Alien (1979)

The setup

A commercial towing ship is on its way home with a cargo of ore when its computer wakes the seven-person crew from hibernation ahead of schedule. A transmission from a barren moon has to be investigated, and the crew's contracts say they must go. Nothing about the ship or the people aboard looks heroic. They are tired workers who want their pay, which is what makes the trouble that follows so hard to shake.

Context

Alien began as a writer's attempt to turn a joke into a nightmare. Dan O'Bannon had co-written and acted in the low-budget comedy Dark Star (1974), made at film school with John Carpenter, and he later said he wanted to redo its creature-on-a-ship idea as pure horror. He wrote about 29 pages of a script called Memory, then worked with Ronald Shusett on a longer treatment under the title Star Beast. O'Bannon retitled it Alien after noticing how often the word appeared on the page. Shusett supplied one of the story's most remembered ideas, a creature implanted inside a crew member that later emerges from the body.

The project moved to Brandywine Productions, run by Gordon Carroll, David Giler and Walter Hill, who rewrote the script across several drafts and added the android Ash. The Writers Guild nevertheless kept the screenplay credit with O'Bannon, with a story credit shared with Shusett. Twentieth Century-Fox approved the film in the wake of Star Wars (1977), which had made studio executives suddenly hungry for science fiction. The starting budget was reported as $4.2 million, and it roughly doubled once Ridley Scott, then known for his debut The Duellists (1977), arrived with detailed storyboards.

Why it matters

Alien fused two genres that had mostly kept their distance. Science fiction of the 1970s often looked clean and hopeful, and horror usually happened in houses and small towns. Alien put a haunted-house structure inside a spaceship, then dirtied the ship until it looked like a place people really worked. That combination became a template for science fiction horror, and it keeps turning up in films, television and video games that have nothing to do with the original.

It also gave cinema a durable hero in Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver in what was her first major film role. Ripley is not introduced as the lead, and the film is more interested in a crew than in a star, which is part of why her emergence feels earned. The character went on to anchor a franchise and is a regular reference point in discussions of women in action and horror cinema; see the entry on Ellen Ripley.

The creature matters as much as the character. The design by H. R. Giger blurs the boundary between the biological and the mechanical, and its life cycle gives the monster a logic as well as a look. Our entry on the xenomorph follows what the creature has become, and the Alien franchise hub tracks the films that followed.

What to look for

• The seven-person crew of the Nostromo, who talk over one another, argue about pay and treat the mission as a job, not an adventure.
• Production design that treats the ship as a worn industrial space of pipes, steam, scuffed corridors and flickering monitors, in contrast to the polished vessels of earlier science fiction.
• H. R. Giger's creature and his designs for the alien derelict, which look grown as much as built.
• A slow first half in which little seems to happen and dread accumulates through small details.
• Jerry Goldsmith's score and a sound design in which silence, engines and breathing do much of the work.
• A creature that is glimpsed in pieces and shadows, so the audience keeps assembling it in the mind.

Development

Before it became Alien, the story had a long and slightly unglamorous path. O'Bannon had spent time in Paris in the mid-1970s working on Alejandro Jodorowsky's famously unmade adaptation of Dune, and that experience put him in contact with the work of the illustrators Chris Foss and Jean Giraud, who signed his work as Moebius, and with the paintings of H. R. Giger. All three would shape the look of the finished film. The film is sometimes described as a story assembled from borrowed parts, a charge O'Bannon himself seems to have taken with good humor, and the sources of its ideas include 1950s monster films and science fiction short stories.

Selling the idea was easier once Star Wars had opened. The pitch was blunt: Jaws in space. After Brandywine took over, Giler and Hill reworked the script heavily, and the question of who deserved what credit was settled by the Writers Guild. Hill declined to direct, and Scott accepted after the producers pursued him. He is reported to have described the film he wanted as the Texas Chain Saw Massacre of science fiction, an ambition that placed it in the company of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a shocking low-budget picture, even though Alien had a real studio behind it.

Casting an ordinary crew

Scott wanted a cast that looked like grown-ups with jobs, not a team of young explorers. Tom Skerritt played the captain, Dallas, and Harry Dean Stanton played the engineer Brett. Veronica Cartwright, who had originally read for Ripley, played the anxious navigator Lambert and later won a Saturn Award for the role. Ian Holm played the science officer Ash, Yaphet Kotto played the engineer Parker, and John Hurt took the part of Kane after Jon Finch, first cast, fell ill on the opening day of filming.

Weaver was a late addition. Accounts of the casting describe a search for the right actress: Meryl Streep was considered, and Helen Mirren auditioned. Weaver's performance earned her a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress and a BAFTA nomination as most promising newcomer. Scott also wanted a cast older than a typical thriller would use, and Ebert noticed it, which adds to the sense that these people have been doing this job for years.

Building the Nostromo

Principal photography ran for about fourteen weeks, from July to October 1978, mostly at Shepperton Studios and Pinewood Studios near London, with model and miniature work at Bray Studios. A crew of more than 200 built three main environments: the surface of the barren moon, the interior of the Nostromo and the alien derelict. Scott chose to treat the project as a story about truck drivers in space, and the production designers followed that idea with cluttered consoles, hand-lettered signs and a ship that looks like it needs a repair crew.

Several people shaped what the audience sees. Ron Cobb designed much of the human technology and its signage, and he is also credited with the idea of the creature's acid blood. Moebius supplied costume ideas that John Mollo turned into the bulky final space suits. To make the sets seem larger, Scott used children, including his own sons, in suits for some shots. The film was recognized by the Academy with a nomination for Best Art Direction, with Michael Seymour, Les Dilley and Roger Christian credited, and Ian Whittaker credited for set decoration.

The creature and the effects

Giger designed every stage of the creature's life cycle, beginning with the facehugger. He also designed the strange, bone-like environment of the abandoned ship. The head of the adult creature was built by Carlo Rambaldi and had a great many moving parts, and the voice effects were provided by Percy Edwards. The body in most shots belonged to Bolaji Badejo, a young design student who stood about six feet ten inches tall, and stuntmen stood in for him in a few scenes. The design of the creature in its early, small form was reportedly inspired by a Francis Bacon painting from 1944.

The film is famous for its shocks, and the best-known one was shot in a single take using hidden blood squibs. Accounts of the shoot say Cartwright's genuine shock was captured on camera and kept in the finished film. It won the film its Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, shared among Giger, Rambaldi, Brian Johnson, Nick Allder and Denys Ayling, according to the Academy's records.

Sound, music and silence

Jerry Goldsmith composed the score and the National Philharmonic Orchestra performed it. Scott had originally wanted music by the Japanese synthesizer composer Isao Tomita, and the final result is a mixture of sweeping romantic strings and eerie sounds that seem to belong to the ship. The score won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Music. Beyond the music, the film depends on the noises of the ship itself: machinery, ventilation, footsteps, the hum of electronics.

This is one of the clearest examples of how sound builds fear without showing anything, a subject treated in our piece on how horror uses sound. The long stretches in which the crew simply walks through corridors are tense because the audience has been taught to listen for what is not yet on screen, just as in the stalking scenes of Halloween a year earlier.

Release and reception

Alien premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival on May 24, 1979, went into wide release in the United States on June 22. It reached the UK on September 6. In the United States it reportedly earned about $78.9 million in its first run. Worldwide totals are given as a range, with estimates from about $109.7 million to $188 million, and Fox itself cited $143 million in 1992. The studio's accounting later led to a lawsuit by Brandywine, which was settled in 1983 with Fox agreeing to finance a sequel.

Initial reviews were mixed. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were both positive, with Siskel awarding three stars, and Ebert later included the film in his Great Movies series. Over time its reputation rose well past its first reviews. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic now record very high scores, the film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction and Best Supporting Actress, and a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2002.

Reading the film

Few horror films have drawn as much critical writing about their imagery. Many critics have read the creature through the idea of abjection, put forward by Julia Kristeva, and Barbara Creed's concept of the monstrous-feminine has been applied to the film's focus on birth, wombs and invasive reproduction. Ebert called the creature unmistakably phallic, and O'Bannon described the oral violation at the heart of the story as a kind of payback for horror films that targeted vulnerable women. The film is notable because it makes men the victims of a bodily violation, a reversal that has fed decades of discussion.

A second reading is about work. The crew members complain about shares and bonuses, and the corporation that employs them behaves as if they are disposable. The Moria review of the film links this hostile view of the universe to class divisions in 1970s America. Where Spielberg's alien films of the same period imagined friendly visitors, Alien offers an indifferent cosmos and a company that sends its people into it without telling them everything. The theme of the faceless employer returns in each sequel.

Versions and how to watch

Most viewers meet the film in one of two forms. The 1979 theatrical cut runs about 116 minutes. In 2003 a Director's Cut reached theaters on October 31 and DVD in the Alien Quadrilogy box set, adding roughly four minutes of previously cut material and removing about five, which makes it about a minute shorter overall. Scott has said that the 1979 version is his preferred cut. Home video has appeared in many formats, including a 4K Ultra HD release in April 2019 and a theatrical re-release for the 45th anniversary in April 2024.

For a first viewing, the theatrical cut is the best place to start, in a dark room with good sound. Viewers interested in the monster should follow it with the creature-feature shelf, which shows what came before, and with the The Fly, where a different filmmaker turned physical transformation into tragedy. It also pairs well with body horror more broadly, since Giger's design and the film's central violation are among the form's landmarks.

Influence and sequels

The immediate sequel, Aliens (1986), was directed by James Cameron, and the series continued with Alien 3 (1992) and Alien Resurrection (1997). Later entries include Prometheus (2012), Alien: Covenant, Alien: Romulus (2024), set between the first two films, and the television series Alien: Earth (2025). Ripley is the one character who runs through the original four films. The video game Alien: Isolation (2014) borrowed the first film's slow dread and retro-industrial look and is often named among the best adaptations.

The cultural footprint is wide. Mel Brooks parodied the best-known scene in Spaceballs, and Nintendo's Metroid series took the names Ridley and Mother Brain from the director and the ship's computer. The American Film Institute ranked the film seventh among science fiction films in 2008, and Empire placed it thirty-third on its list of the greatest films of all time that year. Its tone, in which fear arrives with workaday competence, is one reason it still feels modern.

Verified details

• O'Bannon wrote about 29 pages of an early version called Memory, and the working title Star Beast was later changed to Alien.
• Ridley Scott directed after The Duellists (1977); principal photography ran from July 5 to October 21, 1978.
• Most of the shoot took place at Shepperton and Pinewood Studios, with model work at Bray Studios.
• Bolaji Badejo, who stood about six feet ten inches, wore the creature suit in most scenes.
• Jon Finch was first cast as Kane but fell ill on the first day, and John Hurt took the role.
• The film premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival on May 24, 1979.
• The Academy Award for Best Visual Effects went to Giger, Rambaldi, Brian Johnson, Nick Allder and Denys Ayling.
• Jerry Goldsmith's score won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.
• The 2003 Director's Cut is about a minute shorter than the 1979 theatrical version.
• The American Film Institute ranked it the seventh-best science fiction film in 2008.

Connections

• Part of the Alien franchise hub.
• Character profile: Ellen Ripley.
• Creature profile: The Xenomorph.
• Subgenre: Creature Feature.

Sources and further reading

• Alien (film), Wikipedia
• The 52nd Academy Awards (1980), Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• Alien (1979) review, Moria
• H. R. Giger, Wikipedia