alien analysis

Alien; what makes it scary?

Ridley scotts film alien is often considered one of the greatest horror films of all time, and has been iconically labeled a ‘haunted house in space’. Alien is a great film, and has a few concepts and themes that would work well in our horror opening.

What adds to the fear factor of the alien itself is its mental and physical superiority. It bleeds acid; meaning conventional methods for killing it would be useless (as it would severely damage the spaceship the crew is travelling in). Another reason which makes the alien more fearsome is the fact that the crew are unprepared and poorly equipped. They are a crew operating a mining ship, not trained marines. They don’t possess any guns and wouldn’t know how to use them if they did. They can’t escape, as the emergency shuttle doesn’t have enough room for everyone. Ripley and her co workers are isolated and trapped, fighting a creature they know very little about.

What really gives the alien its scare factor is both the crew of the nostromo and the audience don’t know what it looks like. After the iconic scene where it bursts from executive officer Kane’s chest, it escapes and hides in the ship. The crew believes that they are looking for a very small creature, but in reality the creature ages very quickly. What the viewer and the audience think they are looking for in actual fact is very different
chestburster scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuapyExYJBI

After this, the next time the alien is seen; it appears to be fully grown. This is when it kills its second victim, engineering technician Brett. This is the first of many scenes where the alien shows its mental and physical dominance. It knows that the crew are looking for something small, and wouldn’t suspect the alien to be large and hiding above them in the air ducts and chains that hang from the ceiling. The alien doesn’t hunt its victims; it waits for them. This is an aspect that we want to incorporate into our horror opening, with the killer already in the house of the victim, waiting for the right opportunity to strike.
brett death scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc3A13Yu_qc

The alien further shows its intelligence later in the film when it hides in the air duct system. It knows that the crew are hunting it, with intent to kill it, but it decides to wait in an awkward place. Not only does this make it hard to find and kill, it forces the team to split up, allowing the alien to slowly kill them off, one at a time in isolation.

From the things I have learned from watching alien, the most important is the sense of isolation. While we cant and haven’t set our horror opening in space, we have set it in a house. If we have an establishing shot where the house is shown to be isolated and not surrounded by any human activity, we can set a very lonely and desperate tone to our film from the offset, greatly adding to the fear it can cause the audience.