by Neal Acito

Created on: April 08, 2008

There is a murderer in the old dark house. One by one, the guests are killed off in grotesque fashion. In the end, only one survives. Is this a 1930's murder mystery penned by Agatha Christie? No, it's Ridley Scott's science fiction masterpiece, ALIEN.

Quite often we see repeats of the same old formula. How many mad scientists trying to create a race of supermen have we seen in film? Likewise, how many maniacal slashers come back for revenge? ALIEN takes the haunted house motif and pushes it light years into the future. The old dark house is the spaceship Nostromo. The crew are the unwitting guests. The lone survivor is Ripley.

And it works.

Despite the fact that we've seen this film a thousand times before, Scott gives us a fresh perspective. Everything is updated. The dark corridors of the house are substituted with the air shafts. We even get rattling chains and rain.

We all know that there is going to be a cat that jumps out at us to give us a false scare. After all, we see that in every mystery. And yet, when the cat finally does jump out at us in ALIEN, we still jump.

Being isolated without chance of rescue is another aspect of the haunted house film and it appears in ALIEN as well. The crew has to solve this mystery all by themselves. After all, "no one can hear you scream".

Much has been written about the incubation of the creatures. Admittedly, that's a cause for audience discomfort. The idea that a creature use a human body as a host is certainly disgusting. However, there's nothing really SCARY about that. It's not the weapon that scares you, it's the murderer.

Incubation, sharp teeth, and blood that burns like acid are just the weapons of choice, much in the way that the murderer would use the knife or the candlestick. The fact that it's a candlestick that bursts from your chest shouldn't distract from the fact that there is a murderer out there and that you might be next.

In the final analysis, ALIEN owes much of it's strength to films like THE CAT AND THE CANARY, or Agatha Christies's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. Even the Ritz Brothers' THE GORILLA, with it's haunted house, offbeat characters, and a rarely seen gorilla that commits murder is closer in narrative than standard science fiction.

And what about the red herring?

Every mystery has to have one suspect who diverts your attention. In essence, the red herring is the science fiction genre itself. We are led to believe that the Nostromo is a spaceship.
It's not.

It's nothing more than a haunted house drifting through a dark and stormy universe.

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