Everyone has had uncanny experiences in life, right? These
are the situations or occurrences that leave you shivering with dread or
talking about how creeped out you are even if there’s a rational explanation
for what happened. For some people, it’s watching medical shows on TV. For
others, it’s laying on the grass of the front lawn one summer evening and
seeing something in the night sky that shouldn’t have been possible. Yes. A
hasty retreat was beat into the confines of the house. It’s possible the
blankets were also pulled waaaaay up over this person’s head for the night,
too.
It seems that fear is universal among the human species,
something I learned after reading one science book too many. Apparently,
scientists showed pictures of faces displaying fear (eyes wide, eye brows up,
etc) to people across cultures. No one was confused about what emotion they
were seeing. Even infants as young as four months (possibly earlier, but I guess that’s
tough to prove) can recognize and respond to these fear cues in the faces they
see. From an evolutionary standpoint, and in the interests of not becoming some
cheetah’s chew toy, fear makes all kinds of sense. Meaning there’s some really
rich ground for story tellers to exploit.
Look at the first Alien movie. I hold this one up for your
horror genre consideration because it’s the only ‘horror’ movie I’ve ever
managed to watch and enjoy. This analysis will contain spoilers. So if you’ve
been living under a rock and didn’t already know everything there is to know
about the movie from pop culture references, go get the movie from Netflix or
something. Make spaghetti for dinner that night. Turn off all the lights. Watch
the movie. We’ll wait. You’re welcome. Never eat pasta again? You didn’t really
need the carbs anyway.
What makes Alien work? After all, you don't really see anything bad
happen to anyone but Kane (the guy with the face hugger and the subsequently
fatal case of alien indigestion). Here's a partial break it down.
1.
Something unusual happens – these people are
awakened from hibernation when they shouldn’t have been. They expected to wake
up and be home. Instead, they wake up to realize they’re in the freaking middle
of nowhere, nearly a year’s flight time from earth. And it’s all because of a
signal the ship’s computer picked up – a signal that indicates someone’s been
here before them.
2.
Isolation – while the crew of the Nostromo have
one another, the seven of them are completely cut off from the rest of
humanity. They can phone home all they like; help is at least a year away. That
sense of being utterly cut off is intensified, first by the fact that this crew
isn’t united, and second, by the fact that they’re picked off one by one.
3.
Hostile environment – deep space doesn’t like
humans much. Vacuum is damned unforgiving. While the crew and the ship seem
rock solid and reliable, in watching these people suit up in space suits, or
detach the tug for a trip away from the rest of the ship, most of us are very
aware that the crew are one minor accident away from disaster. (Not to mention
that in horror movies, whenever you split the party, you know it’s bad news.)
4.
Dark, the inexplicable, dead bodies, foreboding
– the entire scene sequence of investigating the crash site, the discovery of
the fossilized body, and the egg chamber touch on several primal fears:
solitude (Kane is alone when he drops into the egg chamber), darkness, the dead
body in the cockpit, and the things that go bump in the night – namely the
alien in the egg that moves when Kane shines his light through the egg and the
fact that the landing party cannot possibly identify any of what they’re
looking at. Add into that the fact that Ripley decodes the signal that brought
them to investigate only to find it *wasn’t* an SOS – it was a warning and she
can’t get through to the team inside the wreck to tell them to get the heck out.
5.
Unfulfilled expectations – Alien did this
brilliantly. At every juncture, you know something bad could happen. You brace.
Nothing bad happens. You relax. But you don’t relax back down to your starting
point. You brace again for the next possible bad thing. Rinse, repeat in a
rising cycle of tension. Alien puts you through the rinse, repeat cycle an
amazing number of times before an alien breaks out of an egg, melts Kane’s
faceplate and melds to his face. You’re all ‘something bad happened, I can relax
now’, except Kane’s not dead. And he’s being carried back to the ship where
he’ll get medical treatment. Uh oh. It wasn’t a bad enough bad thing, was it?
6.
Precious little blood shed – in this movie,
there aren’t buckets of blood. There’s one scene of bloodshed. Poor Kane. After
the face hugger drops way, dead and Kane is revived, everyone finds out he’s
merely a host for an alien baby that hatches by exploding out of his chest. If
I remember correctly, this is the only time you watch someone die in this movie
– sketchy on this point, though, so feel free to correct me. From a story
telling and psychological standpoint, you don’t need to see anyone else die
because you know the stakes and they are messy. Most people I know say the
worst part of the movie is near the end, when the only other female crew member
is under attack and screaming. Her shrieks stop in mid-scream. Chilling.
7.
You never get a clear view of the threat –
admittedly, you never get a clear view of the alien because the director didn’t
want to give away seven foot guy in a mask – but this bit of cinematic trickery
works on a psychological level because you’re never allowed to face your fear
head on and come to terms with it. And what the human brain isn’t allowed to
study and catalog, it approximates, filling in all kinds of possible details,
in this case, each worse than the last.
Granted, you’re not setting out to rewrite Alien, but the
techniques the movie used translate into any kind of story that requires a bit
of scary. So go wandering through the Doomwood Horror forest, armed with the knowledge that you're all alone out there in the dark. Good luck. Hope your flashlight battery holds.
