Alien – The Necessity of The Unknown, My Life in Horror

In that, the alien is essential, regardless of its presentation as an icon of horror: It is the factor that upsets those systems, that they cannot utilise, arrest or assimilate. It occurs amongst them as a cataclysm but also a revelation; the factor that shudders foundational assumptions and upsets what is prescribed as inevitable and eternal. 

Alien – The Necessity of The Unknown, My Life in Horror

Time for a BIG one. 

It’s always frustrating for a self-fancied writer when we can’t adequately express the import of something. But that’s where I find myself when it comes to the original Alien. Being a child of 1984, by the time I reached anything approaching sentience, the film’s imagery was already well-entrenched in popular culture, its influence on everything from toy-design to video games overt (try to find a science fiction video game made in the 1980s/early 1990s that doesn’t include some near-copyright-infringing variation on Giger’s iconic creature, and I’ll show you a rare beast indeed). As such, I came to the film with its imagery already in my mind, as part of my imaginative anatomy. 

As explored in other articles hereabouts, I was originally introduced to Giger’s hellish, biomechanoid aesthetic through video games, comics etc. My appreciation of the man’s art thus began very early, in a state where imagination was pliant and impressionable. As such, it seeped into me with parasitic intimacy, becoming a part of my dreamscapes and the Boschean menageries they host. I recall having nightmares in which such environments and entities occurred, playing with action figures inspired by the Alien films before I came to the source material. 

As to precisely when I first watched the original film, I can’t say: I know that I was so young, it became as ambient and part of the world as cartoons or favourite toys, quickly taking on the patina of a sacred artefact; one of those rare, rare films with a consistent capacity to disturb and horrify. Yet, it also became a perpetual fascination; a film I’d return to again and again as I grew older, finding new elements to appreciate as my own sophistication developed. 

Unlike many films of its ilk

I found myself entranced by its appreciation of its own monster: In almost Lovecraftian terms, the film is in love with what it proclaims to be horrifying: 

From the Face-hugger to the Chest-burster to the full-grown entity they eventually give birth to, the film is infatuated with its own peculiar aesthetic, the design-work that’s so unlike anything that went before. And I, as a -arguably obscenely- young audience member, couldn’t help but share that enthusiasm. 

The fleeting, deliberately vague glimpses of the alien creatures themselves are designed to confound and befuddle: Whilst later entries would forget this essential obscurity, by refusing to reveal everything of their -varied and metamorphic- anatomies in a single shot, the film leaves the viewer intrigued but also confounded, trying to discern how the creature works and fits together. That degree of engagement-through-obscurity is utterly sublime, and means that, without the benefit of context provided by later films and wider media, the eponymous alien can be anything at all, its shape and nature limited only by the viewer’s imagination. 

This feeds into the wider themes of the film established from its opening shot, its first chord of music, the brilliantly effective formulation of its title: 

The “alien” is not the source of horror here in itself; it’s merely an expression of it. Rather, the true horror lies in the situation: Humanity operates here in a universe and within systems utterly inimical to it, a condition of existential hostility in which everything is unknown (and potentially unknowable). 

That is the horror in which the crew of the Nostromo find themselves: In a far-flung corner of the universe in a ship barely held together, where everything -including the systems that have flung them out there- is intent on destroying and devouring them. Humanity’s ultimate irrelevance is the true horror here, manifested in a species that defeats any assumed context of anatomy or biology (the alien in the original film is a brilliantly ambiguous piece of work: Design-wise, it incorporates elements of the biological and mechanical, making it difficult to see the distinction between the two. Its nature and intentions are similarly obscure:

Following its metamorphosis into its -presumably- full-grown state, it starts picking off the crew one by one. But we rarely see what it actually does to them in the -stronger- theatrical cut; it simply takes them.

Precisely what it does is left up to the imagination; a fact that heightens the horror by a series of magnitudes). 

Our crew are a rag-tag collection of expendable nobodies who tell us so much about the dystopia they hail from without a word of exposition: Everything occurs naturally as a result of dialogue and interaction. There’s a documentary quality to the film-making whose sophistication is enviable. They are, effectively, the working classes in a condition of interstellar capitalism. Forget the socialist Utopia of Star Trek, in which everyone who operates in a star ship is a combination of scientist, artist, aesthete and philosopher: These people are blue-collar schlubs who have neither the time nor freedom to consider “higher matters.” From the first instance, there’s a myopic pragmatism to their presentation that communicates all we need to know: 

Even so far into the future, even miraculous numbers of miles away from Earth, capitalist sentiment and assumption is in full sway: They discuss their work, their pay, their bonuses; the inequality between the labourers and their masters (in Marxist terms) in a manner any one of us in the 21^st century would be familiar with. T

he implied horror that, at this point in human history, we have not transcended those systems and assumptions, despite how miraculous our technology has become, is every bit as desolate and despairing as anything the alien wreaks or implies by its existence. In many respects, the alien is the lesser evil: It is doing what its nature and imperatives dictate. It is unknowable in its intent and strange hostility. Whereas the “company” responsible for the current endeavour is an entirely familiar malevolence; one whose self-destructive inhumanity lacks the incredible purity applied to the creature by characters such as Ian Holmes’s Ash. 

More than anything, what Ash terms the “biological perfection” of the creature is a matter of some disturbing fascination.

The implication is that this entity is somehow “purer,” more worthy, than the human beings it preys on; a fact that android Ash certainly seems to believe (unlike the much later derivative of the same archetype, Prometheus’s David, Ash’s beliefs and motivations as a “synthetic humanoid” are extremely oblique, left up to largely visual, symbolic implications that thematically marry to the Alien itself): 

Ash seems to demonstrate a degree of contempt for women, particularly those of strength and authority, such as Ellen Ripley, that might be construed as misogynist were he a flesh and blood human being. As it stands, his perpetual disregard for and dismissal of them takes on a more curious note, especially given the sexually violent subtext of his later attempt to murder Ripley (the scene is framed and blocked like a rape; an act Ash himself is anatomically incapable of. He attempts to smother Ripley by shoving a rolled-up pornography magazine down her throat, which simultaneously refers back to the Face-Hugger’s violation of its victims and also the sex acts of which he is incapable). 

The abiding implications is that Ash is far more complex than a robot operating with reference to a series of commands and protocols;

he is sufficiently sophisticated to have developed neuroses and biases that are ironically human. He is Freudian in a manner that the Alien compensates for: Initially manifesting as a rapine vagina with legs, then as a biomechanical penis with teeth that attacks its victims with a thrusting, oral appendage. . .the Alien does what Ash himself cannot, but aches to. His hatred of women is, in its own way, derived from similar feelings of inadequacy as actual misogynists and rapists: A crippling sense of inadequacy and inferiority projected outward upon those who are its subject, but bear no responsibility for it. 

This in turn has profound implications given Ash’s inalienable nature:

He is a corporate product; in many respects, the ultimate Capitalist -and certainly materialist- degradation of humanity. A parody of human sentience that walks among us unknown, undetected, until some protocol or “malfunction” reveals them. That the manifest, Capitalist ideal of humanity is an unstable, inadequate creature utterly, murderously consumed by its obsessions and crippling inadequacies is a superb and subtly-played satire, an assault on certain traditional prescriptions of masculinity that requires no overt sign-posting in the film itself. 

Ash’s obsession with the Alien is as curious as his love/hate relationship with Ripley: When the Alien finally occurs, he becomes singularly uninterested in anything else, obsessing over its form, its nature, rhapsodising almost poetically over its apparent perfection. Contrasted with his cold and dismissive attitude towards his human fellows, it’s clear early on which he believes should be allowed to survive. The design of Ash’s biomechanical nature is also an interesting contrast with the Alien: Like him, it too seems to be a bizarre fusion of the mechanical and biological, but whereas his is a deeply imperfect balance -being designed by and based on humanity, whose flaws are apparent in every aspect of their work-, the alien’s is in perfect, animal harmony, as though technology and nature conspired to create the most pristine of entities. 

That the alien’s first response and abiding instinct is to attack, infect and cannibalise is also curious:

Throughout -and momentarily divorced from the overly-literal take on the creatures most later films will adopt-, we are left unaware to what degree this entity perceives and thinks, the ultimate nature of its intelligence. Clearly, it’s intelligent enough to continually out-wit the crew of the Nostromo; to second-guess their tactics, predict their movements and lay its own traps. But precisely what it perceives of them and why it is so profoundly hostile is left unanswered. We, as the audience, are left to infer what it wants, what it feels and experiences. That necessary engagement, that exercise in imagination, is what makes the film so resonant in the annals of horror cinema: 

We don’t know, and barely come to understand, what this thing is. Unlike later films, the original Alien doesn’t go into profound detail regarding its life cycle: Again, much is left up to implication and inference. We do not know if the “adult” alien we finally encounter is the last stage of this creature’s development, if it could perhaps become -or even create- something more.

The decision to excise certain scenes from the theatrical cut is a genius decision, as, in the cinematic version of the film, we never get to see what the creature does with its victims. That quality of the unknown, the most hideous mystery, resonates so profoundly with the Lovecraftian dread that pervades every seeping inch of the film. The creature takes on almost metaphysical qualities as an avatar of the bleak and hostile reality into which these quixotic human beings trespass. It is the guardian at the gates, the Minotaur in the labyrinth. A familiar species of mythic evil lent post-modern skin. 

But this entity is no avatar or grim messenger of gods whose whims and natures humanity might find some echo in:

The creature is as inscrutable as its biomechanoid nature, and thus, a horror more resonant and profound than any that might merely inflict violence upon us. The implication is of something so divorced from our assumptions, so inimical to our traditions and systems of operation, it can only be corrosive to them; a species of living apocalypse that could drive us to extinction -or worse- by its presence alone. 

The fact that the faceless, invisible “company” for which the cast works (who created the Nostromo, funded an operation more ambitious than any industry currently extant can conceivably imagine) want this creature, are willing to apparently do and sacrifice anything to get their hands on it, is more horrifying than the alien itself and, in many respects, everything it represents: 

This is evil of a more familiar, human species: The same ideological and systemic malevolence that has been driving us towards self-authored extinction since time out of mind. What, precisely, the “company” wishes to do with the eponymous Alien is left up to the audience to infer, but it’s clear it can only be terrible for everyone  -and everything- involved. One can scarcely imagine the grotesque genetic experiments, the military industrial applications that would derive from the creature, should they ever succeed. 

Of course, in the Alien, the “company” meets something that supersedes and defeats their assumptions:

This is not merely some animal to be apprehended and utilised as a living resource. It is inimical to all such systems, an entity that represents their impotence and corrosion in the vast and hostile void. The “company’s” commercial and industrial intentions become pathetically presumptuous and petty when weighed against the awful and vacuous truth of the alien itself: 

It is the universe, a violent check and balance from reality itself: One that will not be tamed or taken, it will not be understood. And it certainly won’t render itself conducive to any endeavour or experiment “the company” can subject it to:

It exists to fly in the face of such impositions, to undo all around it and rearrange assumptions not only of what is, but what might be. 

A profound and resonant horror of the original Alien is one we find throughout science fiction, particularly that of a Futurist bent:

That, after so much time, upheaval, societal and political shifts, natural disasters, wars etc etc, the same basic systems of operation as exist at the beginning of the 1980s -i.e. Thatcherite/Reaganite Neoliberalism- STILL HOLD SWAY. Humanity itself is still the same as it was a millennia before, owing to the natural stagnation those systems foment. The characters we see aboard the Nostromo are distressingly familiar; not the Utopian philosophers of Star Trek, but the same wage-slaves and materialist labourers we recognise in ourselves. 

In that, the alien is essential, regardless of its presentation as an icon of horror: It is the factor that upsets those systems, that they cannot utilise, arrest or assimilate. It occurs amongst them as a cataclysm but also a revelation; the factor that shudders foundational assumptions and upsets what is prescribed as inevitable and eternal. 

Humanity needs the alien in this universe. It requires traumatic and violent invasion, upsetting of the status quo, if it is to survive the wicked engine it has constructed around itself. The alien is what rearranges the parameters, explodes our contexts wide and opens our eyes to the fact that the universe is not merely some materialist resource to feed the insatiable appetites of redundant Capitalism. 

For me, as a child, these elements of the film were inchoate;

I lacked the language or sophistication to articulate them to myself, but even back then, I understood on a visceral level that I was experiencing something more than a mere monster-movie. The design, the dense and portentous atmosphere of the piece, the framing of the Alien itself, all feed into an overall impression of significance: The film is sublimely aware of its own import, but doesn’t soften or apologise for that fact by winking at the audience or indulging in fatuous irony. 

I remember feeling it; that ominous sense of meaning, as though I were watching something forbidden, akin to the Lovecraftian texts artist H.R. Giger drew inspiration from: Media that could corrupt, that had its own malign animus and intention. It’s an experience as chilling as what the crew of the Nostromo experience setting down on that strange and barren world, wandering the intestinal corridors of an alien spacecraft. And sadly rare amongst the annals of horror. 

For my part, it was formative; a piece whose ethos I seek to echo in my own work, that taught me the value of sincerity in storytelling. Here, now, some thirty-odd years later, I find myself wondering what kind of storyteller I’d be without its influence, if I’d be a storyteller of any kind at all. It still resonates so profoundly, still exercises power in the way that only truly great work can. 

And even given the depths and degradation the material has suffered over successive decades and sequels, the original film remains an article of sublime and undeniable brilliance. 

George Daniel Lea 15-09-24

Further Reading Check Out The Fright Club Podcast’s Controversial Rankiong of the Alien Movies here