Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [103]
More specifically, the alien manages to be both gross and gorgeous at the same time. Being truly beautiful is another kind of freakishness—and that is part of the reason beauty fascinates: it’s so different from what we expect. The sleek look and overt sexuality captivates your attention. As Emily Dickinson put it in a poem about horror, “’Tis so appalling—it exhilarates.” Audiences couldn’t stand looking at the alien, but they returned again and again.
Lying low in Hollywood after being kicked off the set, O’Bannon bought a ticket and attended opening night at Mann’s Chinese Theater with Ronald Shusett. Nervously eyeing the long line, O’Bannon was convinced that the movie would be terrible. They had surely messed up his script, simplified it, and the movie must be compromised beyond recognition. But when the credits rolled, he noticed how silent the audience became. They were engaged, inching forward in their seats. Sitting in front of him was Shusett, who couldn’t wait for the alien to emerge. When the thing popped out of John Hurt, the screams in the audience were deafening. And they continued, roaring along with another odd sound from behind him, a man weeping. Shusett turned around and saw O’Bannon in tears. He couldn’t believe it: they actually liked his movie.
Alien became a quick hit, the fourth-highest-grossing movie of the year. It also picked up two Academy Award nominations, winning the Oscar for Visual Effects. Dan O’Bannon didn’t attend the ceremony, received some poor notices for the script, which was knocked by some critics for being thin, and generally never received the credit he deserved. David Giler diminished his contributions in the press. The studio even took his (and Ronald Shusett’s) name off the poster but was forced to put it back after arbitration.
The bad press over the dispute and the fact that O’Bannon didn’t show up in the movie’s considerable self-promotion almost certainly hurt his career. It also meant that he was not invited to work on any of the sequels. Even closer to home, he still could not find any validation. He traveled to St. Louis to see the premiere of Alien with his mother. As O’Bannon recalls, she passed along these words of advice: “Just because a person’s successful doesn’t mean he can’t fail.”
John Carpenter also told journalists that his old friend merely ripped off It: The Terror from Beyond Space. He called the movie stylish but more repulsive than scary. Carpenter went on to make his own repulsive movie in his 1981 remake of The Thing from Another World, which broke ground in special effects and spared no sensibilities, showing severed arms and gooey body parts in a paranoid, Lovecraftian style that departed from the sunny optimism of the original film.
O’Bannon didn’t think much of Carpenter’s work either. “Halloween is a very simple movie,” he told me. “You can make that in a weekend with some teenagers. It’s kind of nifty in a minor key. Halloween was okay, okay.”
Halloween and Alien—the most significant horror movies of 1978 and 1979—couldn’t be more different in process (do-it-yourself exploitation, studio blockbuster), worlds portrayed (familiar suburbia, mysterious space), and brand of terror (sleek suspense, bloody repulsion). Comparing the two movies, a cover story in Newsweek about the popularity of the horror genre locates the distinction by describing the audiences yelling “ick” at Alien and stunned into hushed silence at Halloween. It’s the difference between graphic violence and suggestion, a drooling alien and an empty house. But just like their monsters, these movies scrambled stereotypes. Halloween proved that low-budget exploitation movies shock audiences through discretion rather than gore, and Alien dispelled the idea that the gross-outs of the grind-house theater couldn’t be studio art.
The culmination