Science Fiction Horror Films

"In the days of Blade Runner and Alien, there were what I would call matte paintings. We did pretty well with those paintings with Blade Runner, but when you look at them today you can see the seams. In those days, it was good enough, and digital effects didn’t exist. To do Alien, I literally had to have a guy in a black rubber suit. That’s why the film is like Jaws, where you don’t see much of the shark, and you don’t really want to look that closely. In Alien, the scariest of all the films in that series, you don’t see much of the monster, mostly because I was so limited in what I could do."

"Alien (like other 1970s films such as Jaws, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Godfather, and Star Wars) was a seminal landmark in the upgrade of shopworn B-movie clichés — monsters, comic book characters, flying saucers, gangsters, Saturday afternoon serials — into major A-movie assets.”"

"Ridley Scott has given us a chilling and brilliantly rendered antidote to swashbuckling space heroes and amiable robots. This is the best horror film to reach the screen since The Omen and a landmark piece of science fiction that looks back to the ’50s tradition of malevolent aliens.”"

"When the first Alien came out in 1979, promising and delivering screams in space that no one could hear, more than a few critics and regular humans called it a relentless, hard-driving thrill machine. In retrospect it resembles a movie with the patience of Job, taking its sweet, stealthy time before arriving at one of the great moments in the history of extreme cinematic gore. You know the scene, probably. There's John Hurt, an actor whose face always seemed halfway to crestfallen even when he didn't have anything to worry about, sitting around the spacecraft galley, having a jolly meal with his crew aboard the Nostromo. He doesn't realize the steroidal tapeworm inside him, gestating, awaits the right moment to burst forth from Hurt's chest and commence the cat-and-mouse franchise spanning two centuries and counting. That monster has been chasing director Ridley Scott ever since."

"Any amount of symbolism and sociological messages can easily be intellectualized in Alien. There is a whole routine about science, for instance, that is compelling and intriguing. But I leave such considerations to others for now and give fair warning: When going on intergalactic travel, always be sure to take a cat. It may prove a friend.”"

"Twentieth Century Fox has spent the annual budget of several emerging nations to fashion a zillion-dollar Tunnel of Screams where you ride through the dark, past various waxy things that leap out of the wall at regular intervals and boo! Or rather, bleah! In Alien you're never quite scared - just queasy. For nothing occurs between the Scary Parts but mumbly crew members chatting it up with that gabby control panel. Even an old ghost story has more than ghosts. Alien skips the story. There's nothing to lead you on, to try to trick you and make it seem like it's all happening to real people. The crew is just part of the hardware fright-meters who register shock; the warmest thing aboard is a cat. You can't imagine being stranded out there in space - helpless - the way you could in, say, that old haunted New York apartment in "Rosemary's Baby" or upstairs in a Georgetown brownstone in "The Exorcist," or in the ocean at Martha's Vineyard in "Jaws." A problem with Alien is that, out there in some vast dreary nth dimension, anything goes. It's too darn easy to haunt a cosmos."

"Yes, these films take place in outer space, so light is minimal. But Alien made distinct use of darkness, hiding its monster in the ship’s bowels, down dim corridors and inside caves. The original poster for Alien made the darkness a selling point, with a cracked egglike figure oozing green on a black background and the frightening tag line: “In space no one can hear you scream.” Much of Alien: Covenant is on the lowlight spectrum, too, with no way to know just where, or how many, threats lurk. Another film with Alien DNA referenced the darkness motif outright: Pitch Black, from (2000), which starred a rising Vin Diesel. After crashing, the passengers of a ship find themselves stranded on a planet full of E.T.s that attack in the dark. When an eclipse comes, so does terror."

"When I was 10 years old, I read in a newspaper that a new film called Alien was so terrifying that people were not only fainting out of fear during screenings but also taken out of the theater on stretchers. I badly wanted to see this movie: one that was so terrifying it could send a person to the emergency room."

"Sci-fi classic Alien is really two movies. The first is a drama about work, labor issues, contracts, company rules, and so on; the second is just a horror film. In fact, one can see the unresolved management/labor problems in the first part of the film as being transmogrified into a monster that destroys the mining spaceship (the Nostromo) in the second part. From a wider historical perspective, the 1970s marked the end of an economic order that began at the end of the 1940s and witnessed the rise of unionized labor in the United States (this, in the film, is exemplified by the working-class characters on the spaceship factory—the late Harry Dean Stanton and the still kicking it Yaphet Kotto). The 1980s, on the other hand, marked the beginning of an economic order that transferred a massive amount of power to supermanagers. We have not left the 1980s to this day, which is why this film is still relevant."

"With its death’s head “face,” phallus-shaped skull and snapping, slavering jaws-within-jaws, the Giger-designed Alien was unlike anything the movie-going public had ever seen. Like the mummy, Frankenstein monster, King Kong and Godzilla, the Alien creature has long since been admitted into the pantheon of greatest movie monsters of all time."

"The consensus about the first Alien was that no one had ever seen anything like it, except those of us who had. With its more lived-in, “2001: A Space Odyssey”-like attention to futuristic detail and S&M and bondage–inspired alien design by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, Alien was unique and an instant classic, adding the words “facehugger” and “chestburster” to the horror-movie lexicon. Scripted by Dan O’Bannon (“Dark Star”) and Ronald Shusett (Aliens), Alien tells the simple tale of a terrifying and deadly alien creature (played by slender, 7-foot-2-inch London design student Bolaji Badejo in an elaborate, tight-fitting suit) on the loose inside the outer-space “commercial towing vehicle” Nostromo. Alien was, like “Jaws” (1975) and “Star Wars” (1977), another case of a B-movie concept getting the A-list treatment from a visionary young director. Indeed, the Alien screenplay was pitched to studios as “Jaws in space.”"

"“It is quite astonishing how much academic work Alien has triggered and from such a wide range of approaches. For example, there are psychoanalytic analyses which stress the importance of the alien as a kind of all-consuming mother figure. The birth trauma of the alien erupting from Hurt’s innards also plays to Freudian interpretations of the film’s significance.” It is as good an example of Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power, the main driving force in existence – to survive and reproduce at all costs. Alien is intriguing when viewed from that philosophical perspective."

"It has scared generations of filmgoers; triggered sequels, prequels, computer games and graphic novels; and made a star of Sigourney Weaver. But most of all, the film Alien – which is about to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its first screening – has spawned an academic industry unsurpassed by any other film. Over the past four decades, dozens of books, hundreds of journal articles and innumerable college courses have analyzed, frame by frame, Ridley Scott’s story of a bloodthirsty creature stalking the crew of the spaceship Nostromo. No other film, not even The Godfather or Psycho, has generated quite that amount of attention."

"20th Century Fox was certainly not seeking intellectual respectability when it began production of Alien in the 1970s. Its executives simply wanted to replicate the massive commercial success of Star Wars and plumped on a science fiction script that writer Dan O’Bannon had been shopping round Hollywood. Scott agreed to direct. Crucial to his approach to the film was the creation of a sense of intense claustrophobia on Nostromo which, he decided, should appear as if it had been drifting around space for eons. Its interior was constructed out of old plane parts while smoke was blown through the whole set to give the film a gritty appearance. Intellectual aspirations were never in his sights, Scott later recalled. All he wanted was to make “a straightforward riveting thriller”."

"Ridley Scott's 1979 film "is not just about people trying not to get eaten by a drooling monstrous animal," film critic David McIntee writes in Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Alien and Predator Films. "It's worse. It's about them trying not to get raped by a drooling monstrous animal.""

"Alien is a rape movie with male victims," explains David McIntee, author of the Alien study Beautiful Monsters. "And it also shows the consequences of that rape: the pregnancy and birth. It is a film that plays, very deliberately, with male fears of female reproduction." Does this make Alien a conservative film or a radical one? Over the years the debate has been teased out in either direction. In the opinion of the cultural critic Barbara Creed, for instance, Scott's film epitomized what she refers to as "the monstrous feminine". It trades in classic Freudian imagery (penis-shaped monsters; dark, womb-like interiors) and shudders at the bloody spectacle of childbirth. Here is a horror film made by men that exploits a particularly male fear of all that is female. Others beg to differ. Ripley, they argue, is the game-changer; the character that sends Alien (and its sequels) off in a bold new direction. "Ripley is pretty revolutionary," insists McIntee. "All of a sudden you have a horror film that has a younger female character who is a survivor and a heroine as opposed to a victim."

"Some people call it a cruel, heartless and essentially exploitative opus. Something to gibber at, in fact. But Alien is not in the business of old-style family entertainment (which was, after all, often as warm and gooey as hot treacle, and about as nourishing). It bases its appeal on a different set of values. Not very enlightening ones, no doubt. But exactly in tune with much more cynical times. It deserves its success for gauging, and gorging, its audience so thoroughly. Technically a British film, it certainly shows how much talent we have in this country if only we had the courage to develop it ourselves. But that's another story, and a much less exciting one."

"No film I have seen in the last year or so, excluding perhaps The Deer Hunter, emanates so strong a whiff of palpable, nerve-straining shock. It is, in fact, an audience reaction picture par excellence. This explains, perhaps better than the colossal build-up, why everyone wants to see it. The public now seems to be sitting back in its seats and saying "Amaze me." Alien, above all others recently, can be relied upon to do just that. Yet it does so, oddly enough, with a story that is basically just a mixture of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Thing from Outer Space. A dozen other 50s-sounding titles spring to mind – well, 60s at any rate. The point is the added 70s proficiency. You won't see anything very original anywhere in the film, other than in the actual making of it. There, no holds are barred. Scott, a recruit from advertising, where instant atmospherics has to be the order of the day, manipulates his audience in a far stronger fashion than he managed with The Duellists. His combination of space fiction and horror story is no great shakes as a work of art. Artifice, however, it has in profusion."

"This homicidal monster, which keeps changing shape, is designed to provoke nightmares, especially in one early scene in which it catapults itself into view, teeth bared. This scene should go down in the books as one of the most disgustingly horrifying moments in movies."

"Alien begins slowly, with a methodical, restrained pace and some self-conscious interplay among its cast, but once the alien itself is introduced the movie takes as firm a hold as the alien does on its victims."

"It was as stylish and thoughtful a space-horror film as has been made, a delightfully cerebral movie in which thrills and chills were accomplished less by the sight of evil than by its implication. The creature in Alien was an ugly little thing, to be sure, and had a disposition to match. But he never was able to dominate the film as he might possibly have one`s later dreams. In Alien, human beings--the ill-fated crew of the spaceship Nostromo--shared the front seat (and the driving) with special effects, and it was on that strength that the film became a memorable box-office smash."

"The austere minimalism of Ridley Scott’s Alien has kept it from becoming dated. Originally released in 1979, this “haunted house in outer space” scary movie still manages to spook audiences, though its infamous “chest-bursting” scene plays somewhat comic now, with the crew looking on aghast like a bunch of stooges. Best known for creating an atmosphere of dread through production design and art direction (the cavernous ship looks like a sci-fi variation of a dilapidated car garage) and, of course, H.R. Giger’s creature (all limbs and shiny black skin and protruding jaws—watch those teeth!), Alien may be the most artfully directed and well-acted slasher movie of all time."

"[Alien] reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn’t mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they’d felt something: they’d been brutalized.”"

"Alien (1979): Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Sigourney Weaver and Tom Skerritt. It’s Friday night. The sold-out theater is so packed, I have to sit in the last seat available in the front row. My parents, who had no problems taking me to R-rated movies, have to sit elsewhere. Then there’s that stunning scene where John Hurt is eating breakfast with his spaceship crewmates and goes into convulsions. Unbeknownst to me, my mother has somehow sneaked up behind me. In a masterpiece of timing, just as the creature pops out of Hurt’s stomach, my mother grabs my shoulder and goes “Bah!” I still have flashbacks. It’s the most scared I’ve ever been at the movies. The film’s tagline: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” In that theater, everyone heard me."

"When we didn't make the picture, Dan O'Bannon needed to be interned in a mental institution for two years, suffering because we didn't get to do "Dune." And when he came out he wrote the script for Alien. Alien was the reaction to not doing "Dune." Who would believe that? But it's true!"

"The end of Alien (spoiler alert!) has Ripley facing down the monster aboard the escape shuttle she’s using to flee the doomed spaceship Nostromo. She plans to eject the parasite from an airlock, but before she does so, she risks her own life by first rescuing the ship’s pet cat, Jones. Author/screenwriter Blake Synder used this scene as a title and theme for his Save the Cat! series of manuals on successful screenplay structure. Snyder, who died in 2009, coined “save the cat” as the moment where a movie hero does something that wins audience affection and empathy. This could happen at any point in a movie. Saving the cat in Alien proved that Ripley had a heart, because she’s a steely cipher in the rest of the film."

"Slightly above-average actioner that tries to compensate for tissue-thin-plot with ever-more-grisly death sequences and impressive visual effects."

"Carl Weathers - Agent Al Dillon"

"Arnold Schwarzenegger - Major 'Dutch' Schaeffer"

""Predator" is an ominous high-tech Stone-Age mixture—ominous because the production is high tech and the script, and its values and mentality, are Stone Age. It's in the bare-bones action-adventure mode that producers Joel Silver and Lawrence Gordon used in "The Warriors" and "The Driver," chic action-fables where nothing impedes the streamlined flow—neither logic, originality nor a single naturalistic moment. Sometimes the form works, but in "Predator," they've hit nada. There's a difference between Walter Hill's minimalism and vacuity—which is what we get from Jim and John Thomas' screenplay. It's arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie. There's no need to do a Mad magazine movie parody of this; it's already on the screen."

"Yeah, I think there’s something very unique about that movie. For one, the movie itself is something that inspired me to do mixed-genre pictures later. I remember going to see it with my older brother who was a bodybuilder and we saw every Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that came out and we went to see that one thinking it was a Commando type film and then it starts turning – I remember the audience reaction to the film in the theater, they were kinda confused when it turned sci-fi and horror and Arnold didn’t really win at the end, a Predator blows himself up and flies off looking like he’s going to a looney bin in a helicopter. And they were a little like "wow what was that movie?" And it just caught on and kept growing in popularity. And the movie itself was very unique."

"Grisly and dull, with few surprises."

"Predator, which opens today at the National and other theaters, is alternately grisly and dull, with few surprises, though the creature's face, when finally revealed, has an interesting claw configuration where its mouth ought to be. The habitat is a good deal more interesting than the action, since it contains both floristy-looking palm fronds and large, deciduous trees that have produced some autumn leaves. The film was shot in Mexico."

"Predator starts out as a second cousin to Rambo and Missing in Action, with Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Maj. Dutch Schaefer) leading a covert mission to find military operatives missing in Latin America. After 45 long minutes, he and his cohorts (among them Carl Weathers) find an enemy camp and conduct a raid. Knock, knock, says Mr. Schwarzenegger, kicking down the door to a hut. Stick around, he says, running somebody through with a sword."

"In the context of racially charged white anxieties about immigration and social order, the historical demonization of Black men is a trope, a stereotype, that easily maps onto cinematic typecasting. The 1987 Hollywood film that launched the Predator franchise fits this pattern. Predator depicted a Black, dreadlocked, large and super-virile male in a way that converged white art with white political history. A white man once said he thought it was cool that I had dreadlocks like the Predator. This is not a compliment."

"McTiernan had a good idea in making his monster all but invisible. (through the film`s first hour, his presence is suggested only through a clever optical effect). Schwarzenegger and his team are, to say the least, very definite physical presences; the only force that could possibly threaten them would be their opposite, something airy and unseen. McTiernan, regrettably, seems more interested in spectacle than suspense, and the attack sequences are filmed for splashy visual impact. And an apocalyptic finale that raises the antiwar message to the nuclear level is more than McTiernan's metaphor can bear. But Predator remains, if not exactly a thinking man`s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, at least an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that reflects some thought."

"Predator presents a confused but not unsympathetic mix of genres: the in-your-face, shape-shifting horror of Alien (film) and the sweaty military mystique of Rambo and Top Gun, with the whole salted by the camp humor and comic book heroics of the typical Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. It`s also, if only half-consciously, a political allegory, with something unformed but urgent to say about U.S. involvement in Central America."

"I think Predator has odd moments of self-consciousness too. The one interesting (as opposed to efficient) piece of screenwriting is the scene after they've stormed the rebel encampment, when the alien hunter is watching the soldiers in infrared. Carl Weathers's CIA agent thanks Duke for skewering a deadly scorpion on his back; Duke's reply – "Any time" – is played back with menacing distortion by the predator, until it sounds like a warning. The radio operator (played by Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black) tells a variation of the dirty joke he tried out in the helicopter, also concerning an echo. Landham finally gets it, and his booming laugh is picked up by the alien and played back, grotesquely. Echoes, echoes, and more echoes … until all the machismo is hollow. Something telling is going on here, tonally. The final image of the sequence is the predator watching the heat fade out of the scorpion in its own palm. It's like the film is saying: there's always someone bigger."

"There's something deeply hypocritical about a film that first establishes that its guerrillas are the evil variety by having one of them cold-bloodedly execute a hostage, then gives its squad of "expendables" free rein to cold-bloodedly murder all of them minutes later. It's the Reagan era all over: tobacco-chewing, tough-talking, US of A military triumphalism on one hand and self-pitying, bugle-salute sentimentalism on the other (when Bill Duke – giving the one thing in Predator that could actually be termed a performance – goes all misty-eyed over his microwaved buddy Ventura). Most of the big 80s action directors displayed some ambivalence towards the mildly fascistic butt-kicking mores of their chosen form: James Cameron developed his My Little Pony eco side; Paul Verhoeven sharpened his satire. But the full mess and insincerity and dumb contradictions are there unapologetically in Predator, a piece of preening post-Vietnam powder-puff for the US ego."

"One of the great science fiction horror films, often imitated, but never properly duplicated, not even by its own sequel."

"I always wanted to see something with mandibles."

"[from trailer] In a part of the world where there are no rules, deep in the jungle where nothing that lives is safe, an elite rescue squad is being led by the ultimate warrior. But now, they're up against the ultimate enemy. Nothing like it has ever been on earth before. We cannot see it, but it sees the heat of our bodies and the heat of our fear. It kills for pleasure, it hunts for sport. But this time, it's picked the wrong man to hunt."

"Soon the hunt will begin."

"It came for the thrill of the hunt. It picked the wrong man to hunt."

"Nothing like it has ever been on earth before."

"Anna: When I was little, we found a man. He looked like—like butchered. The old women in the village crossed themselves, and whispered crazy things, said strange things. El diablo cazador de hombres. Only in the hottest years this happens. And this year it grows hot. We begin finding our men. We found them sometimes without their skin, and sometimes much, much worst. El que hace trofeos de los hombres means... "The demon who makès trophies of men.""

"Blain: Come on in, you fuckers. Come on in. Ol' Painless is waitin'."

"Blain: Bunch of slack-jawed faggots around here. This stuff will make you a god damned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me."

"[after knocking down a door to shoot two more soldiers] Knock-knock."

"[after pinning a man to the wall with his knife] Stick around."