change with tastes and time. Thus, it will never grow stale and it will never grow old. This is a perfect formula and it’s amazing so few science fiction (or horror) films have grasped what Scott does here. And the key to what Scott has done is to give us just enough to make everything seem real, but absolutely nothing more.

Interesting.