In the whole of Alien, the titular entity only appears on screen for about three minutes. That’s one reason the movie holds up so well against the other creature features of its era: in glimpses, you never get a chance to register signs of the alien’s being an artificial construction. That’s not to say it was a shoddy piece of work; quite the contrary, as explained in the new video above from CinemaTyler. Its creation demanded the dedicated efforts of an international group of professionals including special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who’d engineered the giant ape head in the 1976 King Kong remake and the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and would later work on an even more iconic extraterrestrial for E.T.).
Charged with designing the alien, and eventually with overseeing its fabrication and assembly, was the artist H. R. Giger, whose artistic sensibility occupied the intersection of organism and machine, Eros and Thanatos. Though it’s most thoroughly expressed in the deadly creature that stows away aboard the space tug Nostromo, it also, to one degree or another, pervades the whole movie’s look and feel.
Whether from the late seventies or any other period, the usual sleek, antiseptic sci-fi futures date rather quickly, a condition hardly suffered by the unrelievedly dark, dank, and dysfunctional setting of Alien. This surprisingly grimy realism makes the threat of the alien feel that much more real; hidden in its many shadows, Giger’s vision preys that much more effectively on our imagination.
Not that it was guaranteed to succeed in doing so. As CinemaTyler explains, the process of creating the alien came up against countless setbacks, all under increasingly severe constraints of both time and budget. At times the production got lucky, as when it happened upon the nearly seven-foot-tall Bolaji Badejo, who ended up wearing the alien costume (despite Scott’s insistence, early in the production, that he didn’t want to make a movie about “a man in a suit”). But it was attempting to create a being of a kind never seen on screen before, one that had to be developed through trial and error, more often the latter than the former. And it was hardly the only difficult aspect of the making of Alien, as evidenced by the eleven-and-counting episodes of CinemaTyler’s series on the subject. Maybe in space, no one can hear you scream, but one can easily imagine the cries of frustration let out by Scott, Giger, and all their pressured collaborators down here on Earth.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
