50 Days 50 Films - #14 "Alien" (Ridley Scott)

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa.

—"Cassilda's Song" in The King in Yellow Act 1, Scene 2

Some of you "True Detective" fans  might recognize that poem, which comes from Robert W. Chambers's seminal book of weird horror fiction, "The King In Yellow" (1895), which I read for the first time when I was probably twelve or thirteen. I watched Ridley Scott's "Alien" not long after, and as soon as I saw that derelict spaceship pictured above, I immediately thought of Carcosa.

This is not an original observation by any means. Chambers was a huge influence on Lovecraft, and you can draw a pretty direct line between "The King In Yellow" and Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. And people have been saying for years that "Alien" is pretty much the most Lovecraftian of all horror movies (this came up in a discussion on my Facebook page just this week).

It's hard to look at "Alien" — particularly the creature designed by H.R. Giger — with fresh eyes these days. It has become such a font of iconic images that it's easy to forget how truly weird and, well, alien everything in this movie was. The alien itself is almost a cartoon now, and the same goes for the facehugger and the chest burster.

But if you were able to go back in time and see this movie without having all these decades of pop-cultural associations to draw on, I can guarantee it would pretty much melt your brain.

Even now, with all the sequels and spinoffs we've been subjected to since (the nadir being "Prometheus," which managed to drain pretty much all the mystery out of this concept), there's still an odd, hypnotic power to that first film. You really do feel like you're crossing some sort of threshold when you watch it — catching a vision of some primordial hell where the natural laws we take for granted just don't quite apply anymore. Scott and Giger crafted a work Lovecraftian horror in the best sense of the term — giving us a quick glimpse of a vast, black cosmos that is as hostile and incomprehensible as it is insane.

Other movies have dipped into similar territory from time to time, with varying degrees of success. Only John Carpenter's "The Thing" managed to do it better. That film will be coming up later on this countdown. I'll leave off here, because I'm sure all this will come up again.

NOTE: I know a lot of people think James Cameron's sequel is the better film, and in many ways it is. But this is the one that still sticks with me.