Alien: (Not) Not The Texas Chain Saw Massacre In Space

I’ve been thinking about Alien ever since I wrote about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre a few weeks back, since it’s been described - by its director, even - as an attempt to make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in space. When I originally considered this, I didn’t think that it was a comparison that really tracked, but having watched Alien again (for the umpteenth time), it really does have a lot of that film’s strengths, along with drawing from some other horror traditions.

(As a side note, a lot of what got this film made was the success of the first Star Wars film, which suggested that science fiction could be successful with a mass audience. Which is kind of nuts, to imagine someone taking their kid to see this thinking “oh, I bet it will be like Star Wars,” because it’s still a motherfucker of a movie - tense and economical, not like anything before or since.)

It opens on the cold quiet of space, and a terse summary of our location - the commercial refinery vessel Nostromo, crew of 7, hauling thousands of tons of mineral ore. The camera glides through the ship’s interior in a way that recalls haunted house movies - empty corridors, empty rooms, lots of silence. We wait for the silence to be broken, and it’s held just long enough before consoles come to life, filling screens with data and the bridge of the ship with electronic chatter, light spilling onto emergency helmets as if they’re conducting the conversation. And then the slow zoom down a long corridor, to a room where the crew wake slowly and silently from a long, cold sleep.  

It’s apparent right away that the crew of the Nostromo - Dallas, Ash, Parker, Brett, Kane, Ripley and Lambert - are sick of each other’s company and ready to be home. Parker immediately starts complaining about how he doesn’t get a full share (even though that’s what he contracted for) and you get the sense it’s a conversation that this crew has had (or has heard Parker monologue about) a lot. They are not friends, and nobody needs to say that. It’s apparent in the tones of their voices, the looks on their faces. Nothing here is telegraphed, it’s communicated naturally. Their moods don’t improve when they find out they’ve been brought out of cold sleep early, very far away from home. The ship’s computer has picked up a repeating signal, and they’re contractually obligated to investigate it. It might be an SOS.

Or it might be a warning.

I mean, it’s right there in the title. Even if it weren’t for the (ugh) franchising of this film and the insistence on spinning it into a whole “universe” with its own canon and mythology and all of the sort of over-explaining nonsense (that might be fine for films like the sequel, Aliens, which is a good action film in its own right, it’s just not a horror film) that has led to dramatically diminishing returns, even if it weren’t for all the kind of pop-culture nonsense that tends to ruin horror in my opinion, even if it weren’t for all that and you’d never heard of this film before now, you still have an idea of what’s going to happen. Yes, there’s something on the inhospitable planet from which the signal originates, and it gets aboard. You could have a film called Alien without any aliens, but it’d probably be ill-advised. 

So the real key here, I think, is not what happens, but how. And as far as that goes, Alien is very well-executed and has a lot of the virtues I associate with good horror in general, even today. The people feel like actual people, with distinct personalities and relationships, and their interactions don’t feel stagey at all - it really does feel like we’ve sort of been dropped into this group of people in medias res, and although we don’t learn a lot about them and there’s hardly any exposition around them as people, you don’t need it because it’s all in how they act toward each other and how they talk - the way Brett gives Parker a time estimate for some repairs and Parker inflates it when he communicates it to Ripley, the tightness in Lambert’s voice when someone points out that her calculations don’t put them anywhere near Earth, the way Dallas sounds resigned and helpless instead of authoritative when he says “I just run the ship.” They’re actual people, not archetypes or caricatures. A lot of this is apparently down to much of the dialogue being improvised, and it helps a lot. It’s also helped by this - like Star Wars - being set in a world where technology isn’t sleek and glossy, it’s beaten up and grungy and lived-in. grounding it even though we’re in the far future. Video communications are noisy and distorted and low-resolution, equipment is clumsy and cobbled-together. There’s no utopian vision here, just a bunch of tired working stiffs who want to go home already.

This rawness is part of the DNA it shares with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but so is its pacing. This is a film that isn’t afraid to have long stretches where nothing happens in terms of action, and like that film, the long stretches of silence and nothing (or, rather, atmosphere-building, since even in the absence of action, there’s a definite mood being established) are punctuated with sharp, intense bursts of action that are over almost before we’ve had time to process what we’ve just seen beyond that it was very bad and unsettling. And like that film, this movie doesn’t really rely on gore (with one notable exception) - it’s another case where you think it’s gorier than it really is because the worst is left to your imagination. Quick cuts between different close-up perspectives do a lot of the work in this area. 

And it draws on other traditions as well - it makes good use of haunted-house techniques like having something terrible unfold in the background behind unsuspecting protagonists, monster-movie techniques like having an animal pop out where you think the monster will be, only to have the animal’s reaction signal the monster’s appearance, and the slow, methodical stalking techniques associated with slasher films, which were also beginning to develop as a genre around the same time. For that matter, a setting where a bunch of people who do not like or trust each other, stuck in a dangerous environment with a deadly creature set a great precedent for the remake of The Thing, another excellent horror film about an alien. It’s also not one-note - like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, there are twists where expectations are upended and safety snatched away. As the tagline for that film had it, “who will survive, and what will be left of them?” 

It’s been often imitated, but never duplicated, because the key to Alien isn’t the alien, and the science fiction setting isn’t incidental by any means, but it’s also not the most important part. It’s the believability of the people and the inexplicability of their peril, and their antagonists’ utter indifference, told in lulls and bursts of tension which eventually blur into a single panicky fugue where horrors are glimpsed only briefly against a bigger crisis, that this film retains its power. Some of the effects have definitely not aged well (and are, frankly, downright silly to modern eyes), but in its pace, characterization, and art direction, and what it chooses not to tell us as well as what it does, it’s still one of the best for a reason.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon