Alien

Roger Luckhurst

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838714284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) is one of the most enduring films of modern cinema – its famously visceral scenes acting like a traumatic wound we seem compelled to revisit. Tracing the constellation of talents that came together to produce the film, Roger Luckhurst examines its origins as a monster movie script called Star Beast, dismissed by many in Hollywood as B-movie trash, through to its afterlife in numerous sequels, prequels and elaborations. Exploring the ways in which Alien compels us to think about otherness, Luckhurst demonstrates how and why this interstellar slasher movie, this old dark house in space, came to coil itself around our darkest imaginings about the fragility of humanity. This special edition features original cover artwork by Marta Lech.

'Alien'

Introduction

In 1977, a heavily revised script optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox entitled Alien went through the hands of several Hollywood directors. Peter Yates passed on it. Robert Aldrich passed on it. The veteran Jack Clayton, director of the brilliant ghost story The Innocents (1961), dismissed it as 'a stupid monster movie'. The Screen Directors Guild then went on strike. Eventually, the English director Ridley Scott was signed up in February 1978. Scott had a long track record in advertising but not so much experience in studio film production. He had released his first feature film, The Duellists, in 1977, which was not strongly promoted by Paramount. It had shown in precisely one cinema in Los Angeles.

When Alien opened in May 1979, with a saturation ad campaign, it was to lukewarm reactions. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby warned that it provided 'shocks of a most mundane kind' and called it 'an extremely small, rather decent movie of its modest kind, set inside a large, extremely fancy physical production'. The Monthly Film Bulletin praised only its 'commercial astuteness', complaining at its 'moribund' narrative which 'seems to dispense with dramatic structure altogether' and mourned its general 'lack of invention'. James Monaco in Sight & Sound thought it had little intellectual content and 'has no other reason for being except to work its effects on audiences'.¹

This is not a promising start for what became one of the most potent myths of modern cinema. Alien did in fact do well commercially: it was the fourth largest grossing film of 1979 (earning $60 million in America). But texts give birth to myths once stories escape the bounds of their local plot and float free from their origins. Gothic fictions have done this continually across the centuries: Shelley's Frankenstein, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or Bram Stoker's Dracula have each provided powerful icons, condensing something about what it means to be human in the modern world with such incredible economy and force that they broke their literary bonds and became embedded in the general culture. Alien undoubtedly has the same force as its Gothic forebears, bursting out of its modest origins and coiling itself around our darkest imaginings.

So far, Alien has spawned three direct sequels (1986, 1992 and 1997), many revised versions and directors' cuts of each film in the series, a sort of prequel (Prometheus, 2012) and an associated franchise - Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). More films in these series are slated for development. The 1979 Alien appeared immediately as a novel, a comic and a 'foto-book' (helpful for those, like me, who were too young to see an X-rated horror film but could pounce on the stills instead). Aliens (1986) was followed by the launch of a series of comics from Dark Horse, then a set of novelisations exploring this shared world. When video games became a significant income stream in the 1990s, the plotting of Alien proved highly conducive to the shoot-em-up gaming format and several games based on the film have appeared since. Special DVD box sets, anniversary editions and associated merchandise continue to pour out, as does a vast archive of writing by academic critics and equally learned fans. In 2011, Fox released the book Alien: Vault, another account of the making of the film, replete with exhaustive memorabilia. On the thirty-fifth anniversary there was yet another official book, Alien: Archives, a new video game, Alien: Isolation, two comic series (one each in the Alien and Prometheus world) and a brand-new set of Alien novels. Fox also announced the first Ripley collectible action figure, as well as related 'plush toys and bobbleheads'.² None of this looks likely to stop any time soon.

What was it in this creaky Old Dark House in Space, this interstellar slasher, that gave it the evolutionary advantage to survive the late-1970s glut of horror hybrids? The story of how Alien came together in the form it did is a series of glorious accidents, a chance result of arguments and compromises that would surely have wrecked a hundred other films. Cinema, like myth, rarely springs from a single intent, and Alien was moulded, at every level, by the forces of something collective, beyond itself, that pushed it into a shape that nevertheless felt instantly necessary and preordained.

Scott and Weaver on set

This book is an attempt to account for the cultural fascination Alien has generated. For me, it is a boundary fiction, a film that rests on a number of cusps. These kinds of films do a lot of cultural work for us, negotiating limits and meanings. It is why we keep returning to them. Alien is a late-1970s studio film, given the green light by a studio keen to repeat the success of Star Wars (1977), yet it retains a late whiff of that independent spirit of the New Hollywood and even a dash of European art-house sensibility. An efficient thriller plot, honed by tough-guy director Walter Hill, was ornamented to baroque excess by the extraordinary concentration of artistic talents that came to work on the film. Low trappings came with high style.

After Alien it is difficult to recall how innovative was its appearance in the liminal zone between science fiction and Gothic horror. In 1980, the first serious academic study of science-fiction cinema, Vivian Sobchack's Screening Space, struggled to parse the difference of these genres, recognising that there was a 'a limbo of films between horror and science fiction', films featuring BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters) that were abjected as ridiculous by purists in both camps.³ For a long time, science-fiction criticism premised the virtues of the genre on it being scientific, cognitive, future-oriented and sublime, explicitly contrasting it against the lowly Gothic for being religious, over-emotional, tyrannised by the past, and always willing to pull the sublime down into the monstrous and grotesque. Science fiction deals with future possibilities, the Gothic with the dread inheritance of the past, the doom of repetition. But what happens when a film overthrows these conceptual oppositions and entirely fuses the genres? Alien offers a vision of an industrial future where the technological sublime is begrimed by the terrors of the deep ancestral past: this felt very new. It taunts the shiny NASA narrative of the Apollo missions in their dying days. It is the dark shadow of the science-fiction spectacular of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, creeping up behind it in the blockbuster charts of 1979 with new kinds of cinematic intensity and affect.

It is because of this location between genres that Alien launches its grand theme: an investigation of the boundaries of what it means to be human in a hostile universe teeming with other kinds of biological and artificial life. Anxious fantasies of origins and sexual reproduction are at the core of the film's horrific appeal, as they were in so many horror films of the 1970s. But Alien's science-fictional Gothic expands the palate from demon babies and toddler Antichrists, brooding more expansively on evolutionary time, the biological inheritances not just of the past but the monstrous possibilities of parallel alien development or future mutation. These threats hem in the human element in an uncertain zone in the spectrum of being. The fragile boundaries of the body will be menaced from within and without.

Of course, it is that scene, the birth of the alien, which exists like a post-traumatic flashback in our culture, tempting us back to revisit the horror again and again. The franchise chases this inaugural shock, hoping to tap its primal energy. But twists in the expectations of how gendered human beings act are also amongst the most interesting things about Alien: the abject male birthing, the feminisation of the hero, Ripley. This is not all: Alien actually offers a whole spectrum of beings, from the primordial creature they disturb on the asteroid to the computerised Mother that directs their every living breath, to the android that hides in their midst and computes actions to the dictates of an unseen, inhuman corporation. And this is to say nothing of the cunning role of Jones, the ship's cat.

If Alien is about the failure of community or coexistence with others (survival can be conceived only in terms of do-or-die), then this is because the film, shot in 1978 and released in 1979, is also on the cusp of utterly different eras. It was first given a limited release in late May 1979, only a matter of weeks after the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and given a full release in November 1979 just as the Republican Ronald Reagan won the American presidential election. This was a moment of decisive shift from the economic and political crises of the 1970s to the rise of what would come to be known as neoliberalism. Although it cannot know this about itself, Alien registers this epochal shift with ominous portents.

'What's the story, Mother?'

The origin and development of what became the film Alien is buried in a mass of competing accounts. Even before the film's release, the original writer, Dan O'Bannon, was in the press letting people know that 'the production ended up being a battle between camps'.⁴ He was hired and fired several times, forbidden from seeing daily rushes and then banished from the set. The writers fought for credit, eventually requiring arbitration from the Screen Writers Guild. The artists and designers bitched about each others' work. The actors and producers whined continually about the rookie director. The director began avoiding the actors on set. Production time seemed slow and always behind schedule. Somehow, out of this wreckage, a terrible beauty was born.

Dan O'Bannon's first script for a B-movie called Star Beast inevitably wore its pulp sources heavily on its sleeve, and was conceived as a low-budget monster movie in the Roger Corman style. Broke and ill with an undefined stomach complaint (eventually diagnosed as Crohn's disease), O'Bannon had written it whilst living on the sofa of his friend, writer and producer Ronald Shusett. Star Beast emerged from various half-finished scripts, including one about an American B-17 bomber returning from a bomb run on Tokyo, the crew menaced by a nasty set of gremlins on board.

O'Bannon had been writer, effects designer and one of the stars of John Carpenter's student film, Dark Star (extended and released at feature length in 1974), a downbeat comedy of catastrophically bored astronauts on a mission to blow stuff up. The new extended scenes were all based around the comical alien on board, a ...