by Paul Wooldridge

An “Alien” is, by definition, an “other” which, for us humans, forms the basis of almost everything we fear. We are innately scared of that which we do not know, that which is unlike us, that which we fear we cannot predict. After all, human beings desperately seek to control, and thereby remove, any threat from the world around us; to control something is to know what is going to happen. Even the mere illusion of control can lessen the core anxiety of existing at the whim of unpredictable chaos.

With Alien 79, Ridley Scott, Dan O’Bannon and HR Giger brought the cinematic audience an “Other” worthy of the sum total of fear which humanity saves for those which we neither understand nor control.

Cinematic threats thrill viewers by feeding on one or more basic human fears. The Xenomorph, and its face-hugging early stages of its life cycle, successfully combine the various elements of terror more successfully, I’d argue, than any other cinematic terrifier.

The xenomorph and face-huggers stretch the understanding of natural evolution to a believable extreme while remaining perfectly plausible and in keeping with natural law. We, as viewers, with our lay understanding of nature and evolution, instinctively believe that such creatures could, possibly, exist, somewhere out in the wide cosmos, even accepting of the more questionable concentrated acid for blood.

The fact the xenomorph is an animal, although more intelligent than most on Earth, means its singular instinct is to kill and reproduce, making it all the more scary as it cannot be reasoned with, much in the same way as the inhuman attributes of the likes of Micheal Myers or The Terminator. The xenomorph’s sleek black body taps into our fear of the dark and the possibility of unseen predators lurking within. Less visible is less understandable/controllable and ergo more unpredictable. It brings to mind Billy from Black Xmas or the Invisible Man, as unseen stalking threats lurking just out of sight.

In the real world, Arachnophobia is a very common, if not the most common, form of phobia precisely because arachnids are the most unlike human creatures on the planet. Their 8 limbs make them able to jump, scuttle, and behave in unsettlingly unpredictable ways. Spider mechanics utilise hydraulics to move their limbs, unlike human muscles, tendons, and ligaments, giving them a movement that deeply unsettles us bipedal homosapiens. By giving face huggers such arachnid-like qualities, they immediately access a core fear within us all.

The xenomorph lifecycle enables a heightened body horror that is, I’m sure, the envy of Cronenberg. A life form based upon the parasitic use of a living host is the innate stuff of nightmares. Our fears circle around our human frailty and the idea of being invaded, and destroyed, from the inside, exactly where we cannot access, and that our material self is no longer our own, is a deeply traumatic warping of our own biology imperative to reproduce.

The sacrifice of our physicality for the birth of another goes completely against the natural will to live, our own human will to propagate our species. To become a victim of such a warped feat of nature is different from being stabbed or tortured at the hands of a human sadistic foe. The face-huggers target the face, constricting their snake-like tails around the throat while orally raping us is arguably more primevally terrifying than being dismembered by Leatherface or Art the Clown.

Add to this the Freudian psychosexual terror of vaginal face-huggers, phallic protrusions as second mouths, and violent penetration, both internally and externally, which terrifies the viewer on a psychological level, traumatising the subconscious and subverting our most natural sexual instincts. 

The existence of a xenomorph also undermines the most common safety blanket to which many of us cling in response to our galactic insignificance, it refutes the existence of god.

I am unaware of any other cinematic adversary that combines so perfectly so many fearful qualities. The xenomorph is, in this humble writer’s opinion, the embodiment of all that could and does terrify, it is the ultimate Other, the perfect Alien.