Mad about Science: Alien (1979)

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

The few times that I’ve penned an article about a movie it has been to tear it to pieces for scientific inaccuracies, ludicrous time jumps and plot holes big enough to drive a box truck into.

This is not one of those articles.

Ridley Scott’s Alien is a horror masterpiece loaded with effects that remain chilling to this day. If you haven’t seen Alien and you care about spoilers, you might want to put down the Reader and go watch the film. Watch it with a glass of eggnog and pretend it’s a Christmas movie — you might get to taste the nog twice!

Alien hits multiple notes of horror including Loveraftian cosmic horror of the unknown, the visceral horror of ’70s slasher flicks and the primal terror of claustrophobia all bound into one dread-soaked rollercoaster ride that will leave you shaken to your core. 

Much of this was accomplished with practical effects and some psychological trickery using science.

Most of the technology showcased in the film seems a little silly by modern standards. The architecture and spacefaring technology is clearly influenced by the bare-bones (but still very complicated) technology used during the space race and the Apollo Program, which had landed humans on the moon only a decade earlier. We have cellphones that can access practically the entirety of human knowledge just with our thumbs in 2023 — why would people in the year 2122 be using dimly lit corridors, funky light switchboards and a computer running MS-DOS?

To a degree, the low-tech decisions actually make sense in this kind of setting. Traveling vast distances through space requires tremendous energy in order to accelerate a vessel into an escape velocity from a parent star. Wasting huge amounts of energy charging a cellphone and lighting corridors would eventually leave a crew vulnerable to running out of oxygen when there’s no energy left to run fans that push air through filters or regulate heat inside the vehicle. 

We remark about how powerful our devices are now compared to the interior of Apollo 11, but the amount of power devoted to systems back then was a conscious decision. The technology wasn’t a limiting factor — the availability of energy and the amount of weight onboard the vehicle were.

Moving past the VHS-quality streaming cameras of the year 2122, there was more trickery in Alien to keep the dread hitting at a primal level. Human beings have a visceral reaction to gore and exposed organs. Viscera triggers a big warning signal in us: seeing stuff that should be inside now on the outside means that something dangerous moved the insides out and we should be cautious. Scott used actual organs from butcher shops at multiple points throughout the movie. The first is the xenomorph egg found inside the alien ship, which opens to expose the lining of a cow’s stomach in all its gooey glory. This was only one of the practical effects in this scene.

The egg itself had portions constructed of translucent fiberglass and was filled with jelly. You can see the form of the facehugger squirming around inside the jelly. Though this looks convincingly like a CGI trick, it’s actually one of the director’s only cameos in the movie, as Scott put his hand into the jelly to move it around and create the illusion of pulsation. 

The gravity-defying goo dripping upward from the egg was another trick, accomplished by the crew dripping water normally onto the egg and the camera panning upward from the base, then the film being edited to play in reverse so that the camera would be panning downward as actor John Hurt’s character examined the water appearing to defy gravity. 

The facehugger’s emergence was another practical effect, as the crew launched a sheep’s intestine away from the camera and then edited it to play in reverse and make it appear as though the alien leapt from the egg toward the viewer.

Later effects, including the dissection of the deceased facehugger, also included actual organs and seafood such as raw oysters. This served two unique purposes in filming. The first was to disgust the viewer. The second was to disgust the actors. As time passed during filming, the bits began to smell, which created authentic revulsion among the actors, which in turn made their performances more authentic.

It wouldn’t be a discussion about the practical effects of Alien without mention of the chestburster scene. The common myth is that the film crew and Hurt were the only ones aware of what was going to happen during this scene, so as to produce an authentic scare from the rest of the cast. 

Cast members were in fact aware of what was going to happen; however, they weren’t expecting pressurized jets of blood to spray them with such force, nor the quantity of blood. Veronica Cartwright, who played Lambert, famously screamed and fell over a chair during this scene, which was only partially scripted.

There are plenty of analyses online about the symbolism of the xenomorph and what the creature and its disturbing methods of reproduction represent. It’s an extremely alien concept, but it’s a more common occurrence on Earth than you might think. 

Multiple species of insects will implant their eggs directly into a source of nutrients for the larva. This is most commonly seen with insects implanting eggs into plant matter, but parasitoid wasps will inject their eggs into another living insect and allow their young to devour it alive from the inside out.

Horrifying as this is, parasitoid wasps have actually been used to control infestations of invasive species to aid in agriculture without the need for toxic chemicals that can leach into underground water supplies. Some of these creatures are also active and specialized pollinators that certain species of flowering plants require to survive.

Stay curious, 7B.