Alien

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Most science fiction responds to anxieties within contemporary culture.  Alien is different because it is also a horror film, and horror films tend to operate differently.  Horror films explore the deep fears and desires that are usually repressed in the subconscious.  Alien goes deep into the human psyche and explores primordial fears about the human body, birth and sexuality.

In the late 1970s and 80s there was a cycle of films that collectively came to be known as ‘body horror’, because they focussed on anxieties surrounding the human body.  The body itself became the site of horror as its physical form was altered by disease, invasion or mutilation.  Decay, mutation and transformation were depicted as horrific processes.  Alien is an early example of this trend. 

The film was conceived as a gothic horror film set in space and the design evokes a gothic atmosphere.  The Nostromo is a giant oil-refinery, but it looks like a gothic cathedral floating in space.  It has towers covered with intricate filigree detail like Notre Dame.  Inside, the corridors are gloomy and labyrinthine; they are like a technological version of the subterranean tunnels from gothic horror films.  Of course, a space ship is the perfect location for a horror film because it’s a place of absolute isolation – no one can help you and there is no escape.  Likewise, it forms a pressurised environment, which creates an intense claustrophobia.  The tagline for the film was ‘In space, no-one can hear you scream.’  This indicates that the film is a fusion of the science fiction and horror genres. 

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The film’s production design was groundbreaking and two conceptual artists worked on it.  First of all, Ron Cobb was hired to design all of the human environments, the ship and the hardware of the future.  These are some of Ron Cobb’s designs for the bridge and the medical bay.  These were reproduced as sets.  Ron Cobb’s work was admired because it was logical and realistic.  He approached the film as an industrial design challenge and all of his designs look like they could actually work. 

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More famously, the Swiss artist Hans Rudi Giger was hired to design the alien and its habitat.  Giger is a surrealist artist.  He pioneered a unique biomechanical aesthetic which involves a grotesque fusion of the body and technology.  For example, Giger‘s painting Birth Machine depicts the male reproduction system as a bizarre gun, a piece of hardware for firing weird living bullets.  His work is full of sexual symbolism.  In a piece entitled Biomechanical Interior (1980), human body parts are concealed in the composition.  They appear almost like innuendos.  Thus, Giger’s work is a synthesis of the mechanical and the sexual. 

Giger studied architecture and industrial design and his work has a strong architectural quality.  It features a three-dimensional space with an architectural structure made up of biological and mechanical elements.  This could be translated directly into production design.  In 1977 Giger published a book called Necronomicon.  The film’s screenwriter Dan O’Bannon saw the book and was entranced by a creature called Necronom IV.  He showed this image to Ridley Scott and he decided this should be the basis for the alien.  Giger began working on all aspects of the alien’s lifecycle and habitat. 

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Giger’s conceptual art includes an early design for the alien pod and face-hugger.  Of course, this is a foreign organism, but it has echoes of human biology, which make it deeply disturbing.  It looks like a foetus in the womb.  The alien itself is a monstrous creature, but it is drawn in a very lascivious way with an eroticised form.  The head is phallic in shape.  So the alien has an implicit but powerful sexuality.  The adult alien is a sexually aggressive being; it has a telescopic mouth which is very phallic and penetrative, but it can lay eggs and in a sense give birth to itself.  It therefore has an ambiguous sexuality.

Giger’s design for the alien is a key example of biomechanisation: the alien clearly is a biological creature – due to the emphasis on organic matter (acidic blood, slime and secretions) – but it has an exoskeleton that seems metallic and mechanical.  The alien moves like a machine.  Ash describes it as a perfect organism because all it does is kill and reproduce itself. 

As two conceptual artists worked on the film, its aesthetic was split between the human and the alien.  This emphasises the powerful dichotomy between these two opposing forces.  The meeting place for these two forces is the ship, which is called the Nostromo.  The name is derived from the novel Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad, who also wrote Heart of Darkness.