Why Alien is Still Scary
The Lasting impact of Ridley Scott’s classic
It’s hard to imagine both the horror and the science fiction cinematic landscape prior to Alien’s release. It’s one of those films that so profoundly readjusted audience expectations of the genres and the way a sci-fi future was depicted that there was no going back. It was even deemed by the Library of Congress to be “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and is preserved in the National Film Registry. Most sci-fi or horror movies owe something to Alien, whether its Event Horizon or the recent Underwater, all feature some element you can trace back to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece. There’s a lot of reasons why it had such an impact: the grungey ‘trucker’s-in-space’ aesthetic, the class critique embedded in the story, that eerie modernist score by Jerry Goldsmith, but it was the BBFC (of all things) who were perceptive enough to understand why it was so horrifying at the time of release, and why it still has lost none of its unsettling presence.
Back in 1979 the process of film certification was a little different. For instance, the BBFC was still the Board of Film Censorship back then (as opposed to ‘Classification’ now). Their job has always been to actively assess a film and then recommend an age limit but back then they had tighter controls and could order cuts depending on the…
