Alien: Analyzing What Makes Us Jump

Alien, released in 1979, is an unprecedented synthesis of science fiction and horror whose product is one of film’s finest creations. Directed by Ripley Scott, Alien is a rather straightforward narrative describing a commercial spaceship which picks up an uninvited visitor in the form of an extraterrestrial life form which seeks to murder the crew in its entirety. Ever since it was first shown, Alien has elicited fright from various audiences with its combination of visually repulsive imagery and heart-thumping suspense scenes. However, while both elements are integral to the film as a whole, Alien’s use of psychological horror is the driving force of fear within the film.

By successfully exploiting a human fear of the unknown, Alien elicits a unique and personal feeling of horror from each individual viewer. Alien does not provide its audience with a consistent identity for its antagonist, calling on the audience to project personal fears in imagining what the Alien looks like. In doing so, the Alien becomes an entity much more frightening than any amount of visual effects, especially during the 1970s, could ever hope to produce. Aboard the ship, the Alien is constantly developing, emerging from Kane’s chest as a bloody mass and only being slowly revealed afterwards as a developed life form. The first instance in which the audience confronts the developed Alien is when Brett is searching for Jones, an orange cat, in the bowels of the ship. As Brett makes his way past hanging chains and dripping machines, he comes across a massive shedding of skin. The audience cannot help but panic as Brett continues searching, scanning every frame of film for a sign of the Alien perceived to be lurking in the shadows. Even when Brett, as well as every other crew member, is killed, the audience is left to its own devices, handed a few scraps of sounds and shadow in order to conceive a mechanism of death.

The Alien is not merely an unknown presence, but an unconquerable one. Alien, as a vindication and rejection of science, portrays advanced weaponry and devices as unable to lay even a scratch on the primitive Alien whose cells rapidly repair and whose blood is highly acidic. The crew’s misplaced confidence in human logic is broken to bits when it’s highest ranking officer, Dallas, is killed when carrying out the crew’s plan to confine the Alien in the ship’s air ducts, magnifying an overwhelming feeling of vulnerability. The crew is functionally defenseless in what Alien portrays as a fight for survival. This is why the mere presence of the Alien, instead of the Alien’s physical features, is so suspenseful for the audience. The musical scores and set design in Alien help drive home such feelings of vulnerability. The Nostromo during the self-destruction sequence successfully captures the essence of Ripley’s vulnerability, replete with ominous shadows, flashing lights, and compact walkways. The score, composed by Jerry Goldsmith, allows for silence. Periodically interrupted by barely audible mechanical sounds, such silence emphasizes the overwhelming emptiness of space, and making real Alien’s poster line, “nobody can hear you scream in space.”

While scenes such as when the Alien jumps out of its slimy egg onto Kane’s face or bursts out of Kane’s chest with a powerful splash of blood are no doubt important examples of visual horror within Alien, such scenes are only memorable because of the preceding psychological buildup. When the Alien is finally revealed in full during the film’s climactic ending sequence, much of the audience’s fabricated fear simply dissolves. The dynamic of vulnerability has become completely flipped as an unsuspecting Alien slumbers aboard Ripley’s escape ship, making Ripley’s victory so believable for the audience and allowing for the film’s resolution. Indeed, Alien’s closing sequences continue to remind us that what we had feared was merely fear itself.