★★★★★
Ridley Scott’s 1979 chestburster still sets the table for every haunted-spaceship picture that followed – and eats them all.
Nearly half a century on, the wonder of Scott’s original is how little it strains for its scares. The crew of the mining hauler Nostromo – Tom Skerritt’s weary captain, Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto grousing over their bonuses – wake from cryo-sleep to answer a distress call, and a sense of dread begins to accumulate: the drip of condensation, the ping of the motion tracker, the vast industrial dark of the ship itself. H.R. Giger’s creature, all wet chrome and phallic menace, is still the most unsettling design the genre has produced, and Derek Vanlint’s photography keeps it half-glimpsed, a shape at the edge of the frame. There’s a whiff of rubber and Velcro in a couple of full reveals – the seven foot man in the suit – but that tactility is part of the charm.
What has aged like wine is the film’s read on labour and gender: Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is the one crew member who follows quarantine protocol, and the one nobody heeds, overruled by the men and by Ian Holm’s company android until she is the last body standing. Jerry Goldsmith’s score frets and skitters; editor Terry Rawlings holds on the deep silences and empty rooms. On a FrightFest screen, with a primed crowd, it remains the benchmark against which all sci-fi horror is measured.
Alien plays at Tubi FrightFest in London this weekend.