Alien (1979)

Not many franchises can boast the continuous relevance or international influence of Ridley Scott's Alien.

Cinematography by: Derek Vanlit

While my last post, Blade Runner (1982), is the film that stamped Ridley Scott’s name into the history books, Alien (1979) is the film that put Scott’s name into people’s mouths in the first place, and opened the right doors.

This hugely influential sci-fi horror film has even had a similar - though much less successful - trajectory as the Star Wars series. Both originated around the same year (1977 for A New Hope); spawned massive franchises that are still chugging out films, comics, novels, and video games; and introduced the world to iconic creatures (the Xenomorph, facehugger, and chestburster for Alien), and badass heroes (Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, a landmark for female representation as action heroes).

Apart from the effects, storytelling, cinematography, and directing, what’s often awe-inspiring in Scott’s films is the meticulously detailed production design. They fully conceptualized settings have been executed so minutely that every last pixel of the frame seems to have its own history. And the textures!

In Alien’s story, the horror reaches existential heights, as the crew of a commercial space vessel, trapped with nowhere to go, attempt to battle it out against an extraterrestrial creature that’s perfectly adapted for survival (corrosively acidic blood included). The creature’s sole purpose is to hunt and reproduce, which, appropriately, it does by killing: its larval forms inject an embryo into the chest cavity of a living host, where the embryo incubates for a few hours, and eventually bursts forth from the host’s chest in a spray of blood and viscera (hence the nickname “chestburster”). The embryo then rapidly grows into it’s adult form, the ultimate killing machine: the Xenomorph. It’s the universe’s most horrifying, unstoppable parasite. And as the film’s legendary tagline says, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”