In observance of that autumn spell when we celebrate the primal instinct of fear, Rainestorm highlights 31 days of spooky scares to season the eerie atmosphere of Halloween.
Reign of terror: 1979
The horror… the horror: The timeless classic that effectively launched Ridley Scott’s career. Deservedly so. What starts as a quasi-ghost story eventually turns all-out monster movie, but sophomore director Scott is in no hurry to get there. The movie unfolds in layers, each one revealing and adding to the suspense. Scott paces the film in rhythmic ebbs and truly jarring crests. There is no skimping on the science-fiction, either. Though in the abstract the aliens’ method of reproduction seems grossly inefficient, it is nonetheless clever, and its rapid growth from infancy to adulthood need not be discredited against the discovery of a small, seemingly innocuous accumulation of shed skin.
Halloween haunt: The Nostromo is as quiet and ghostly as a haunted house, full of empty corridors, rattling chains and the obligatory hissing cat. Shadows dance along the walls, masking the alien’s menacing approach. Even Tom Skerritt’s hunt for the creature through the spacecraft’s air ducts is like being trapped behind the walls of a secret chamber. Before all hell inevitably breaks loose, being on the Nostromo is no less unnerving than being trapped within the shielded walls of William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill.
Tastiest treat: John Hurt earns his surname at the dinner table as the crew of the Nostromo receives a hellish, bloody surprise.
Devilish discourse: “I can’t lie to you about your chances but… you have my sympathies.”
Goes great with: Pitch Black (2000). David Twohy manages to make an entire planet seem claustrophobic as a band of survivors from a crashed spacecraft discover they have arrived just in time for a full-blown blackout eclipse on a moon orbiting three suns. Though largely remembered as the launch of Vin Diesel’s leading-man career, Pitch Black is a smart science fiction horror film that has its protagonists forever on the run from the planet’s carnivorous, nocturnal monsters, and Twohy never lets his anti-hero’s character waver.
2 responses to “31 Nights, 31 Frights: Alien”
I agree with what one previous poster said. I do feel that there are a lot of things that Alien and The Thing have in common. The claustrophobia, isolation, and of course a nasty monster. But I have always thought that the crew in The Thing had it worse. The Thing could look and act just like it was an actual human. That would make it very difficult to deal with. The Alien is most obviously……alien. But, having stated all of that I love both films.