Aliens, space horror and growing up Evangelical

original art from MOTHERSHIP

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."  

Aliens came out 40 years ago this week and I thought I should talk about it.

When I was growing up my mom kept an extremely close watch on what kind of media I consumed. Cartoon ghosts were condemned as demonic. Fantasy magic was devil worship. Sitcoms where the characters had extramarital sex were deemed harmful to my moral fabric. Even the Archie comics I collected were, for a while, the Al Hartley Christian comics because that's all my mother would let me read. I had been exposed to horror themes as a child, largely through gaps in my mother's surveillance: the odd ghost story here, playing Doom in my neighbor's basement there. But after my parents' divorce, my mom started paying a little less attention, and was a little more lax in what she was willing to let me read or watch or play; in that space I was able to cultivate a great love for horror that has lasted to this day.

Neither Alien nor Aliens were my first Alien film. That was Alien³, and I watched it on network television (I don't remember which channel, though probably WXIX, the local Fox affiliate) by myself one night. In retrospect, it seems improbable that it would get a prime-time showing, but the 1990s were strange. I only know that it was just before my parents split; mom was studying for her theology degree and not paying attention to what I was doing in the living room.

Alien vs Predator (1994) for the Atari Jaguar

Whatever the hazy circumstances of my seeing the film, it made me a fan of the series, and I immediately set about trying to watch the rest any way I could. I couldn't tell you exactly why; I suppose there was an element of forbidden fruit, but I think a lot of it was the bleakness of the film and its universe, and mix of fascination and revulsion that the xenomorph, the titular alien of the Alien franchise, evoked within me. Here then was a creature that could not be explained, a monster so fundamentally inhuman as to not resemble anything we could imagine on Earth, not ghost nor vampire nor serial murderer nor horned demon. A monster somewhere between humanoid, insect and reptile, unstoppable yet unknowable. In a sense, the xenomorph is deep space: there is so much that we do not and cannot know. There are things out there that we might rejoice for never seeing... and for those things never seeing us. 

Alien is a big franchise now, often crossing over with Predator (which I am not nearly as enamored of, though still enjoy.) There's been comic books, video games, several movies, even a TV show now. When I was young I think I would have found all that amazing; these days, I've been frustrated with the direction the franchise has taken since Alien Resurrection and especially since Disney bought the rights, and I find myself retreating to the comfort of the original trilogy and the Dark Horse novels and the video games up to Aliens: Colonial Marines (which isn't that bad.) I'm often torn between which I like better, Alien or Aliens; my opinion can sometimes switch on rewatches, and right now I feel like I'm pretty firmly Team Aliens.

Event Horizon

This isn't really a review of Aliens; I'll write up a formal review of it someday, but today I just wanted to talk about how this franchise has shaped me. I'm a big fan of horror in general; I like it in almost all its forms (some exceptions apply; the French know what they did.) But space horror I like best of all, whether it be schlocky monster-of-the-week potboilers full of alien wing-wong (I promise that link is SFW) or terrifying psychological thrillers in the isolation of deep space. Or both. I think it's because space horror, especially space horror of the Eighties and Nineties, sits at the intersection of a (frequently very cyberpunk-influenced flavor) of science fiction, and the natural horror of space itself, the ultimate hostile environment. There is no way to make space livable; we can only seal ourselves up in little flying tin cans and just going outside is a multi-hour endeavor lest our blood boil away in our veins. That's not even getting into relativity, the existence of which makes for a pretty strong argument that reality as a concept is meaningless and nobody gets to criticize me for being a philosophical nihilist ever again. The best we can do, then, is to use science and technology to traverse the void; what things we may find in it, are unknown to us.

There's a lot of fun stuff to be found in the space horror theme. Aliens was a big deal, and spawned a lot of imitators; Doom is basically Aliens meets Evil Dead, just as an example. (And of course, modders brought things full circle with several Aliens-themed mods for Doom.) The recent passing of Sam Neill (what an actor!) brings to mind Event Horizon, one of his better movies, a sort of Amityville-in-Space (not counting the actual Amityville in Space, which I swear to Palutena is a real thing) whereupon a rescue crew is dispatched to a haunted starship — haunted not by the ghosts of its missing crew, but by the ship itself, seemingly alive after its years-long disappearance. There's plenty of space horror to be found in video games, too, like Dead Space, Routine, System Shock; there's even tabletop RPGs like MOTHERSHIP. And I just keep buying it all, because this is my genre. It's been a growing obsession for thirty years.

In the last year before she passed away, I finally showed my mom Alien. Her reaction was funny, because for someone with as poor observation skills and media literacy as she had, she saw some scares a mile away. But she understood, on some level, why I'm so obsessed with this franchise and its imitators. There's so much out there that we don't know and can't explain; mom tried to find answers in the Bible, but even the Bible can't account for everything. Even leaving aside the abject terror of the unknown, there's just something fun about it; it's fun to imagine the future, and sci-fi horror feels realistic, an acknowledgment that the future is something we cannot know.

I don't miss my childhood, restricted and friendless and frequently bullied and abused by everyone I knew. But Aliens feels like home to me, with its dark corridors and bad weather and smoking hot people covered in dirt and sweat the way actors aren't allowed to be now; with its central protagonist an all-loving mother figure who will stop at nothing to protect against a seemingly impossible threat. For all my baggage with my mom, for all that happened growing up, she never gave up on her identity as a mother, not just to me but to her students. I wish I could have shown Aliens to my mom; I think it would have resonated with her. 

-june❤