Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [96]
WHILE WAITING for Dark Star to be released, O’Bannon and Carpenter conceived of a script inspired by The Thing from Another World, about predatory, shape-shifting alien insects found in an archaeological dig. When their working relationship broke up, Carpenter agreed to give O’Bannon the idea. O’Bannon wrote the original script for “Star Beast,” later renamed Alien, with his writing partner Ronald Shusett, who had invited him to sleep on his couch after returning from Paris. Shusett had been thinking about another idea for a film about a B-17 bomber over Tokyo that gets sidetracked, and part of that plot found its way into the script. O’Bannon imagined it as a $500,000 monster movie. He tried to sell it to studios, but was told it would be too difficult to pull off because of the limitations of special effects. So O’Bannon simplified the creature. Instead of bizarrely shaped arachnids, he envisioned one human-shaped monster that could fit in a cheap rubber suit. In its original conception, it’s a step backward to the monster movies of his youth. But as is true with Targets, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and so many of the movies of this era, the directors started with the past and then introduced a dialogue with the future.
The story shared the outer space exploration plot with the fifties science-fiction drive-in hit It: The Terror from the Beyond, and also resembled Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires. “I don’t steal from anybody,” O’Bannon would often say. “I steal from everybody.” In any event, Alien followed a crew of male astronauts returning to Earth who are sidetracked by a message from a remote planet. It begins with mundane chatter among ordinary working-class types. This was in outer space, but it could have been at a truck stop. In the style of a film student well versed in Isaac Asimov, the dialogue works against the glamorous adventure slogans. “Time and space don’t mean anything out here,” said one member of the crew in the original screenplay. “We are living in one of Einstein’s equations.”
After hearing reports that there may be an alien life form on a nearby planet, three members of a team stop and land to investigate. They find an ancient-looking, abandoned spacecraft. After walking through its corridors, they find a room of egglike shells, and a spidery beast leaps out of one and grabs on to the face of an astronaut. Building on O’Bannon’s idea of an insect monster from They Bite, Shusett imagined that the creature would operate like a wasp that latches on to a spider and uses it as a host to plant an egg. But the life cycle is accelerated, allowing for the monster to change shape after it enters the ship. O’Bannon mulled over this idea when he went to sleep and woke up in the middle of the night. He walked over to Shusett’s bedroom and proposed what would become the most shattering horror scene since a bewigged Norman Bates pulled open the shower curtain. “The monster,” O’Bannon told his friend, “bursts out of his stomach.”
O’Bannon went on to explain that the alien not only lays its egg inside the man, but grows inside and emerges as a baby, splattering flesh and blood everywhere. The idea of an alien violently bursting out of a stomach was of course very personal for O’Bannon; that’s what his sickness felt like. He could also see that this would be a potent metaphor for childbirth. Increased access to birth control pills and the rise of abortion as a political issue in the seventies made reproduction a source of much paranoia.
Rosemary’s Baby popularized the pregnancy horror films, but that movie remained fairly psychological and distant from the gruesome possibilities of giving birth. Director David Cronenberg led a more visceral approach to the horror of reproduction in movies such as Rabid, Shivers, and The Brood. His movies focused on the physical aspects of mortality, showing gooey, off-putting images that inspired disgust. Cronenberg shared a similar background with Wes Craven. Born around the same time in the late thirties in towns far away from Hollywood—Cronenberg hails from