Greg Littmann
Alien is the best science fiction horror film ever made—in my opinion.1 Nothing has ever been quite as chilling as the tale of six space‐truckers trapped with a shape‐changing predator in a tiny starship sailing through an endless void.
One reason why the power of Alien is philosophically interesting is that it supports the theories of seminal American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) about what makes good science fiction horror. Lovecraft, in case you don’t know, is the greatest science fiction horror writer ever, and arguably the greatest horror writer period. Most of Lovecraft’s stories were set in a common fictional universe, with recurring characters and alien races.
Lovecraft never directly offers a philosophy of science fiction horror. However, at different points in his essays and letters, he addresses the genres he calls “interplanetary fiction,” “horror,” “supernatural horror,” and “weird fiction,” the last being a broad heading covering both supernatural fiction and science fiction. Taken together, a philosophy of science fiction horror emerges.
Dan O’Bannon, author of the original Alien script, was a lifelong Lovecraft fan and was directly influenced by him in writing Alien and other scripts. Strikingly, Alien shares its basic plot with numerous Lovecraft stories: an individual or small group, alone in an immense barren nowhere, explores bizarre and mysterious ancient ruins, leading to a hideous and deadly encounter with one or more alien monsters, usually leaving a sole survivor to tell the tale.2 More importantly though, the effectiveness of the film Alien provides support for Lovecraft’s philosophy of science fiction horror. That isn’t to say that the Alien production team were thinking about Lovecraft, but rather that the film happens to do what he recommends, to unnerving effect!
Lovecraft believes that the scariest threats are mysterious ones. He writes: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”3 The power of mystery extends to location, and especially unknown worlds: “Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.”4
But mystery isn’t enough. He writes: “The essence of the horrible is the unnatural.”5 The most powerful horror fiction, in his view, relies on an emotion he calls “cosmic fear,” caused by violations of nature by mysterious and foreign entities: “A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of…a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”6
In Alien, the planetoid visited by Nostromo is an unknown world, as—in a sense—is the alien shipwreck. The alien predator is an entirely mysterious and unpredictable threat. As Ash notes, “This is the first time we’ve encountered a species like this.” The crew are constantly being surprised by its abilities, as it pulls tricks like attacking straight out of the egg, keeping Kane paralyzed but alive even though he’s biologically unrelated to its natural prey, defending itself with acidic blood, reproducing by bursting out of Kane’s chest, and suddenly growing from the size of a small cat into a hulking horror. The importance of generating mystery in cultivating fear explains, in part, why each film set in the Alien universe has been less frightening than the one before, up until Prometheus broke the curse by not having the familiar alien predator appear at all.
The alien’s abilities are so surprising because they break our Earthling rules about what animals should be able to do. They seem like unnatural abilities because nothing in nature as we know it can do what the alien can. The crew of Nostromo could have been placed in just as much danger by a pride of lions getting loose on the ship, but the film would be much less frightening. Lions are lethal, but not…alien.
Lovecraft stands out among contemporary weird writers for his efforts to be realistic. Regarding spaceship‐based fiction, he writes, “Inconceivable events and conditions form a class apart from all other story elements, and cannot be made convincing by any mere process of casual narration. They have the handicap of incredibility to overcome; and this can be accomplished only through a careful realism in every other phase of the story.”7 He’s unknowingly echoing the advice given by Aristotle (384–322 BCE) in his Poetics for good serious theater: “Any impossibilities there are in [the author’s] descriptions of things are faults. But from another point of view they are justifiable, if they serve the end of poetry—if…they make the effect of…the work…more astounding.”8 In other words, Aristotle thinks it’s alright to include amazing elements in order to tell an amazing story, but that even an amazing story should default to realism. Even if the work is based on astounding premises, “There should be nothing improbable among the actual incidents.”9
Lovecraft claims that realism in science fiction requires scientific accuracy. He writes of spaceship stories: “[A] strict following of scientific fact in representing the mechanical, astronomical, and other aspects of the trip is absolutely essential.”10 Likewise, alien planets must be scientifically plausible.
Alien isn’t a scientifically realistic film. Even the existence of starships like Nostromo is scientifically absurd: Nostromo flies faster than light, a feat that requires more than infinite energy! However, as Lovecraft should have noted, and as is demonstrated by both Alien and his own work, there are ways of cultivating the necessary atmosphere of scientific realism other than being scientifically realistic. Alien is rich in suggested “scientific” detail. As the Nostromo crew considers exploring the planetoid on foot, Ash analyzes the environment: “There’s inert nitrogen, high concentration of carbon dioxide crystals, methane…I’m working on the trace elements.” Having studied the alien, he explains, “he’s got an outer layer of protein polysaccharides. He has a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicone, which gives him a prolonged resistance to adverse environmental conditions.” When he invents an alien‐tracking device, he can explain how it works; when Ripley asks, “What’s it key off?,” he answers, “Microchanges in air density.” Most elegantly, when we first see the Nostromo computers wake up, numbers and words stream across the screens in green and blue, their glare reflected in the faceplate of an empty helmet. It’s all meaningless to the viewer, but assures us that complicated technical reports are being prepared, taking account of all the facts.
Technology is made to seem more plausible by being imperfect. Even though Alien violates physics by having the Nostromo travel faster than light, the film cultivates an air of realism by having the crew “frozen” in suspended animation for interstellar trips, in acknowledgment of the vastness of space and the difficulty of crossing it. Being frozen is an unpleasant process, leaving Lambert feeling chilled and Kane feeling “dead.” Maneuvering the ship is laborious, requiring painstaking calculations, and just landing on the planetoid is so dangerous that the ship is badly damaged. Workstations are cramped and cluttered; there are bewildering masses of displays, lights, controls, and mysterious tubing and wires. Lighting is deficient and the rations tasteless. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get back is get some decent food,” smiles Kane as he spoons up space‐noodles. One of the crew has even put up a photograph of a fried egg on the wall, alongside pornographic centerfolds.
Alien further fosters an atmosphere of realism by emphasizing the mundanity of the characters. Nostromo is a commercial towing vehicle belonging to a large corporation, a ship full of ordinary people doing ordinary jobs. The crew members are expected to show complete obedience. As Dallas notes, “Standard procedure is to do whatever the hell they tell you to do.” Working spaces look lived in, with battered surfaces and scattered coffee cups, beer cans, and cigarette packets.
The actors’ appearances are carefully tailored to emphasize ordinariness. Clothes are utilitarian and unflattering, hair is messy, and nobody bothers wearing makeup to work. Clothing styles are almost identical to what we wear today, complete with t‐shirts, overalls, button‐up jackets, and lace‐up sneakers. It isn’t actually realistic for clothes to have changed so little from today when technology has had time to advance so far, but it makes the film feel realistic because their clothes are familiar from life.
Lovecraft should appreciate the realistically mundane nature of the crew. He wrote: “We must select only such characters (not necessarily stalwart or dashing or youthful or beautiful or picturesque characters) as would naturally be involved in the events to be depicted.”11 However, he himself didn’t tell stories about ordinary folk. He notes: “I do not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them.”12 A loner, Lovecraft had no idea how ordinary people talked, and his stories contain remarkably little dialogue. Lovecraft’s protagonists are almost always thinly disguised versions of himself, or some idealized version of himself: richer, better educated, and more respected. The independently wealthy antiquarian Jervas Dudley who explores his family vault in “The Tomb” (1917) is interchangeable with the independently wealthy antiquarian Randolph Carter who goes hunting for the gods in “The Dream‐Quest of Unknown Kadath” (1927) as well as the independently wealthy antiquarian and author of weird fiction Robert Blake, who explores the ruins of an old church in “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935), and most other Lovecraft protagonists.
The alien predator in Alien, like the Nostromo itself, is scientifically absurd. Even leaving aside its improbable molecular acid for blood, the thing has the ability to grow to the size of a large human without eating anything to use as new mass. Perhaps most impressively, it is able to paralyze, sustain, and utilize a human for breeding purposes, despite humans being biologically unrelated to its natural prey. Realistically, the Facehugger should have just spat Kane out, as you would spit out food fit for a spider, a crab, or a plant—all forms of life much more closely related to humans than the alien is. However, Lovecraft encouraged the breaking by alien creatures of what we humans foolishly take to be natural laws. This is the source of “cosmic fear” after all!
His alien visitors are happy to consume humans, like the sentient iridescence that drains the life from the Gardner family after moving into the well on their farm in “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), and the shape‐changing colossus that preys on generations in suburban Providence and is buried under “The Shunned House” (1924). More remarkably, when Lovecraft’s aliens decide to traverse space, they break the laws of physics in ways that make Nostromo look realistic. Generally, they fly through the “aether” by flapping their wings. Otherwise, they might travel by telekinesis, take over a human body remotely, or cross dimensions by walking, burrowing, or swimming.
For all that, Lovecraft thinks it essential that aliens be realistic in their alienness. That is, they must be genuinely alien rather than being essentially like humans. He wrote that aliens “must be definitely non‐human in aspect, mentality, emotions, and nomenclature…It must be remembered that non‐human beings would be wholly apart from human motives and perspectives.”13
Appropriately, the wrecked alien ship found by the Nostromo crew looks nothing like what we expect a spaceship to be. The outside is weirdly asymmetrical and has no obvious rockets. Entering through a vaginal doorway, the exploration team find themselves in what seems to be the interior of a massive organic body, the glistening black corridors lined with ribs. The corpse of the alien navigator is like no form of life on Earth, apparently half‐biological and half‐mechanical, with a body that is one with the chair it reclines in. Judging from its desiccated bones, it wasn’t only unable to leave its seat, but couldn’t even turn its head away from staring into its massive telescope. According to Prometheus, the “corpse” we see is actually a suit, containing a humanoid being. Taken by itself, though, Alien offers the more Lovecraftian, and much more disturbing, possibility that the navigator’s race are just as unlike us as they first seem. The corpse suggests that they are not just physically alien, but psychologically alien as well. For us, the life of the immobile navigator would be a special hell. It presumably suited the navigator just fine.
As for the alien predator, it has not one but three completely unfamiliar forms, used at different stages of its bizarre life cycle. The inspiration for the look of the predator came from artwork in Swiss artist H.R. Giger’s book Necronomicon. Giger, a Lovecraft fan, took the name “Necronomicon” from his work. Lovecraft’s fictional Necronomicon is a magical grimoire and a store of terrible secrets about the true nature of the universe.
What we see as “realism” in fiction will depend on what our view of reality is. For Lovecraft, humanity is insignificant and the universe is indifferent to us. He writes: “All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos‐at‐large.”14 Lovecraft accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution and was passionately atheist, writing that, “I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convinced of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge.”15
Appropriately, the background assumptions in Alien are not religious but Darwinian. In place of the ghosts and demons of traditional horror, the alien navigator and the predator alike spring from evolution, making them seem more plausible, and so more threatening. Even if one or both were engineered, whatever engineered them was presumably a product of nature rather than a supernatural force.
Along with religion, Lovecraft dismissed morality as mere human convention. He writes, “good and evil are local expedients—or their lack—and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.”16 His alien creatures generally do without moral rules. A Lovecraftian alien is, as Ash describes the alien on Nostromo, “A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”
Maintaining realism requires maintaining realistic characters. Lovecraft says of weird fiction, “the characters and events must be consistent and natural except where they touch the single marvel.”17 Again, he’s unknowingly echoing Aristotle’s advice for serious theater: “The right thing…is in the characters just as in the incidents of the play to seek after the necessary or the probable; so that whenever such‐and‐such a personage says or does such‐and‐such a thing, it shall be the necessary or probable outcome of his character.”18
Lovecraft is particularly critical of the artificiality of characterization in the science fiction of his day. He writes, “Insincerity, conventionality, triteness, artificiality, false emotion, and puerile extravagance reign triumphant,”19 while “a good interplanetary story must have realistic human characters; not the stock scientists, villainous assistants, invincible heroes, and lovely scientist’s‐daughter heroines of the usual trash of this sort.”20
Appropriately, the crew of Nostromo act more like real coworkers than any starship crew previously appearing on film or TV. They genuinely get on each other’s nerves. “Quit griping,” Kane snarls at Lambert. “I like griping,” she retorts. “Knock it off!” snaps Captain Dallas at them both. Parker and Brett deliberately annoy Ripley to amuse themselves, turning up the steam while she’s trying to talk. Even more impressively, they get away with it, without Ripley ever getting the last laugh. Later, Ripley can only get Parker to listen to her plan by shouting at him to shut up. The crew speak like ordinary people. Ripley’s plan to deal with the alien is to “blow it the fuck out into space.”
The crew are bound together only by professional obligation. When they expel Kane’s corpse into space, Dallas asks, “Anyone want to say anything?,” but nobody does and they eject him in silence. When Ripley tells Dallas that she doesn’t trust Ash, he replies, “I don’t trust anybody.” When Dallas is trying to gain advice from Mother, he doesn’t even type “WHAT ARE OUR CHANCES?” but “WHAT ARE MY CHANCES?”
Even a heroic character like Ripley isn’t morally simplistic, because the universe she lives in, like the real universe, doesn’t permit it. Ripley is brave enough to volunteer to go after the exploration team when she thinks they may be in danger and even brave enough to risk her life to save Jones the cat, leaving the shuttle and returning to an alien‐infested Nostromo set to self‐destruct. But she refuses to let the infected Kane back inside until he’s gone through quarantine: “You know the quarantine procedure. Twenty‐four hours for decontamination.” When Dallas orders, “He could die. Open the hatch,” she reasons, “Listen to me. If we break quarantine, we could all die.” In most films, such an objection can come only from a cowardly character who gets shown up by the courage of the protagonists.
Characters in Alien act as though they feel real emotions. After Ripley refuses to let the infected Kane back onto the ship, Lambert slaps her. When Mother won’t stop the self‐destruct countdown, Ripley screams, “You bitch!” and hits the computer with a piece of equipment. Most importantly, the characters behave as if they feel real fear. The actors’ faces show shock and horror as the alien bursts out of Kane, splattering them with his blood. As the adult alien moves in on Dallas in the air vents, Lambert starts weeping, “Move Dallas! Get out of there!” She cries again at the strategy meeting following Dallas’s death, so afraid that she suggests they draw straws for the seats in the shuttle. Even Ripley sobs after learning from Mother that the crew are expendable and from Ash that he knew this all along. Indeed, it is Ripley’s evident terror that drives the film’s tensest moments, as she crawls on the floor to escape Ash’s attack, runs through the corridors as the self‐destruct counts down, and creeps around the shuttle in her undies, three feet from the monster. Tellingly, her last verbalization before triggering the rocket booster and finally killing the alien isn’t a triumphant one‐liner, but a scream of fear.
Lovecraft claims that to keep emotions in a weird story realistic, the characters must remain focused on the weird element itself. In spaceship‐based fiction, “The emphasis, too, must be kept right—hovering always over the wonder of the central abnormality itself. It must be remembered that any violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human being.”21 Lovecraft characters, even the heroic ones, frequently respond to the alien by fainting, screaming hysterically, or panicking and running, and they routinely suffer memory loss, chronic insomnia, or temporary or permanent insanity from their experience.
Alien achieves mixed results by this standard. While the crew are appropriately terrified of the alien, Lovecraft would find them insufficiently astonished by it, and by the wrecked starship they found it in. Evaluating exactly how astonished they should be depends on how much contact with alien life, and especially intelligent alien life, humanity has had so far. Still, discovering two new forms of life, one of which is intelligent and the other of which invades a colleague’s body for reasons unknown, should be enough to blow anyone’s mind. Lovecraft would find it unrealistic that when the crew sits down to what is supposed to be their final meal before returning to Earth, they discuss the food and the journey, rather than the alien starship they found and the mysterious creature that attached itself to Kane’s face.
Lovecraft recognized that atmosphere relies as much on how the events of the story are related as on what those events are. Engaging the audience with an improbable story requires slowly building the mood to make them receptive. He writes of science fiction: “the handicap of incredibility can only be overcome if there is a gradual atmospheric or emotional building‐up of the utmost subtlety.”22
Appropriately, Alien moves very slowly, right from the moment we first see Nostromo gliding leisurely through space. It’s about twelve minutes into the film before the first mention of aliens, twenty‐five before the first glimpse of alien technology, thirty until the first alien corpse, thirty‐five before the first living alien, and over an hour before the first full‐grown specimen emerges.
Lovecraft believed that emphasizing suggestion over explicit detail is essential for building atmosphere. He writes: “Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion—imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the unreal.” He committed himself early to refraining from clearly describing horrific entities. Given his belief that fear stems from the unknown, this is hardly surprising. Sometimes, he didn’t describe his monsters at all, while at other times he went to considerable trouble to convey a vague but horrible impression. In “The Festival” (1923), the protagonist enters ancient catacombs and encounters “hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall.”23 In “The Unnameable” (1923), a writer of weird fiction argues that the truly alien would be impossible to describe, and then proves it to the horror of his skeptical friend.
Alien is a masterpiece of suggestion, reminiscent of the work of director Alfred Hitchcock and his seminal horror films Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). The details of the Alien sets are kept obscured to give our imaginations free play. The planetoid’s surface is dark, misty, and scoured by howling winds. Lambert rightly keeps complaining that she “can’t see a goddamn thing.” When we watch events play out on Ash’s video screen, the image is further blurred. When the crew hunts the alien in the cargo bay, the bay is dark and steamy. We see the full‐grown alien gradually, with a little more detail revealed each time it strikes. We’re never given a display of exactly what it does to people. It bites Brett in the throat and hauls him off‐screen, with the camera inviting us to speculate by lingering on the face of Jones the cat as he watches the carnage. Later kills are no more illuminating. The alien makes jazz hands at Dallas and his camera goes dead. It bites Parker’s throat and hauls him off‐screen like Brett, then snakes its tail suggestively up Lambert’s leg until we cut to Ripley listening to her screams.
Late in his career, Lovecraft changed his mind about refusing to offer clear descriptions. One of the highlights of At the Mountains of Madness (1931) is a detailed account of the dissection of an Elder Thing, as the arctic explorers who found the corpse strive to make sense of its weird biology. Likewise, Alien sometimes leaves suggestion behind in favor of explicit shocking weirdness. The Elder Thing dissection in Lovecraft is echoed by the wonderful dissection scene in Alien and subsequent discussions about the creature’s biology. These scenes not only heighten the sense of realism by making the alien the subject of scientific study, but serve to showcase the horrific creature that the audience were hoping to see when they sat down to watch a movie named “Alien.”
Lovecraft emphasizes the vulnerability of humans by contrasting our small size and brief existence with the vastness and age of the universe. His simplest technique for this is to place characters against an immense backdrop. He writes: “Probably the worst thing is solitude in barren immensity.”24 His principle is borne out in Alien by the tension when the exploration team is alone on the lifeless planetoid, when the crew must face the alien in the emptiness of space, and especially when Ripley is left to face the alien alone. Vast distances are suggested by Nostromo drifting slowly across the screen although it is traveling at tremendous speeds.
Just as we are dwarfed by space, our little lives and civilizations are dwarfed by time. Lovecraft writes: “The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.”25
The inevitable extinction of humanity is a recurring theme in Lovecraft’s work. In his mythos, time will run out for us when our civilization is destroyed by aliens, a possibility also threatened by Alien in the form of the corporation’s plan to keep live specimens. However, Lovecraft isn’t content to have us crushed by just one type of alien. Instead, when the right alignment of the stars finally arrives, many different sorts will be free to attack at once, in an orgy of destruction.
Lovecraft likewise depicts civilized alien species being wiped out by other alien species, generally leaving only ruins behind, like the ruined starship in Alien. The Earth was once ruled by vegetable Elder Things, but they were exterminated by shoggoths, creatures they had created to be their slaves. Likewise, the conical Yithians also once ruled Earth, but were overthrown by “polyps” from yet deeper reaches of space, while the snouted Yaddithians, who live too far away to bother us, are doomed to be annihilated by dholes, gigantic worms.
The predator from Alien that threatens humanity resembles Lovecraft’s civilization‐destroying aliens in two major ways. Firstly, it keeps changing form, leaving the crew guessing about what horror they will face next. The shoggoths and polyps have no form at all, being amoeba‐like and taking whatever shape suits their fancy. The same is true of the sentient black slimes that live beneath the subterranean human civilization of K’n‐Yan and will one day ooze up and obliterate it. The formlessness of the destroying races expresses the chaos and directionlessness of evolution.
Secondly, the predator alien in Alien shows no sign of being as intelligent as its prey, whether biomechanical or human, and relies less on technology. It hunts like an animal, attacking from ambush and striking with its teeth. Similarly, the ape‐like creatures that overthrow the ancient human city of Olathoë in “Polaris” (1918) are brutes with basic tools, the dholes are mindless, and the shoggoths and polyps, who have no known technology, are vastly intellectually inferior to the species they wipe out. The way that mindless or mentally limited forces destroy more advanced societies expresses both the mindlessness of evolution, and the recognition that superior intelligence is only one way to outcompete a rival species, and not necessarily the most effective.
There are three more ways in which Alien echoes Lovecraft’s work. Firstly, Lovecraft cultivated claustrophobia by setting his tales in confined spaces. In Alien, claustrophobia is overwhelming as the crew are hunted through the cramped Nostromo. Lovecraft produces the same effect by setting events underground in too many tales to list, including all three of his novellas.
Secondly, Lovecraft cultivated an atmosphere of paranoia by having inhuman creatures walk amongst us in disguise, often while plotting against us. In Alien, the robot Ash pretends to be a human as he schemes to return the predator to Earth even at the cost of the crew. In Lovecraft, Yithians pass as human by taking over human bodies, while fungoid Mi‐Go prefer disguising themselves with wax masks, and froglike Deep Ones just hide in enormous coats. In Alien, paranoia is stoked by having the crew betrayed by other humans: the corporation. In Lovecraft, myriad secret human cults, like the Order of Dagon and Church of Starry Wisdom, work with the alien forces that would harm us.
Thirdly, Lovecraft violates the human body in horrific ways. In Alien, such violation is central to the horror. Most dramatically, the alien occupies Kane’s face and metaphorically rapes him, laying its eggs in his stomach. Kane subsequently gives birth by being torn open from the inside. Further such abuses of biology are hinted at for Dallas, Brett, Parker, and Lambert. Likewise, in Lovecraft, things happen to human bodies that make simple butchery look mild. For example, when “The Colour Out of Space” preys on humans, it drains them until they are grey and brittle, crumbling to dust while still alive, while when the ancient creature buried beneath “The Shunned House” kills Dr. Whipple, it first blackens and decays his flesh, then melts him into a pool of faces of its previous victims. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), botched resurrections from partial remains leave scores of people in hideously incomplete condition but unable to die, while “Cool Air” (1926) and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933) feature characters imprisoned in animate but decomposing corpses. Like Alien, Lovecraft is tastefully nasty. And what is horror fiction if it hasn’t got a bit of nasty to it? The kiss of the Facehugger is one of the greatest kisses in cinematic history, and my personal favorite.
The following, then, are the ultimate secrets for producing good science fiction horror, according to H.P. Lovecraft. The threat must be mysterious and, from our perspective, unnatural. Alien creatures must be genuinely alien, quite unlike humans both physically and psychologically. Everything else must be treated with absolute realism. Such realism requires that the characters react to the alien with extreme awe; their emotional response to alien encounters should be so strong that it overwhelms all of their other concerns. To inspire the audience’s imagination, weird events should be conveyed by subtle suggestion.
Following Lovecraft’s example, we might add any of the following: encourage claustrophobia by setting events in enclosed spaces; encourage paranoia by having nonhumans live amongst us unrecognized as they conspire against us; and keep in mind that the most horrible violations of nature, from our human perspective, are transformations and perversions of the human body.
Of course, no formula can be followed to guarantee good art. If it were possible to produce a film as excellent as Alien by consulting a simple checklist, then films as good as Alien would be a lot more common. On the other hand, given how rare films as good as Alien are, it makes sense to examine such examples of good science fiction horror in an effort to pick up useful tips and rules of thumb. It’s been thirty‐five years now since the crew of Nostromo walked out into the howling winds of a distant and hostile planetoid, to explore the forsaken ruins of an alien ship and discover its terrible secret. We haven’t had a science fiction horror film as good since, and like a predator lurking in an abandoned starship, I am getting impatient.