How Alien set course for critic’s future

I was a week away from turning 13 in the early summer of 1979 when my best friend and I convinced his dad to take us to an R-rated, creepy sounding science fiction film called Alien, which an acquaintance of ours had described as a “nightmare in space.”

Other than that brief pull quote — not surprisingly, our friend was an aspiring film critic — we knew next to nothing about it. It was scary; it was in space; that was enough for us. But that night in late June has stayed with me ever since. Every critic has a movie they can point to from their childhood or adolescence as the one that signaled to them their eventual choice of career. For me, that film was Alien.

Ridley Scott’s film is fiendishly simple (a fact underscored by the final shooting script, which offers scant dialogue): A deep space mining ship is en route back to Earth with a full cargo, when the seven members of the crew are unexpectedly awakened from hypersleep and directed by their company’s mandate to investigate a repeating beacon — feared to be a distress call — on a harsh, otherwise uninhabitable planet.

Once there, and investigating a desolate, wishbone-shaped ship stuck into the mountainous landscape, one of the crew members is afflicted with a face-hugging parasite and, against the wishes of the ranking officer, is allowed back on board their ship. Shortly thereafter, a monstrous creature emerges from the afflicted man (John Hurt) and terrorizes the other crew members until only the last one, a clear-headed woman named Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) makes it out alive.

Its elegance is in its simplicity — as one of the characters says of the creature itself, it’s easy to admire its purity. Take the film’s title, which, in Dan O’Bannon’s original script, started out as the laughable Star Beast, before being refined into the more spare, provocative Alien. The opening title sequence alone, with its eerie, slow pace, creepily atmospheric background sound mixed with Jerry Goldsmith’s hauntingly understated score and achingly slow title reveal, remains appreciably jaw-dropping no matter how many times you watch it. It’s perhaps the most effective title sequence in cinema history.

But there was more to the film’s appeal to me than its magnificent art direction and expert filmmaking craft. Something I wouldn’t have been able to articulate then but has become more clear to me over time.

A couple of weeks ago in October, on the occasion of the film’s 40th-anniversary, an events company called Fathom offered special screenings of Alien back on the big screen in select theaters across the country. Given an opportunity to see one of my favorite films in a theater, I couldn’t resist, especially as my daughter was now the age I was when I first saw it.

Having developed a (very welcome) predilection for horror movies, ever since I took her to see Us in March — for her breathless reaction, see my review in the Democrat-Gazette — my daughter has been clamoring to see more of the classics of the form. So this was a golden chance for her to see the film that is such a part of my love of cinema while taking in an important moment of history from the genre she has come to appreciate.

I managed to keep it a surprise until we walked in. As it happened, my mother was also in town, visiting from Fayetteville, and she — not one for horror movies since Psycho so traumatized her back in 1960 that she still won’t shower in a hotel room — agreed to see it for the first time as well. The theater was more than half-full, lots of couples where one partner was trying to explain what the other one could expect, so there was a sense of anticipation as the lights dimmed.

I monitored my mom and daughter out of the corner of my eye, especially during the film’s most famous scene, in which the afflicted crew member, seemingly recovered from his parasitic ordeal, sits down for a fateful last meal with the others, before the small, embryonic alien creature suddenly bursts out of his chest, across the table and into the bowels of the cavernous, dark ship. My kid didn’t jump, particularly, or recoil, as I’m sure I did four decades previous. But her eyes were huge, and her fingers, I noted happily, were clutching at the armrests, as if she were anticipating a giant force of wind or wave to come knocking her off the seat.

Afterward, both of them seemed relatively sanguine. My daughter announced that she hadn’t found it scary so much as tense, a dictum with which my mom more or less agreed. They had enjoyed it. Both had predictably been most worried about Jones the cat making it out alive (he does), but neither felt it had been overwhelmingly terrifying. To their mind, it was a particularly good sort of space thriller or something.

Their reaction, which pretty much echoed that of my partner and her two sons, who had seen it earlier in the week together, left me curious. It’s true that horror tends to be more of a specific time and place — apart from everything else, the best horror movies are always so pilfered and copied after their release, many of their most arresting and effective scenes feel rote to a later-day viewer — but I also thought more about why it was the film hit me as hard as it did, and why that feeling has stuck with me, literally thousands of movies later, remaining one of my most cherished cinematic experiences.

It finally dawned on me, but the answer takes a wee bit of context from my childhood. My father was an English professor at our local university; my mother, a respected and published fiction writer. They had both loved movies, and much of their early courtship had consisted of them going to the arthouse cinema in Iowa City, where they were both attending grad school, and taking in films of the French New Wave, Fellini, Resnais and, yes, Hitchcock.

Books were always the primary source of family cultural undercurrent, but movies came a close second. I grew up watching some of these films, long before I had any means of making sense of them, along with the early, black and white comedies of Chaplin and the Marx Brothers my dad so adored.

By the time I was 13, I was just starting to forge my own sense of artistic catalog. As an adolescent boy, that unfortunately meant a good deal of comics, bad TV shows, really banal fantasy epic novels and Ian Fleming’s James Bond books (it also meant an unfortunate propensity for early Genesis albums, but that’s another column). When I first saw Alien, I was on my own. And the film was so devastatingly good, taking me by such complete surprise, it became my first true moment of artistic awakening without the influence of my parents to guide me.

In this way, it became my private experience, one not dictated by family, and possibly the first time I realized just how utterly bewitching truly inspired cinema could be. To my knowledge, my father, who passed away a few years ago, never saw the movie (a Brit and something of a sentimentalist who loved Dickens and feel-good romances; it wouldn’t at all have been his cup of tea), while my mother saw it just now, mostly as a means of appeasing her granddaughter.

Alien was the first incredibly powerful piece of art I could place on my own wall, in the imaginary dwelling I was slowly moving myself into, one of the first steps to my coming into my own and forging a tentative path for myself as an eventual adult.

With that in mind, there was no way the film would have affected my daughter the way it had me: There would be few films on this Earth she would have felt less as her own thing (much as my first screening of the aforementioned Psycho was influenced by my mother’s experience of the movie). Rather than coming at it with a clean slate, as I had done years before, my daughter had known the story about it and watched the trailer with me many times. It must have been like meeting an extended family member you had only heard about before: interesting, sure, but hardly a statement of eventual emancipation.

So, I suspect, as much as I adore going to films with my kid and hope to always do so, eventually, she will begin to branch out, find movies I’ve never heard of, and experience them all her own, building her own place, if you will. So when she moves out, she knows just where she’ll be living.

In that theater back in 1979, after Alien ended, and the credits mercifully started rolling, I unclutched my body, which had been clenched tightly rigid for the last hour, leaned back in my seat, looked over at my friend, and we both broke into gales of laughter, a relief from the incredible anxiety and stress of Scott’s film. The two of us sat there for several minutes, guffawing, as his father patiently waited for us, closer to the exit. In between laughing jags, I told my friend I was going to recommend this film to everyone I knew.

I guess I still am.