Over forty years after its release, Alien still makes you jump, bite your fingernails to the quick, and fear what lurks in the shadows. Ridley Scott’s Alien is available to rent, buy or stream.
In space, no one can hear you scream, an immortal slogan of a film that would change the landscape of science fiction and horror forever. From its simple yet mysterious poster design to its haunting trailer, Ridley Scott’s Alien gleefully tore up the horror and science-fiction rulebook, taking cinema audiences into the coldest, darkest reaches of space. Scott would take the Star Wars fever of the late 70s and strip away the blasters, dogfights, and cantinas in favour of a stark, mechanical and human portrait of space exploration. But it was the design, sound, female representation, and horror held in Alien that would earn it a rightful place in movie history.
Alien premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in September 1979, but it would hit UK cinemas in January 1980. Since that premiere, its influence on modern cinema has been widely discussed, with multiple viewpoints on its lasting legacy. Ripley is at the heart of these discussions, as the relative newcomer Sigourney Weaver dared to challenge the final-girl stereotype. Weaver’s Ripley wasn’t screaming or running away, her hair plastered to her face; she was calm, collected, and determined.
Weaver would rewrite the role of women in horror just as Carrie Fisher transformed the role of women in science fiction adventure. However, in the end, Scott lets Ripley down by stripping her to her underwear. It’s almost as if Scott suddenly realised he had given birth to a new female protagonist who didn’t need men to survive and quickly pandered to the expectations of a ’70s male audience.
The ship’s technology is human, clunky, functional, and prone to the flaws of its crew—the low-fi aesthetic of Alien, a reason the movie still feels fresh over forty years on. The Nostromo is claustrophobic, dark, and old; it is a haunted house in all but name. The ship’s silence allows for sudden jolts of noise, like a classic haunted-house movie where the wind howls around the eaves before a mysterious bang shocks the poor souls within its walls. But when you add H. R. Giger’s xenomorph, based on his 1976 Necronom IV painting, to this floating haunted house, Alien becomes a true masterpiece of science fiction and horror. By mixing human anatomy with metallic layers of armour, the androgynous yet sexual creature holds a disturbing look that our brains can’t process.
Ridley Scott’s decision to keep this creature in the shadows only heightens our fear as we try to decipher its shape and design in the darkness, its silent movements interrupted only by the screams of its victims. Over forty years after its release, Alien still makes you jump, bite your fingernails to the quick, and fear what lurks in the shadows. It is a masterpiece that takes us into the cold and dark reaches of space while reminding us that our sense of superiority is very much Earth-bound.
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