Dark, foreboding, macabre and intense, Ridley Scott’s Alien is perhaps the finest example of horror and sci-fi fused into a sublime work of cinema. Often copied but never equaled, this tale of survival manages to be outlandish, creepy, deathly serious, scary and somehow within the boundaries of nightmarish believability.

In the cold depths of space, Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and a crew of six other members man the mining ship Nostromo, a horrifyingly beautiful spacecraft housing shadowy corridors and claustrophobic ingresses. When a distress signal is picked up from a nearby planet, the crew is awoken from hypersleep to investigate. A small search party examines the dilapidated remains of an alien vessel, resulting in Kane (John Hurt) being unwittingly attacked by a spider-like parasite that affixes itself to his face. He is returned to the ship for examination, resulting in one of the most memorable and gut-wrenching scenes ever filmed. As shocking as the shower scene in Psycho, an alien creature tears its way out of his rib cage, spewing blood and viscera across an appalled dinner table of crew members. Attempting to catch the tiny snakelike creature, the dwindling group is slowly picked off one by one as the alien grows rapidly in size and deadliness.

One of the most unique aspects of the film is the maturity of its characters. While slasher flicks make use of screaming teens that run frantically from a deranged killer, Alien instead features a crew of adults. Perhaps unintentionally, the older crew has a hardened, experienced feel about them, creating a more mature and realistic sense to the game of cat and mouse. Few films have been able to genuinely capture the immediacy and seriousness of fictional and outlandish alien situations. Director Ridley Scott miraculously managed to create two of the most important and influential science-fiction films of all time with Alien and later Blade Runner. The scares and terror that surmount are stunning in their simplicity and yet carefully executed with fascinatingly eerie sets, biomechanical alien designs and an overabundance of steam and slime.

H.R. Giger, a famous Swiss surrealist was assigned the daunting task of creating the ultimate alien life form. His design is flawless due to the ingenious reproductive cycle he envisioned, as well as the biomechanical design of the horrifying adults. James Cameron would later alter the cycle by creating the Alien Queen in the first of several sequels, but the main idea of an egg bearing a parasitic facehugger which lays another egg in the victim’s chest, remained the same. After bursting out of the body, the worm-like chestburster would grow to a bipedal monstrosity complete with a banana-shaped head and a tongue lined with teeth. In the original blueprints, the alien drone would be capable of mutating human bodies into in an egg to start the process again.

Rivaled in suspense by its sequel Aliens, but not in sheer terror, Alien is perhaps the greatest science-fiction horror film ever made, and has certainly introduced us to one of the most terrifyingly formidable screen villains of all time.

- Mike Massie

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