Alien!

Readings in the Genre - Week 8 - Alien

Well, it's not really a 'reading' but Ridley Scott's 'Alien' is a masterpiece of Horror Science-Fiction, so I guess I can see why it'd make an appearance in the course.  The difficult part comes from extracting techniques and criticism from the movie that can be applied to the written word... our format.

A number of people I've talked to have described Alien as a B-rate movie plot, done really well.  In a lot of ways they're right... spacecraft encounters an alien creature on a planet, said creature proceeds to kill off the crew, crew must fight said creature to survive.  That's the plot of a lot of B movies over the years.  The difference between 'Alien' and it's predecessors like 'The Thing' is that each of the elements is done extremely well and the director has clearly embraced the Horror elements of the story.  Not that it uses a different plot.

The first thing that stands out about Alien is the titular figure is just that alien... it's not just a human with a different skin tone or girth... when the people designed the Alien they made it truly alien... a smooth exoskeleton with a roughly human shape... impossibly non-human skull... and who can forget the recessed and extendable second mouth?  (Scary thing is that an entire genus of ocean going reptiles had a similar feature in their anatomy) It's alien... its black, it's almost formless in a lot of shots where you see the creature... you just get a glimpse, it's there and its not.  It's something the mind can't quite grasp.

Then there's the whole thing with the alien's first appearance... the face hugging creature that infects the crewman is dead and removed... the guy goes back to work... has breakfast.  Then has an alien rip out of his stomach in the middle of the meal.  That puts the threat way out there... one of their crew has become this... thing that each of them is struggling to kill or destroy.  While the threat that another of them could be infected is lurking on in the background (not used till the sequel of course).

Space as a setting is by itself a terrifying environment, the threat of death in vacuum and the absolute isolation that the crew is under make for a great start point for the story... like a ship at sea or an oasis in the desert... there's no where to escape to.  Alien works by stacking threats and complications... the threat of isolation, vacuum, the facehugger, death in cryostasis, and ultimately the alien.

A quick word about the Heroine... like a lot of horror stories I've read.  We don't need to really like the hero in order to get into the story.  Ripley is a tough woman to be sure, but she's not high up in the command ladder of the ship or extraordinarily strong.  The one thing she has that a lot of horror story heroes seem to have is a remarkably strong desire to live.  They don't give up and keep trying more and more desperate and insane things until something works.