Review: "Alien" Answers The Age-Old Question of the Haunted House

Over four decades later, Ridley Scott's masterpiece is the benchmark for sci-fi horror.

December 1, 2022

In October 2004, Bravo premiered an exclusive television event, listing the 100 scariest moments in movie history. It did not break new ground, subverting expectations by considering the merit of each sequence instead of pandering to cultural consensus and placing moments based on impact. It did not dissect the craftsmanship, elaborate upon the technical choices, or do anything but round up the usual suspects for praise.

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Alas, this is the same network that greenlit a dating show where a gay man got duped into courting straight men and gave Kathy Griffin a reality show: high expectations were, in a word, unwarranted. Still, what value the program lacked it made up for with a slice of critical insight simple enough to explain the greatness of Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic, Alien.

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It was the second-ranked moment on the list, that famous scene where John Hurt, having gotten impregnated by a Facehugger, begins convulsing around the dinner table. As the crew tries to steady him, a small alien creature bursts from his chest, killing him. It gently twists about, hissing at the horrified crew members, and escapes into the ship.

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It was a well-laid trap. It caught us with calm and convinced us that what remained would get confronted from the outside in, not from the inside out. Of course, therein lies the rub.

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Alien is a sharp break from the age-old issue of the haunted house horror flick, though, in truth, it is that movie. The crew of the USCSS Nostromo, a spacecraft deployed by a mysterious company, encounters a derelict alien craft on a faraway moon. After a strange creature breaks through the helmet of a crew member and latches onto his face, they must face an unknown evil of supernatural strength.

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Whether in an eerie hotel or rural motel, a dilapidated farmhouse or a Victorian mansion, protagonists have always zigged and zagged from room to room, plunging deeper into the death chamber or gripping the handle to freedom before darting back from whence they came. It is the only means to justify extending the runtime past 20 minutes. You cannot have a haunted house movie without a house. Despite knowing this, we always wonder: why not just leave the house?

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As the crew of the Nostromo weighs their options, the reality of what makes the movie so terrifying, more than the creature or the shadows that shroud each step in darkness, is evident: as film critic Maitland McDonagh states, “In Alien, there is nowhere to go.”

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The simple matter of being trapped is enough to make Alien horrifying. We do not know what evil hunts us, what waits behind every turn, beneath every grate, lurking in every shadow. We do not know how to trap, contain, or destroy it. We only know that we must. With no exit, it is a simple battle: it… or us.

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Yet, Alien is more. It does not rest on its laurels, settling for cheap aesthetics and dishing out gore for sport. It casts a looming shadow, dealing in contrasts and darkness to set its mood. It subdues its villain, forcing it into hiding, letting the crew’s imaginations stir with possibilities. Only at the end do we discover the size of the xenomorph and the full breadth of its design. It knows how long to suspend us in terror before thrusting us into action, plunging our seeming hero into certain death before making his fate appear more assured than it ever seemed possible and ripping him from us entirely.

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But for all its visual tricks, it is still a human enterprise. Ripley is not a woman contrived by her circumstances. She does not bend to orders that violate protocols or make decisions based on sentiment or her subordinate's whims. Hers is the logical position, and within her pragmatism, we feel dread. When she takes aim, seeking answers to the questions we also ask, the implications feel tangible. When she adjusts course, resolving to take their chances in the escape pod, the air thickens, and the stakes rise.

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Alien never stops rising, though it does so quietly. It spaces out its horror, killing without regard for timing. We never learn something just as another crew member gets claimed or solve the creature with each demise. We see death in moments in which it seems inevitable but get spared the leisurely burn of watching demonic beings slink around corners or swipe from one side of the screen to the next. For a man scurrying through pitch-black tunnels with only a tiny flame to light his path, or a man tracking a fleeing feline into the dark depths of the ship, death is a guarantee. Alien understands the means are always more terrifying than the ends.

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After all, a venture into the great beyond is not without risk. These are people operating a craft into the far reaches of space. Launches can go awry; malfunctions can become disasters in seconds. Any discovery made, as they quickly learn, is unearthing peril. Death may never get considered, but it will always get taken into account. Facing the risk is one thing; knowing the risk is another.

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Trapped inside their haunted house, the crew must fight but soon realize the only means of survival is the house itself. Anything they use to fight or flee must come from the ship, but the Nostromo itself is now the evil. It is more friend to the alien than to them. A creature of shadows and darkness always thrives within them. As with any horror movie, we can only fight in the light. Nostromo's light abandons the crew more and more with each death. The only means of using the ship is to risk life itself. The movie does not, because it cannot, let us breathe.

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Thus, it forces us to observe as we wait for a moment to exhale. Our minds can never wander because we must peer in to see, lean in to listen, and keep our attention fixed on each moment to escape it.

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We will never forget the gutbuster, the tension that builds as Kane aches helplessly in Parker’s grip, and the terror plastered on a shocked Lambert as the creature emerges from the blood and escapes into their home. After all, that is the core of Alien, the fundamental human fear that drives the desperation: we do not want something inside of us.

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Of course, “us” can mean many things. It can mean a virus, bug, or alien forcing its way down our throat to impregnate us with its spawn; it can be our home getting violated by an intruder seeking to destroy us. Alien violates us, breaking inside everything that makes us human and stripping it away. It uses the crew’s home against them, slithering its way through the air ducts and emerging from the shadowy ceilings to rip into their insides and inject itself into their beings. It uses their bodies to store itself, furthering its species by ending theirs.

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Alien never forgets to evolve its idea into something tangible. It does not believe a monster in the house is enough, so it dims every environment or strips it of light entirely. It does not think the crew’s fear sweats enough through the screen, so it turns its own company, and one of their own, against them. It does not believe an alien creature killing them one by one layers the movie with enough tension, so it strikes a visual chord with its monster that is as terrifying as it is disgusting. It knows its quiet intensity must build to something more, so it sounds a distressing alarm as the self-destruct sequence counts down. It knows its crew must feel like concepts we can understand without their virtue being a whisper in the wind, so it develops them through their interactions with each other and as they face off against death itself.

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‍Alien is horror because it exploits an ever-present fear: we are not alone. Although the creature seems invulnerable, its exploitation of humanity is what makes it terrifying. Evil is perhaps a subjective concept, dependent on the perspective of the involved parties. The Xenomorph sees humanity as a means to an end, a necessity of existence it cannot ignore. The crew sees it as objective evil, defiling them without cause as they fight to survive. In the end, such abstract discussions of morality are fruitless. They have only the now, where survival hangs in the balance, swaying back and forth in the suffocating air of an inescapable reality: in space, there is no one to hear you scream.