Deadlights: Why Am I Scared of That?

Cover art to Alien: The Motion Picture Soundtrack, N.C. Winters

The purpose of horror as a genre is to elicit a physical response of revulsion from its audience. There are many ways (some clearly recognizable, others more elliptical in concept or execution) in which horror film seeks to elicit this response. At one end of the spectrum lies the classic "jump scare", the sudden appearance of a violating figure or image at an unexpected moment (the specter of Pazuzu's face in The Exorcist) or after a period of mounting suspense engineered through a combination of scoring, sound effects, and camera work (the game of Red Light, Green Light in The Orphanage). At the other lie the raw and boundless primal anxieties for which we have no words.

Alien, Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror sleeper hit, is a master class in probing those anxieties. The film's titular creature -- a collaboration between screenwriter Dan O'Bannon and Swiss painter H. R. Giger -- inspires revulsion on multiple levels. First and most primally, it resembles an insect. Its body is encased in glistening chitin, its tail tipped with a stinger, its tongue a lethal rod of mucus-slicked teeth like the radula of some monstrous snail. It reproduces in the manner of the species of wasps which lay their eggs in living prey for the larvae to devour after hatching. Fear of the insect is fear of penetration, of the violation of the body's vulnerable orifices by something expressionless, mindless, and implacable. 

Like an insect the alien moves through vents and between walls, violating the safety and knowability of the spaces it haunts. Like an insect it feeds constantly and matures and reproduces with extreme rapidity. By reproducing the archetype of the insect and exaggerating the features of that archetype to which humans harbor instinctive reactions of revulsion, Giger and O'Bannon create something at once familiar and terribly other, a mixture to which viewers tend to have conflicted and intense reactions. The alien's roughly humanoid frame heightens this tension, adding an intimate human element and the implication of reasoned intent to the creature's predation.

The other foundational fear on which the alien draws is our anxiety surrounding rape. Its phallic tail, tongue, and cranial sheath, its slick appearance and viscous drool -- these things signify its status as a violator. The eruption of the bullet-headed chestburster from the stomach of crewmember Kane (John Hurt) is the movie's defining moment, a true example of horror in that it hammers home the revolting realization that the alien can forcibly impregnate us. Our understanding of our bodies and our safety collapses in the face of this new and dreadful fact. 

First, identify the fear. Next, consider its visual signifiers and the ways in which a film's settings, characters, and structure can amplify those signifiers and drive closer to the core of that fear. This is the simplest and most elemental way to either create a richly thematic monster or to unpick why such a creature sticks with you in the dark and quiet of your room at night, its spindly fingers reaching from every shadow, its vicious shape coiled behind every half-shut door long after the film has ceased to roll.