Alien captivated audiences by creating new nightmares beyond the typical jump cut and scare, forever changing the standards of the sci-fi genre. On the 40th anniversary of the film’s release, documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe takes this chance to dive deeply into the origins of Ridley Scott’s breakthrough sci-fi classic and the iconic “Chestburster” scene in Memory: The Origins of Alien. With the same attention to detail that Philippe used in 78/52 (dissecting the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), lovers of Alien, sci-fi, and filmmaking get to explore the inspiration, genius, and creativity that made Alien a centerpiece of suspense and horror that, arguably, remains unsurpassed.
While Philippe shows how many minds and creatives came together to create the film, the one person without whom there would be no Alien was the late Dan O’Bannon. His lifelong fascination with comics, the sci-fi genre, and horror fiction inspired many of the beloved aspects and scenes. In one interview, it was shared that O’Bannon would joke that he didn’t steal from anyone, he stole from everyone. For example, the famous “Chestburster” scene has so many points of origin that it’s hard to truly trace the lineage, but it’s fun to see how every part helped to make the iconic scene. The 1951 DC comic Seeds of Jupiter was one part of O’Bannon’s inspiration, along with his obsession with H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and even O’Bannon’s diagnosis of Crohn’s disease which his widow said, “was devouring him from the inside.”
With the same attention to detail that Philippe used in 78/52 (dissecting the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’), lovers of ‘Alien,’ sci-fi, and filmmaking get to explore the inspiration, genius, and creativity that made ‘Alien’ a centerpiece of suspense and horror that, arguably, remains unsurpassed.
The most impressive thing that Philippe does is acknowledge how Alien pushed boundaries in female equality, and how corporations missed this but audiences throughout the years haven’t. His first treatment, which was titled Star Beast before garnering the name we know today, had both interspecies rape and male pregnancy. And not one male producer even noticed. This begins to address the guilt patriarchal society felt in 1979 and are still uncomfortable talking about in 2019. Ripley is an amazingly captivating, fully realized, and dynamic role for a woman, which was originally written for a man. “It’s wonderful how the subconscious works,” an interviewee notes.
Alien has shaped how sci-fi and horror films can push and challenge its audience. One interviewee paraphrased how Lovecraft defined his style of horror fiction as ‘weird fiction’ saying that, “the essence of horror is the unknown. And what is most unknown, it is what is out there in the depths of space…” Memory: The Origins of Alien does just that: it gives us the essence of horror by breaking down how the unknown came together, and celebrating all sci-fi art that came before it. This is a delight for those who are avid Alien fans and lovers of sci-fi and should be embraced by those who want to continue to change the film industry, and our world, for the better no matter what the medium they use may be.
