What happens when you reduce “adult Sci-Fi” to its core… oh wait, I already used that line before. Well now, anyways, it is absolutely true for Alien.
All those grand, overblown, sexual references throughout the movie, astronauts entering an alien spacecraft through a gigantic vaginal looking tube, standing mesmerized before the Spacejockey, the alien pilot who met his fate strapped down in a distinctly phallic looking device, a man getting attacked and impregnated by an alien creature that springs from an egg-like shell and not to forget the following iconic, shocking birth sequence of the Alien, all these events seem like a satirical nod to what was going on in 70’s Sci-Fi; it’s the ultimate comment on a decades cultural churn-out, you would only have needed to add buckets of blood, gratuitous gore and a misogynist intend and Alien would have been the final word on seventies horror, too.
By rights when you look at the singular parts it was made up from, at all those organic looking interiors the alien ship* was made from, the obvious innuendo of the whole story set-up, the movie should have audiences alternately shaking with laughter or snickering in delight, and yet it managed to scare us, back then and still today, more than thirty years later… but what exactly is it that keeps scaring us in Alien?
Is it the reflected fear of personal sexuality that keeps resonating with the audience?
* Question aside if it is fear of sexuality that keeps scaring audiences, the fact that the movie is using sex organ like constructs to emphasize the alien nature of the ship and its inhabitants sure can be taken as a message, one that doesn’t cast a positive light on us or our culture.
Leaving on a lighter note, this picture taken from the classic Sci-Fi adventure movie Moontrap, starring Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell, with it’s 30’s pulp magazine cover looks, perfectly sums up the movie’s easy, playful spirit.
Popcorn cinema completely free of any importance or message, entertainment that allows the our mind to lounge on the couch, stretch-out its mental feet and relax.
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