Column: Cthulhu Eats the Movies: Alien
by Filamena Young
Alien (1979) Director: Ridley Scott. Screenplay: Dan O’Bannon Cast: Tom Skerrit, Sigourney Weaver. Veronica Cartwright.
When I started putting this column together in my head, I thought a lot about how to review movies you may have already seen. I figured what might be fun is to try to place these movies in a sliding continuum from Lovecraftian to Very Very Not Lovecraftian, with plenty of room for debate along the way.
This left me with something of a problem, because if you ask ten people what the most Lovecraftian movie is, you may get eleven or twelve answers. I needed the advice of an expert, someone who know more about Lovecraft than the man himself might have. So I asked Ken Hite, and if you don’t know who he is, you need to pick up Tour de Lovecraft or Dubious Shards and get you some good old-fashioned Cthulhu schoolin’.) When I asked him what the best Lovecraftian movie was, he told me Alien in no uncertain terms. He also bemoaned the fact that he didn’t have a better example of a great Lovecraft movie based on Lovecraft’s own material.
I’d heard this before, and sat down with the movie and some popcorn to give it some serious consideration.
You know what? I think Ken’s right. Alien takes the concepts of maddening, unfathomable cosmic horror from Lovecraft’s page and brings it to life with chilling visual detail. The problem I often have with the translation of Lovecraft to screen is that there is just so much horror in what you can’t see in Lovecraft’s work, how do you do that visually, as required by a visual media. Well, in this case, you get H.R. Giger to design some mind-blowing monstrosities you’re going to terrorize your characters with. The aliens in Alien are so strange and so outside of the natural order you have to wonder where Giger goes when he dreams.
Further more, the creative crew, from Dan O’Bannon to Ridley Scott, really captured the isolation and panic so important to Lovecraftian horror that while you might not be seeing is story unfold, you feel the terror of his characters as they have brushes with the various entities that simply Should Not Be. A seven-person crew being picked off one at a time by an unfathomable horror until only two are left. It’s hard to imagine a space crew being utterly on their own. They must be part a global government or massive company that they can simply call out to for assistance. But corruption in this story, unfathomable evil comes not just from the inhumanity of the aliens, but also from the greedy company that is supposed to support the characters. A spy on the ship, orders to capture the alien even at the cost of the entire crews lives, it’s reminiscent of the mad plans of a secret cult so common to the Lovecraft universe.
So that all said, for now, let’s set the bar at Alien as the best Lovecraftian movie and next time I’ll try to present the worst Lovecraftian movie so we can start to build a scale here at Cthulhu Eats the Movies. Disagree, have some ideas on better or worse movies in the genre? Hit me up in comments and we can talk. I’d love to hear your opinions.
Verdict: Lovecraftian.
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Filed under: Reviews
by silviamg
Even better, as I’m sure Ken Hite knows, in the early screenplay for Alien (the one with a unisex crew) the discovery of the eggs on the planetoid has an even more explicitly Lovecraftian tone, with an alien pyramid full of narrative pictograms (cf. At the Mountains of Madness), and the alien is more tentacled and cephalopod-like. There is no doubt in my mind that Dan O’Bannon had Lovecraft’s work in mind when he wrote this.
Djibril, did you have to purchase the script to read it, or is it posted online? (I know of some legal places to read film scripts, I wonder if Alien is on one of them.) I’d love to read it.
Alien is a classic. And great as a Lovecraftian horror. That said, John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy (The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In The Mouth of Madness) are some of the best and most Lovecraftian movies around. while The Thing owes a lot to some other SF inspiration, Prince of Darkness is Lovecraft in all but name. And as good as that film is, it is mere prep for the masterpiece of In The Mouth of Madness, which gets my vote as most Lovecraftian movie yet made. Is it as good as alien? Overall, probably not. A better love letter to HPL (and other horror writers)? Most definitely.
B
Djibri, this early screenplay sound very interesting! I didn’t know about it. I can realy see this vast lonely and gloomy pyramid world. Is there any storyboard pictures from these early ideas?
I think the movie Psycho is based on a novel which Lovecraft hade some influence in. Psycho also has this feeling of isolation. A motel near an abandoned highway.
One of my art books (I don’t have it here, but in Mexico City, so I don’t know the name) contained pictograms by Giger showing the face-hugger emerging from the egg. They looked vaguely Egyptian inspired to me.
I also had a Spanish edition of Lovecraft stories with that exact same image as the cover. Unfortunately, that is also far from my current location. Maybe somebody can post a link to a scan of it?
Funny, I just watched Alien the other night and was thinking how Lovecraftian it was.
One of Ron Cobb’s original concepts for Alien
http://pics.livejournal.com/nekokaiju/pic/000e0e0r.jpg
I can’t see any statement as to whether it’s legal or not, but a copy of the early screenplay (which has been circulating for years) is, for example, at http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_early.html
There are some sketches/storyboards in there, but not many. It’s interesting how Bannon’s vision evolved into Giger’s, I guess.
(It occurs to me now that the pyramid idea was re-used in AvP–a wasted film if ever I saw one, and not the least bit Lovecraftian.)
Nice call. I hadn’t really thought of this film in Lovecraftian terms, but the mold certainly applies. I could also make an argument for “Blair Witch Project” capturing the feeling of a Lovecraft story better than most, although it seems to be based as much on Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” as anything. Still, the mood is right.
If I could make a suggestion for worst Lovecraft film, I would offer “The Tomb” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1039646/) which is supposedly based on a couple of Lovecraft’s stories, but has more in common with the Saw films. Why anyone bothered attaching H.P.’s name to this disjointed film, I have no idea.
Hmm, I’d never considered Alien in terms of Lovecraft before, but it’s a great insight. Will have to add it to the Netflix queue to confirm.