Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [98]
Alien features a strong female protagonist, but that was not how O’Bannon originally imagined the part. It began as a movie about a group of guys. Horror in the seventies was already filled with women taking revenge on their attackers. After The Last House on the Left, an entire genre called “rape-revenge” movies told stories of empowered women fighting back, the most controversial example being I Spit on Your Grave, a ferocious portrait of a New Yorker who is raped in the country and then spends the rest of the movie seeking vengeance against her attackers. Roger Ebert called it “one of the most depressing experiences of my life.” The movie also has its defenders, who claim that the graphic rape displays evidence of a feminist impulse willing to show the real ugliness of sexual violence. Alien, as it was originally planned, avoided the woman in distress, pointedly.
O’Bannon was not interested in the sadism of identifying with the man chasing the woman or the fantasy of getting even, so much as he was looking for the best way to assault his audience, who, he expected, would be mostly young men. He figured that making the alien burst out of the man added a new Lovecraftian horror to an old anxiety. Childbirth may terrify some women, but after going through it once, it becomes less mysterious and potentially less daunting. To men, the suffering of childbirth is, by its very nature, alien. It’s unknown in a way that even Michael Myers is not. O’Bannon imagined the men in the audience looking at their own stomachs, wondering what was going on inside.
O’Bannon’s second crucial decision was taking the leap of faith to pick H. R. Giger to design the creature. Giger had never worked in Hollywood. He hardly spoke English. His sexually grotesque paintings, melding the look of cold industrial machines with vulnerable human flesh, looked nothing like any other movie monster. That O’Bannon fought for the creator of such obscene and off-putting art was a direct result of his background. Unlike the rest of the great horror directors of the day, O’Bannon originally wanted to be a visual artist. He went to art school, and his understanding of design not only informed his aesthetic of horror but added up to a philosophy of fear that he described this way:
In certain types of horror movies, you find yourself contemplating a spooky old castle or a piece of dramatic landscape. What’s going on there? Why do we need to be scared to appreciate scenery? Fear is like salt—you know. Salt opens up your taste buds so meat tastes meatier. Fear sensitizes you so you become very alert. This is true on a basic instinctual level. Animals who feel secure and happy are dopey and relaxed. But as soon as the animal senses he is under threat, he becomes alert. Fear makes you much more alert to what happens in front of you. That makes your enjoyment of scenery more intense.
By the late seventies, the aesthetic of most horror movies was marked by ragged and chaotic clutter, the dirt and grime of a madhouse mixed with a dive bar. Craven proved that this rough design could be employed to bolster the authenticity of a scene. Hooper learned from that and added gothic elements, decorating the dinner table with animal skin and flesh and skeletal remains. On the opposite side of the spectrum was the work of Polanski and Carpenter, who preferred clean lines and empty spaces with plenty of room for scary things to jump into the picture. O’Bannon liked how Giger mixed styles, blending dark high-tech with a more flamboyantly fantastical design. He understood the horror of the in-between.
In the middle of writing the script, O’Bannon called Giger and had a thirty-minute conversation in which he slowly explained in overly articulated English the general outlines of the movie. He sent a package the next week that included a check for $1,000, some sketches by Ron Cobb and O’Bannon, and a list of elements to