31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 7 (Alien)

If we're being technical, everyone's screaming on a ship
IN space. So, people on the ship can still hear you scream.

I've tangled with this before, of course. My first tangle, in fact, and you never forget your first. As I may have mentioned before, I was utterly petrified of anything to do with horror in the 90's. I caught glimpses that have stuck in the mind, however. Once, late at night on TV, I happened to see a few minutes of a movie called Alien 3. There was a man in a grimy ventilation shaft, and then there was a monster that killed him and he fell into the fan. I got nightmares from that. Anyway, I'm fairly sure we're in late 1997 when I have my real first tangle. A family member has a tantalizing collection of formative films for a young dork like me. I see the Star Wars trilogy in a fucked-up order, just before George tinkered with it. I watch all the numbered Star Trek films and that first one is just WEIRD. High on a sci-fi buzz, I borrow a tape that looks kind of scary. I'm a bit braver now about pushing my boundaries, so I go into it. Thus do I view the Alien trilogy... and it was a trilogy at the time. Now we're gonna talk about that first movie. Because that first movie is the best one. Cry pardon, Aliens fans, but that's just where I side.

Alien manages to both be pure and indecent at the same time. This is a merging of two concepts that will run through this project, and one we've encountered before. This is Sexuality, but not played in a fun and campy way like Rocky Horror. This sexuality is harsh, invasive, and lethal. A thing birthed from an egg that latches onto your face with a rude kiss, plunges itself down your throat, and impregnates you with its offspring, such that you emerge from your coma and minutes later are writhing in agony, giving birth to a hybrid child that hisses as your lifeless corpse twitches, blood oozing from the gaping crevice where your chest once was. Then the thing evolves, a phallic monstrosity that shoves its member into warm flesh, invading and conquering. We're in H.R. Giger land and it's rough... but it's meant to be rough. This is a horror sci-fi film, after all, it's meant to unsettle. This creature from beyond the stars, half us and half other, is a pure representation of our final(?) concept. The xenomorph is a hybrid of itself and whatever creature it births from, yes, but it's a hybrid here as well. One part Sexuality monster, because H.R. Giger... and one part Slasher. Here's that, then. A narrative force that stomps about, ending the lives of human beings in messy and violent ways. Or... not doing that, because I'm pretty sure my DVD messed up the order of the theatrical and director's cut, and I got the cocoon scene in the movie. So, huh.  The xenomorph is a pure Slasher. It has no motivations, no prejudices, no psychopathy driving it to kill. It's just a predator. The Nostromo is its new hunting grounds, and it hunts and kills based entirely on primal instinct. Ash can't help but admire the thing. The Company wants that purity on their side. They want to control the Slasher.

How would that even work? One has to wonder, after seeing the movie so many times and being a few hundred words into a quickie piece on it, how that would work. How would you weaponize something like this? More pressing is why. Is The Company at war with some other nationstate in the future? Are the xenomorphs their own new escalation, a metaphor for the atomic bomb? We're getting off the rails here but this is the first time I have ever really questioned why the Company wants these things so badly. Our answer may come by ignoring everything else. Ash believes the remaining crew of the Nostromo can't kill it. A perfect organism, he calls it. He, like I, admire it for its purity. Granted, the Nostromo crew only had cattle prods and makeshift flamethrowers to try and kill the xenomorph, but the thing does technically survive getting blasted at close range by a shuttle's rockets. It flies off into the void of space after that, but it doesn't appear dented or melted or anything like that! Then Aliens comes along and the things can just be mowed down by dudes with guns! I don't think that shit would have happened in Alien. Like, I honestly think that even if the Nostromo had a gun on board for some reason, it would have done shit-all to the Xenomorph. Then again, the grappling hook at the end did stick into it. I'd headcanon that it didn't do that much damage, but we're wheelspinning here. Point is, this creature, this Sexuality Slasher, is pure. The crew of the Nostromo have engaged in no decadence to set this creature off on its rampage; it's just a predator that gets loose and gets all but one of them. The same cannot be said for the other invocations of the Slasher on this project, and we'll tackle the most famous at some time. For now, Alien. It's very good and it got sequels. I'll close out by yelling quickly about them all.

Aliens is a nice action movie, I guess, but Big Gun Fuck Man Vs. Scary Acid Blood Monster is slightly inferior to The Sexuality Slasher for me. Luckily, being slightly inferior to a fucking masterpiece lands you in the realm of "incredibly entertaining" so we're good there. Alien 3 is a movie I want to like, because it tries to get back to its roots of powerless people against an alien predator and is also so goddamned bleak that it earns my respect for being brave. Something about it doesn't work though, even in the Assembly Cut. Resurrection is a film I have seen exactly twice; once in 1998 on VHS with that family member who lent me the other movies, and once in 2014 on DVD. The first viewing I barely remember but I didn't like. The second made me realize that this is firmly in "so bad it's good" territory. It's HILARIOUS sometimes. Alien vs Predator is kind of neat with its von Daniken plot and two movie monsters duking it out, but lukewarm otherwise. The sequel, Requiem, is trash. All the spectacle of the space setting is sucked out and replaced with this domestic slasher movie garbage. As for Prometheus... oh, Ridley. Ridley, honey, you didn't have to explain a thing about Alien. No, really. Please. Please, Ridley, I'm begging you here. Ridley why? That's all I have to say about Alien. Go watch it. It's great. I have no other clever way to end this post, so go see Alien. Please.