A frail shadow of a creature, trudging slowly from room to empty room. No aim beyond watching the long days pass. The drip of water, the echo of soft music. Time becomes a tangible thing, cold and suffocating. We dream of grass, of sky, of sun…
Author: Daniel Pietersen
Daniel Pietersen is a writer of weird fiction and critical non-fiction on horror and horror theory. When not writing articles or preparing conference papers, you will find Daniel still trying to complete Dark Souls 2. Daniel is on Twitter as @pietersender and much of his work can be found through his website.
The problem with Alien: Resurrection, contrary to popular opinion, is not that it’s a bad film. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fourth instalment in the Alien series has a lot of good elements; Ripley-8’s gleeful progression into inhumanity contrasts impeccably with the pathos of Call’s self-hatred, for example, and Jeunet seems to genuinely want to do something new with the sci-fi palette. No, the problem with Alien: Resurrection is that it’s not quite Alien enough. Or maybe the problem is that it’s a bit too Alien. Either way, it tries to be both the darkly comic, baroque sci-fi epic that Jeunet obviously wanted it to be and the more conceptual piece that screenwriter Joss Whedon seemed to originally intend, whilst leaving the actual Alien elements feeling tacked on.
Taken at face value it’s difficult to describe Richard Stanley’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out Of Space as a good film. The cast grind their way through a frankly abysmal screenplay and, although both Joely Richardson and Madeleine Arthur manage to tease out excellent performances, Nicolas Cage appears to cosplay Nicolas Cage.
We live in a time of remixes. Arguably, we live in a time that is itself a remix. Culture, history and politics all seem to repeat themselves, changed only slightly from one iteration to the next, with increasing rapidity. Whether it’s blockbuster movie sagas or wars in the Middle East, everything seems unpleasantly familiar.
I love Alien. Perhaps the only things I love nearly as much as Alien are the non-film spin-offs that have been slowly populating the property’s galaxy over the past decades and which are, in some cases, better than some of the films. The late 80s Dark Horse comic series, for example, is still perhaps some of the most terrifying Alien content ever released. And, more recently, the excellent Alien: Isolation made full use of the immersion that only video games can provide to construct a hugely atmospheric narrative.
When it comes to video games, especially Metroidvania-style platformers, I’ve a couple of requirements: off-plot exploration, an excellent soundtrack and, most difficult of all to satisfy, an aesthetic based on medieval Spain’s particularly esoteric form of Catholicism.
Alien is very possibly my favourite film. I certainly spend much time overthinking it, as anyone who’s read my recent article on its Gothic roots will already know. Imagine my annoyance, then, when I realised I would miss the limited theatrical run of the film’s new documentary, Memory: The Origins of Alien, directed by Alexandre O. Philippe. Imagine my comparable delight when it suddenly became available to stream through the website of the trusty old BFI.
“Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket” – W.H. Auden
You may believe that Alien is a science fiction film. After all it’s set in space with all the hypersleep pods and computer terminals and rumbling star-drives you might want. The story happens in some distant (but not too distant) future where humanity feels at home travelling the gulfs between stars. It is, perhaps most pressingly, called Alien.
You may believe that Alien is a science fiction film and it’s not an absurd position to hold. It’s just wrong.
“Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between horror and terror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?”
Ann Radcliffe wrote these words in her essay On The Supernatural In Poetry, published posthumously in 1826. She then goes on to clarify:
“Obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate; confusion, by blurring one image into another, leaves only a chaos in which the mind can find nothing to be magnificent, nothing to nourish its fears or doubts, or to act upon in any way.”
For Radcliffe, this blurring of horror means that it can never teach or improve the recipient of that horror, only “freeze and nearly annihilate them”. Horror becomes for her a denial of and turning away from the sublime. Terror, on the other hand, is the effect of staring clearly into the glare of the sublime, of suffering through an experience that “expands” us and fundamentally changes how we live.
“There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you. If a machine seems like a human or you can’t tell the difference, then you’d jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities and rights and all the rest.” – “Ian McEwan: ‘Who’s going to write the algorithm for the little white lie?’”
With this dismissive opinion of science fiction – writing that’s full of fun and gadgets, perhaps, but ultimately vapid and ignorant of more important concerns – Ian McEwan not only set the genre internet alight but also added himself to a list of hoary old authors and critics who’ve blithely dismissed genre fiction as little more than children playing with toys while the adults look on indulgently.