Alien (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Alien is a 1979 science fiction horror film that begins with a single, deceptively quiet transmission. A commercial starship called the Nostromo is hauling twenty million tons of ore back to Earth when its computer, called Mother, picks up a signal from a nearby planet. Seven crew members wake from stasis to investigate. None of them will survive intact. What follows is one of cinema's most sustained exercises in dread, directed by Ridley Scott from a script by Dan O'Bannon. The questions the film plants early are simple enough: What sent the signal? What is hiding inside the derelict ship they find on the surface? And who, or what, is really in charge of this mission?

• 2. From Beach Ball to Giger

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  Dan O'Bannon first encountered the problem of making an alien look real while studying cinema at the University of Southern California, where he made a science-fiction comedy called Dark Star with director John Carpenter. The alien in that film was a spray-painted beach ball with rubber claws. The experience left O'Bannon, in his own words, "really wanting to do an alien that looked real." A couple of years later he began work on a horror version of the same basic idea, which he described as "Dark Star as a horror movie instead of a comedy."

  The decisive creative turn came when O'Bannon joined Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated adaptation of Dune, a project that took him to Paris for six months. There he encountered the Swiss artist H. R. Giger, whose paintings he described as both horrible and beautiful in a way he had never experienced before. "I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster," he later said. When the Dune project collapsed, O'Bannon returned to Los Angeles broke and homeless, sleeping on the couch of his collaborator Ronald Shusett. Together they revived the script, which had been called Memory and then Star Beast before O'Bannon settled on the word that appeared most often in the pages: Alien.

  Shusett contributed one of the story's most disturbing ideas: a crew member could be implanted with an alien embryo that would burst out of his body. O'Bannon drew on a wide range of influences, describing his own creative process with characteristic bluntness: "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!" Among his acknowledged sources were The Thing from Another World (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), Planet of the Vampires (1965), and a 1953 short story by Clifford D. Simak called "Junkyard," which features a crew landing on an asteroid and discovering a chamber full of eggs. O'Bannon also cited Strange Relations by Philip José Farmer (1960) and various EC Comics horror titles as influences on the film's approach to alien reproduction.

• 3. Script Wars and Star Wars

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  O'Bannon and Shusett pitched their script as "Jaws in space" and were close to signing a deal with Roger Corman's studio when a friend steered them toward Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill, who ran a production company called Brandywine with ties to 20th Century-Fox. The deal they signed brought friction almost immediately. Giler and Hill rewrote and revised the script extensively, which O'Bannon resented; he believed they were trying to claim credit for his work. Shusett later acknowledged that Hill and Giler had added at least one element that became central to the film: the android character Ash, which O'Bannon considered an unnecessary subplot but which Shusett called "one of the best things in the movie."

  20th Century-Fox was not eager to finance science-fiction at all until the summer of 1977, when Star Wars changed the calculation overnight. Carroll recalled the shift plainly: "When Star Wars came out and was the extraordinary hit that it was, suddenly science fiction became the hot genre." O'Bannon remembered that Fox wanted to follow through on Star Wars quickly, and the only spaceship script sitting on their desk was Alien. The studio greenlit the film with an initial budget of $4.2 million. When Ridley Scott, whose debut feature The Duellists (1977) had impressed Giler, Hill, and Carroll, accepted the directing offer and created detailed storyboards in London, Fox was so impressed that it doubled the budget. The Writers Guild of America ultimately awarded O'Bannon sole screenplay credit despite the extensive rewrites.

• 4. Truckers in Space

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  Casting calls were held in New York City and London, with Scott employing Mary Selway for the United Kingdom and Mary Goldberg for the United States. Scott's original conception of the warrant officer Ripley was male, but he changed the character to female after a suggestion that there was no reason she could not be a woman. O'Bannon and Shusett had deliberately written all the roles without specifying gender, noting in the script that "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women." The guiding casting concept was "truckers in space" - working people in a realistic industrial environment, inspired in part by Star Wars's grimy, lived-in aesthetic.

  Sigourney Weaver, who had Broadway experience but was largely unknown in film, was the last actor cast. She impressed Scott, Giler, and Hill at her audition, and performed most of her screen tests on the sets while they were still being built. Meryl Streep had been considered for the role but was not contacted because her partner John Cazale had recently died. Helen Mirren also auditioned. The role became Weaver's first leading role in a motion picture and earned her nominations for a Saturn Award for Best Actress and a BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Role.

  John Hurt was Scott's first choice for Kane, the officer who becomes the alien's first human host, but a prior commitment in South Africa led to Jon Finch being cast instead. On the first day of shooting, Finch became ill and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which had worsened a case of bronchitis. Hurt, whose South African project had fallen through, was in London by then and quickly replaced him. Bolaji Badejo, a 26-year-old design student discovered in a bar by a casting team member, was cast as the alien itself. At 6 ft 10 in - 7 ft inside the costume - with a slender frame, Badejo attended tai chi and mime classes to develop convincing movements.

  Roger Ebert later noted that the cast skewed older than typical thriller films of the era. Tom Skerritt, who played the captain, was 46. Ian Holm was 48. Harry Dean Stanton was 53. Only Veronica Cartwright at 30 and Weaver at 28 fell within the age range of the usual thriller cast. Ebert observed that this gave the characters the texture of workers rather than adventurers, which reinforced the film's central premise.

• 5. Building the Creature

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  When Scott introduced Ridley Scott to H. R. Giger's work - specifically the painting Necronom IV - they agreed immediately that this was the visual territory the film needed. Fox initially judged Giger's work too ghastly for audiences, but the Brandywine team persisted. Carroll later said that the moment Scott saw Giger's work, he knew the film's biggest design problem had been solved. Scott flew to Zürich to recruit Giger personally, and Giger went on to design all aspects of the alien and its environment, from the egg to the adult creature, as well as the derelict spacecraft and the planetoid surface.

  The facehugger was the first creature Giger designed, going through several size variations before settling on a small creature with human-like fingers and a long tail. Ron Cobb contributed the idea that the creature would have highly corrosive acid for blood, a characteristic that would make it impossible to kill by conventional means without destroying the ship. For the facehugger's emergence from the egg, the creature was launched using high-pressure air hoses; the footage was then reversed and slowed in editing to prolong the effect. The egg's innards were a cow's stomach and tripe. Test shots were filmed using hen's eggs, and this footage appeared in early trailers, which is why a hen's egg ended up on the film's promotional poster rather than the alien egg that appears in the finished film.

  The chestburster design drew on Francis Bacon's 1944 painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Screenwriter O'Bannon later credited his personal experiences with Crohn's disease as an inspiration for the scene. The cast knew the creature would burst from Hurt's chest but had not been told that fake blood would also spray in every direction from high-pressure pumps. The scene was shot in one take. When the creature burst through, a stream of blood shot directly at Veronica Cartwright, who fell over and went into hysterics. Tom Skerritt later said, "What you saw on camera was the real response. She had no idea what the hell happened." The scene has repeatedly been called one of the most memorable in cinema history; in 2007, Empire named it the greatest 18-rated moment in film.

  The adult alien's head was manufactured by Carlo Rambaldi, who had worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and contained roughly 900 moving parts and points of articulation. Giger sculpted the body using plasticine and incorporated vertebrae from snakes and cooling tubes from a Rolls-Royce. Percy Edwards, a voice artist known for providing bird sounds on British television throughout the 1960s and 1970s, provided the alien's vocalizations. Rambaldi's original alien jaw is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

• 6. Shooting the Horror

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  Principal photography ran from the 5th of July to the 21st of October, 1978, fourteen weeks in total, primarily at Pinewood Studios and Shepperton Studios near London. Model and miniature work was done at Bray Studios in Water Oakley, Berkshire, roughly 25 miles from Shepperton. A crew of over 200 craftspeople constructed three principal sets. The sets of the Nostromo's three decks were each built almost entirely in one piece, occupying separate stages, with the actors navigating the hallways between them to reinforce the ship's claustrophobic sense of scale.

  The conditions on set were punishing. The space suits worn by the actors were thick, bulky, and nylon-lined, with no cooling systems and initially no venting for exhaled carbon dioxide. Combined with a summer heat wave, these conditions nearly caused the actors to pass out, and nurses with oxygen tanks had to be kept on hand. Scott solved a problem of scale by having his two young sons and the son of cinematographer Derek Vanlint stand in for regular actors in certain shots, wearing smaller space suits to make the sets appear larger. The children also nearly collapsed from the heat.

  Scott kept most of the alien in shadow throughout filming, a deliberate decision to prevent the audience from seeing too much at once. He explained his philosophy directly: "The most important thing in a film of this type is not what you see, but the effect of what you think you saw." The first cut of the film ran over three hours; the final version is just under two hours. One sequence cut from the theatrical release showed Ripley discovering Dallas and Brett partially cocooned by the alien during her escape from the Nostromo. Scott later said they were "morphing" or being consumed into eggs. The scene was cut partly because it did not look realistic enough and slowed the pace of the escape sequence. It was restored in a shortened form in the 2003 Director's Cut.

  Light effects inside the egg chamber were created using lasers borrowed from the rock band the Who, who were testing them for a stage show on the sound stage next door. The tagline "In space no one can hear you scream" was written by Barbara Gips, wife of poster designer Philip Gips.

• 7. Score, Reception, and Legacy

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  Jerry Goldsmith composed the film's score, conducted by Lionel Newman and performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra. Scott had originally wanted Isao Tomita to score the film, but Fox preferred a more familiar composer and recommended Goldsmith. The relationship was not smooth: Scott and editor Terry Rawlings had grown attached to pieces of Goldsmith's music from previous films - including a piece from Freud: The Secret Passion - as well as Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 2, which was used for the end credits. They rescored several sequences to match the temporary tracks they had used during editing and left some of the temporary score in place in the finished film. Goldsmith later said he was "going at opposite ends of the pole with the filmmakers." Despite the friction, Scott called the score "full of dark beauty" and "seriously threatening, but beautiful." The score was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Soundtrack Album, and it won a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.

  Alien premiered as a midnight screening on the 24th of May, 1979, at the fourth Seattle International Film Festival. Critical reaction was initially mixed. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave it two affirmative votes on their television program Sneak Previews; Ebert called it "one of the scariest old-fashioned space operas I can remember," while Siskel described it as "an accomplished piece of scary entertainment" and gave it three out of four stars but also called it essentially a "haunted house film" set in a spaceship. Variety, Sight and Sound, and several individual critics offered mixed or negative assessments. One review from Time Out dismissed it as an "empty bag of tricks."

  Commercially, the film opened in 90 American theaters over the Memorial Day weekend of 1979 and set 51 house records, grossing $3,527,881 in four days. It remained the number one film in the United States for three weeks. In the United Kingdom, its opening week at the Odeon Leicester Square grossed £71,988 - the biggest opening week of any cinema in UK history at that time. It eventually earned $78.9 million in the United States and £7.8 million in the United Kingdom during its first theatrical run, with total worldwide gross estimated at between $109 million and $188 million. In time, critical opinion reversed. In 2002, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2008, the American Film Institute ranked it the seventh-best science-fiction film ever made, and Empire placed it 33rd on its list of the greatest films of all time. The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and three Saturn Awards; the franchise it launched eventually extended to sequels, prequels, crossovers, video games, books, and a television series on FX on Hulu titled Alien: Earth, which was released on the 12th of August, 2025.