Alien (1979)

Placing Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien into a single genre would be discounting its inventive nature. With an aggressive Alien creature onboard a spaceship, many months of travel from Earth, and a crew that is slowly killed off one-by-one, it is no surprise that it has been termed “Jaws in space.” By spanning two standalone genres, Alien breaks conventions of each genre and thereby creates some new conventions of its own in an incredibly unsettling and scary film that is as effective today as it surely was over 30 years ago.

Alien tells the story of seven crew members aboard a commercial towing spaceship named Nostromo. After receiving a mysterious signal from a nearby planet, Captain Dallas takes the crew to investigate the source. While combing the surface, Executive Officer Kane discovers a field laden with large, grotesque eggs; shortly thereafter, a creature leaps out of an egg and onto Kane's helmet and remains latched to his face for several hours, leaving him comatose. The creature suddenly disappears, and Kane seems to be fine until the Alien bursts out of his stomach. The Alien continues killing off crew members one-by-one as they search him out, until only the navigator Lambert, the Chief Engineer Parker, the Warrant Officer Ripley, and the Science Officer Ash remain. Upon learning that the main objective of this journey is to capture the Alien and return it to Earth, Ripley confronts Ash, who proceeds to attack Ripley until Parker decapitates Ash with a fire extinguisher, revealing Ash to be an android, sent to ensure that the Alien is returned to Earth. While trying to get to the shuttle and abandon and destroy Nostromo, Parker and Lambert are finally killed by the Alien, leaving only Ripley, who is successful in killing off the Alien.

Because Alien spans multiple genres, it surely does not abide by the standard conventions of each respective genre. As a horror film (which it is primarily considered to be), Alien features an antagonist, the Alien, that is certainly not groundbreaking. The Alien is almost a stock character in the horror genre—a creature wholly unknown to science—that is seen in movies dating back to 1920's, though the Alien is admittedly more grotesque than, say, Nosferatu. But beyond its slimy, repulsive appearance, the aspect of the Alien that poses the biggest threat to the crew of the Nostromo is its apparent omniscience and undying desire to kill anything and everything with which it comes into contact. This type of monster is found in many horror films, though the physical appearance of the Alien makes it one of the more effective examples. The overall arc of the story—a group of people are stuck in one place where outside help is impossible and are being hunted by an aggressive specimen that cannot be killed using conventional weapons—is also a fairly standard formula within the horror genre.

However, one aspect in which Alien breaks the conventions of the horror genre is its setting: outer-space. Several outer-space horror films would follow after the release of Alien, but it was undoubtedly one of the first. Because Alien is so unlike anything that had been released prior to it, it does not have many icons that harkened back to previous films; however, with three sequels and two spinoffs, as well as throughout film history in general, Alien arguably created some of the most memorable icons of all time—the facehugger, the chestbuster, and Ripley's repeated encounters with the beast.

Although style widely varies throughout the horror genre, few use the film noir style as effectively as Alien. With much dim light, as well as high contrasts (particularly on Nostromo, where seemingly all of the rooms are either completely black or completely white), great use of smoke and fog (especially on the planet on which the Alien is first encountered), and a fair amount of shadow play, Alien effects an almost constantly creepy atmosphere that becomes one of its strongest assets.

One of the most important elements of Alien is it that it crosses many boundaries genre-wise. The sheer fact that it takes place in outer-space and involves several interactions with an alien creature is practically enough to make the argument that it is a science fiction film. Also supporting that stance is that it involves some technology that did not and does not exist in the present (though its not all that implausible) and the sentient computer system (“Mother” in Alien) that has ulterior motives unbeknownst to the crew members calls back to Stanley Kubrick's science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and is seen again as recently as last year in Duncan Jones' Moon. However, due to the violent nature of the Alien as well as the many scenes which are clearly intended to scare the audience, the opposing argument (that Alien fits more comfortably into the horror genre) is more logical and generally more widely accepted.

By slapping two fairly distinctive genres together, Ridley Scott achieves a remarkable feat of filmmaking with Alien. As a film that crosses more than one genre boundary, Alien creates some conventions of its own and still exists as a distinctive film that has stood the test of time.