I first saw it on VHS in the early 80s. As a birthday treat my Dad brought the school VHS player home - a massive weighty thing it was. We then went to the video shop (a classic - sticky carpets, dense shelves of obscure wonders) and rented Alien and Dark Star. Alien scared the piss out of us and has stayed one of my favourites ever since. I’ve managed to see it in thr cinema a few times now and the darkness really does enhance the experience.
yep, it truly is a classic.
As for getting another film like it, obviously it’s really a sub-genre of its own, so anything too close is just a copy/clone.
But as for what generally makes it a classic, I’d venture (off of the top of my head) that what Ridley Scott himself says is pretty on the mark: B grade horror done like A grade film. More generally, it’s the rendering of something that’s remained “under-produced” and exclusive to a sub-culture into a higher-production and dramatically serious and high-caliber form.
If that’s part of it, then it’s interesting to ask what other films have done that. Suggestions, off the top of my head:
- The Matrix comes immediately to mind (anime, cyberpunk, hong-kong martial arts films done as a Hollywood blockbuster).
- 2001 A Space Odyssey probably counts (I’m not really sure how Sci-Fi was viewed before 1968).
- Lord of the Rings (high fantasy, though I wonder if Star Wars is the real predecessor of this?)
- Comic book movies probably count to some extent here (Burton’s Batman, Nolan’s Batman and the first Iron Man?), but I’m loathe to include them because I think they’re all kinda derivative of the above, with Burton’s Batman probably being an exception but also not so much of a perfection of content and form that Alien and the above were.
- Pulp Fiction?
You’re thinking too much about modern films. Alien builds on classic suspense murder movies like Alfred Hitchcock. The suspense and dread is worse than the actual killing. In Psycho they don’t even show a knife stabbing anyone.
And the Space Jockey, Alien design and chestburster aren’t part of it? Cuz we are certainly shown the chestburster and definitely see the Alien!
In suggesting “modern films” for the idea of “films making niche things dramatic, serious and mainstream” … they were just the suggestions off of the top my head.
I first saw this film when I was way too young with my Dad. I made it through the chestburster scene, but the tension with Brett in the wet/chains room put me over the edge. I had to stop watching and left the room. My Dad found it funny and asked what am I afraid of, “it’s all rubber and slime”.
I feel sorry for these poor kids from 1979. The parents are bonkers. Taking them to R rated films because they love horror and the other excuse about “it could be all true”! Okaaay.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Never before had the genre been tackled with such style and sophistication, and its grimy space truckers vibe infused with a simmering '70s sexuality gave the project an edgy real-world foundation from which to launch into more familiar “monster in a haunted house” movie tropes.
These precious news nuggets were mined from coveted fanzines like Starlog and Cinefantastique, poking from pockets of many a nerdy Bay Area kid, read in between Round Table pizza runs and Saturday afternoon treks to Talbot’s Toys and Hobbies for fresh packs of Estes rocket engines or miniature bottles of Testors paint to finish off that Revell airplane model.
Months before release, our Belmont Theater displayed a vivid set of 11-by-14 inch lobby cards hinting at the claustrophobic confines of the Nostromo, its blue collar crew, the exterior of a derelict spaceship, and astronauts climbing up onto the petrified Space Jockey.
Much of its near-erotic imagery with the dreadnought’s yonic openings and pulsating semi-transparent eggs was lost on my pubescent brain in the sold-out theater, but the mystery and foreboding it evoked resounded inside my cranial cavity like a miniature time bomb.
There’s an almost fetishistic way Scott lingers on the lethal creature’s drooling mouth, seductive prowling, phallic-shaped head, and dreamlike fluid movement, all adding to audiences’ latent fears and sexual repressions.
Entrenched barriers were crossed between campy horror and high art, boundaries were violated, breached and bulldozed, as the unknown world of adulthood loomed on my horizon like the organo-form starship obscenely lodged in a rubble of jagged rocks on the hostile planetoid.
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I never saw it in theaters, but it scared me the most out of any movie as a kid.
