Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [102]
O’Bannon made suggestions, offered criticisms (the X-rays of the alien should be in black and white, he insisted), none of which earned him goodwill, but neither did it get him kicked off the film—that is, until he thought his typewriter was stolen. O’Bannon dictated all his ideas to a secretary who typed them out, but when he entered his office and found it missing, he stormed into a meeting attended by Scott and the producers and found the machine right there. His temper exploded. Scott told him to calm down, that they had borrowed it, but O’Bannon, who had difficulty settling down once he got into a fury, raged on. He was kicked off the film within days and was back in the United States. Far away from the set, he considered the worst. They would ruin his movie and take the credit. His stomach ached.
Before he returned home, O’Bannon did contribute his last crucial idea, a piece of advice. Scott was no expert in horror and was fairly indifferent to the intense low-budget exploitation movies of the era. O’Bannon thought it was important that Alien not be merely a science-fiction mood piece. It had to deliver shock value as well, in a way that the monster movies of his childhood did. “I was concerned that Ridley didn’t understand the horror genre. It was important to bring him up to speed,” he said. So before shooting the first kill, O’Bannon set up a screening for Scott to watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. “I told him you are not going to like this film but just see it,” O’Bannon says. “It was important because that showed him what he had to do. This couldn’t be a discreet thing.”
Scott saw Chain Saw in a small screening room at 20th Century Fox. Early on, Walter Hill walked in and asked what he was looking at. The producer had a Coke and a hamburger. They watched together right until the end. When the credits rolled, the food had not been touched. Scott was ready to shoot the big scene.
Unlike most terrifying horror sequences, the entrance of the alien, shot with five cameras, was bathed in bright light. Scott wanted you to see this abominable creature clearly, and it was a sign of the confidence he had in Giger that the design would hold its own without elaborate tricks and shadows. At first, the frame, gliding around a tight, whitewalled room, focuses more on the onlookers than on the victim struggling on his back on a table. We see their shocked faces. The perspective reproduces the position of the innocent bystander, and lingers on the faces of the crew when the alien emerges, the helplessness on their faces magnified by the fact that none of the actors (save John Hurt, out of whose stomach the alien emerges) knew what was going to happen in the scene. The surprised expressions were actually genuine.
When the alien bursts out, something strange happens; the camera stops. The bright lighting does not darken. The audience gets a straighton look at the monster. It is grotesque: bloody, slippery, and obscene. Once it appears, the monster looms in the center of the frame, while the crew freezes, gaping at this bizarre, freakish creature, unable to turn away. They don’t run or hide. They are fascinated. Like us, they are an audience, helpless, frightened, and too curious to realize they are in danger. For the first time in history, revealing the creature is not an anticlimax.
IF HITCHCOCK’S Frenzy makes the argument that not seeing the horror is scarier than having it shoved in our face, Alien counters persuasively. Once we see the monster, it cannot shock us in the same way again. But it can do something else: tap into another powerful feeling almost as intense as fear. The alien makes us sick to our stomach.