“I’ve never liked this kind of film before,” recalls Alien director Ridley Scott. “Because in the end, there’s always just a man in a rubber suit. There’s only one way to deal with that. To make it about what you think you saw, rather than what you actually saw.”
What you saw in Alien (1979) was another plastic monster, only it was never exposed long enough for that to register. All you glimpsed was the slimiest, most carnivorous dentistry on film, an incisor-equipped, phallic gremlin exploding from John Hurt’s chest. And Sigourney Weaver in her smalls.
Based on a script by Dark Star writer Dan O’Bannon, Alien spliced the ‘50s space B-movie with contemporary effects technology, Ridley Scott’s visual flair and the obsessive psyche of Swiss über-goth artist HR Giger. The artist had first met O’Bannon during an abortive attempt to film Frank Herbert’s Dune in Paris during 1975.
After the project’s collapse, a penniless O’Bannon returned to Los Angeles and set about welding some abandoned ideas into a marketable script, provisionally called Star Beast. Soon the script caught the attention of director Walter Hill’s production company, which in turn approached Fox.
The film, now re-titled Alien, began filming in Britain on July 3rd, 1978 and was shot over 13 weeks with up to 300 people working on the project at any given time. Determined to make the film as unsettling as possible, Ridley Scott not only endlessly redesigned his monster but also persuaded the cast to needle lead actress Sigourney Weaver, in an attempt to toughen up her innocent, laid-back persona.
It worked. Released in 1979, the $11 million movie made $60 million in America alone, won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1980 and turned Weaver into an icon as the iron-willed Ripley – a role she would return to in the three sequels. But it’s Scott’s original that not only set out the elaborate template for its successors but became a sci-fi/horror benchmark, later remade as ‘Alien In The Antarctic’ (1982’s The Thing), ‘Alien In The Jungle’ (1987’s Predator) and ‘Alien Underwater’ (1989’s Leviathan). Moreover, Giger’s lethal biomechanical killer remains the inspiration for the genocidal aliens that populate the likes of Independence Day and Starship Troopers. The lurid sexual innuendo of his designs, meanwhile, pushed much of the film, notably the chest-burster scene, into folklore.