The story of the production has been well told by a number of people besides Nathan (e.g., Thomson, 1998; Sammon, 1999; Scott, 2001; Luckhurst, 2014), and we only briefly touch on it here. It is in many ways a standard Hollywood story, with an idea evolving to a script and screenplay over a long period, with many hands contributing along the way – and many more again making a difference to the shape of the final product. Beginning from a 1970 script outline titled Star Beast by Dan O’Bannon, the idea was picked up by Ron Shusett, who had links with Fox. (Roger Luckhurst is excellent in recounting the various sources that O’Bannon drew on, precursor ideas mainly from SF novels – he recalls that Fox had to settle out of court a claim from veteran SF writer A. E. van Vogt over use of ideas from his ‘Voyage of the Space Beagle’ stories.) At Fox, another player – Gordon Carroll – saw potential for a crossover with the horror genre. While in script development, Walter Hill at Brandywine Productions introduced the notion of adjusting the gender balance among the ship’s crew. Fox’s Sandy Lieberson, who had recently seen Ridley Scott’s The Duellists raised the idea of Scott directing. Scott came to the script on the back of having seen Star Wars and realising that he wanted to shift away from art house-style films. But perhaps (as David Thomson captures it) he retained something of that in a distinction he drew: he thought this could be more than horror film: it could be a film ‘about terror’ (Thomson, 1998: 10).

It is important to give a context to our study. We are hardly alone in being interested in understanding the meaning of Alien to its audiences. Film critic Tom Shone, famously sneery towards film scholars, recently asked in his preview of Prometheus: ‘Why are academics so obsessed with Ridley Scott’s movie and its sequels?’ (Shone, 2012). To prove his point, he offers a bibliography with 24 academic references, suggesting that this ‘cottage industry’ is just an indication of typical academic obsessions with finding meanings in films that no one else can see. If only he knew. Our bibliography of significant discussions of films in the franchise currently stands at well over 100 items. But – sneers aside – Shone does have a point. There is something very intriguing in the depth and persistence of film academics’ engagement with, especially, the first Alien film. There are things going on inside this continuing fascination which are relevant to our study. Indeed, they are among the formative reasons for our undertaking it. There are several features to the debates which warrant attention: first, how widespread they have been, and in a wide range of publications. People were publishing commentaries in journals devoted to film, popular culture, American studies, philosophy, science fiction, feminism, psychology, psychoanalysis, speech studies, literary and gothic studies, and religion.