I was 8 years old in the spring of 1996. My life had undergone some massive changes the year before, which took me and my family from a three-bedroom house in Pinion Hills, California, to an 16-foot travel trailer in the middle of the woods in Ash Fork, Arizona. Due to our remote living situation, my parents’ respective workplaces were at least 2.5 hours away (as well as the basic amenities that cities provide), so when they both had to run errands, I’d be mostly alone in these woods save for a pack of extremely loyal Australian Shepherds.
My imagination (and dogs) made sure I was never bored, but what I also had to pass the time were my parents’ massive VHS cabinets, which were stuffed into a storage shed that my dad built from the ground-up by himself. In Cali, I wasn’t permitted to rifle through the hundreds of tapes my parents had amassed over the years (including Alien3), but in Arizona, it was the equivalent of gaining secret access to a box full of Playboys. All I had to do was make sure the solar panels mounted on top of the trailer were generating enough power to operate our 8-inch TV and VCR, and it was showtime. Among the many movies I watched with great abandon was the original Alien. Nothing would ever quite be the same after that.
Granted, I was exposed to Alien before I had even watched the third installment in theaters. I scarcely recall glimpses from that film, much like a person who took a Polaroid picture ten years before and was then asked to describe everything that was in it on that day. I hadn’t yet experienced it with a coherent mind until I popped the VHS into the VCR and watched it on that little TV, standing on one of the trailer’s foldout couches to watch it (unfortunately, there was nowhere else to put the TV and VCR but on a shelf-like platform that my dad mounted on a wall by the bathroom).
Right away, Alien was unlike anything I had seen before--even Alien3, which was the product of a different time, a bigger budget, and a different director. Instead of dread, there was an overwhelming sense of isolation that I identified with right away, and beyond that, a foreboding sense of dormancy. At the time, I didn’t have the luxury of even knowing who HP Lovecraft was, but the whole idea of something ancient and sinister just waiting to be released spoke volumes here. The opening theme, punctuated by a sound akin to whale song, is incredibly hard to forget once you’ve been exposed to it.
As the movie progressed, there was so much to latch onto, from the palpable realism of the Nostromo and its crew to the discovery of The Derelict, its dead pilot, and its slumbering cargo. The first viewing was overwhelming, to say the least, but the titular Alien (or the Big Chap, as he’s affectionately called these days) struck me as more formidable and terrifying than the one I had seen in Alien3, which was more of an animalistic slasher. The Big Chap didn’t give me nightmares, but its presence complimented the glacial pace of the movie to such an extent that it was more graceful than monstrous, more unknowable than evil. It was truly Alien. Up to that point, I had been spurred to tell stories of my own thanks to Star Trek, but it was the original Alien that inspired me to go against the grain and reassess the possibilities of science fiction storytelling.
Since then, I have become a disciple of Alien—not the franchise specifically, but the original movie itself. Even on the 40th anniversary of its release, Alien sort of exists within its own vacuum, while the sequels, prequels, and spin-offs reside in their own domain. That isn’t to say most of those films are bad or nowhere near as good as their predecessor, but Alien is often regarded as a singular experience, the alpha and omega of science fiction horror. As I’ve gotten older, my appreciation for Alien has deepened tenfold, and that doesn’t stem from repeat viewings so much as delving into the creative journey that culminated with the film we know and love. As comprehensive making-of books and retrospective documentaries have shown us, it’s one of those instances where the motivations and collaborations that took place behind the scenes could be considered just as compelling, if not more compelling, than the final product itself.
It was one thing to see the realism and subtle world-building play out on a 8-inch TV screen, but it was another thing to learn how basic it was from the beginning. When you strip away all the amazing contributions that helped shape Alien into what it is, it’s quite straightforward: ship intercepts distress signal, crew finds alien eggs, one of them is impregnated, alien hatches, and all but one person dies. The framework is no different than the B-level science fiction movies that inspired it, and at various stages, that’s what people expected it to be, but with sharp rewrites, incredible curated performances, and some innovative artistic contributions, Alien became more than the sum of its parts. It became wholly original because enough people cared and believed that it could be more than a simple B-film. It was a perfect storm in a little bottle, and we’ll never get an Alien sequel or prequel that has the same effect ever again.