Alien (1979)

science fiction
directed by : Ridley Scott
featuring : Sigourney Weaver - Tom Skerritt - Yaphet Kotto - Veronica Cartwright - Harry Dean Stanton
running time : 2 hours 4 minutes
"In space, no one can hear you scream." A close encounter of the third kind becomes a Jaws-style nightmare when an alien invades a spacecraft in Ridley Scott's sci-fi/horror classic. On the way home from a mission for the Company, the Nostromo's crew is woken up from hibernation by the ship's Mother computer to answer a distress signal from a nearby planet. Capt. Dallas (Tom Skerritt)'s rescue team discovers a bizarre pod field, but things get even stranger when a face-hugging creature bursts out of a pod and attaches itself to Kane (John Hurt). Over the objections of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), science officer Ash (Ian Holm) lets Kane back on the ship. The acid-blooded incubus detaches itself from an apparently recovered Kane, but an alien erupts from Kane's stomach and escapes. The alien starts stalking the humans, pitting Dallas and his crew (and cat) against a malevolent killing machine that also has a protector in the nefarious Company.

Combining science fiction with horror, Swiss artist H.R.Giger's alien design and Carlo Rambaldi's visual effects creepily meld technology with corporeality, creating a claustrophobic environment that is coldly mechanical yet horribly anthropomorphized, like the metallic monster itself. Director Scott keeps the alien out of full view, hiding it in the dark or camouflaging it in the workings of the Nostromo. Signs of '70s cultural upheaval permeate Alien's future world, from the relationship between corporate capitalism and rapacious monstrosity, to the heterogeneous crew and Ripley's forceful horror heroine. The intense frights and gross-outs, however, are credited with making Alien one of the biggest hits of 1979; Giger, Rambaldi et al. won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Alien went on to spawn three genre-bending sequels with exceptional '80s actioner Aliens (1986), dark prison drama Alien 3 (1992), and exotically grotesque Alien Resurrection (1997). With its atmospheric isolation, implacable monster, and whiff of social conscience, Alien stands as one of the more thoughtful yet utterly terrifying horror films of the 1970s.