Ridley Scott's 116-Minute Cosmic Sci-Fi Thriller Masterpiece Is Officially Coming to Streaming

As far as genres go, science-fiction and horror pair together pretty naturally. Both of them regularly have stories where people explore the unknown, and strange creatures often show up in both categories. That’s why movies like Cloverfield and A Quiet Place have been so successful in recent decades, because the elements of science-fiction and horror that they are combining naturally complement each other.

But to this day, nearly all sci-fi/horror movies still pale in comparison to the 1979 classic, Alien, which will be arriving on Netflix on September 1.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Alien takes place in the year 2122 aboard a freight ship in deep space. A small crew is aboard the ship in a prolonged state of sleep until they are awakened by a distress beacon from a nearby moon. When they explore the moon, they find a ship that crash-landed years earlier with no one left alive. They also find some large, mysterious eggs. When one of the ship's officers, Kane (John Hurt), inspects an egg, a spider-like alien latches onto his face. The crew then leaves the moon in a hurry and tries to remove the creature. They fail repeatedly, but it eventually falls off and Kane is seemingly okay.

However, not long after Kane appears to recover, a creature bursts out of his chest, killing him. It then runs off into the darkness of the ship. From there, the rapidly-growing alien begins killing off members of the crew one by one.

What is Alien about?

Image: 20th Century Fox/The Everett Collection

Alien wasn’t the first movie to combine sci-fi and horror. The two genres have been intermingling ever since Mary Shelley invented the sci-fi genre with Frankenstein in 1818, but Alien is a landmark work in the area of sci-fi/horror for the way Scott used classic horror movie storytelling and combined it with unique, state-of-the-art production design — and especially creature design.

At its most basic level, Alien is a monster movie and a haunted house movie. Both of those kinds of horror films feature people on the run from some mysterious force and getting picked off throughout the film. The alien, of course, is this movie’s monster, while the darkly-lit, industrial spaceship is the haunted house.

Because the story structure is fairly straightforward, the movie’s characters are allowed to shine. The cast mostly consists of character actors that were big in the late 1970s, with Tom Skerritt being the closest thing to the film’s leading man. Eventually, after more and more crew members perish, it becomes clear Sigourney Weaver is the actual star, but part of the fun of the film is how it begins as an ensemble. The strong female lead was far less conventional in those days, and Scott turned Weaver into the star she still is today.

However, the most impressive thing about Alien is the way the movie looks, from its unglamorous production design to its creature — one of the most memorable designs in the history of film.

The haunting imagery of AlienActor Harry Dean Stanton on the Set of 1979’s Alien, looking up with dread as the Xenomorph’s hand reaches for his head

Unlike many sci-fi movies that romanticize the future, Alien looks cold and grimy. While some of that lived-in texture was introduced in the original Star Wars, which came out two years earlier, the future depicted in Alien took it to another level. Their ship, the Nostromo, was anything but glamorous. It was dirty, industrial, and claustrophobic.

But it's the alien that made the biggest impact.

The alien creature in the film, which would come to be named a “Xenomorph,” was designed by Swiss artist H. R. Giger, who gave the alien a biomechanical, slightly erotic look. In 1979, it was terrifying and completely unlike anything seen before.

In a 2018 interview with Yahoo!, Scott said of the creature, “In my career, which has been pretty long, there's only been, with the greatest respect for the people I've worked with, two real, real originals. Funnily enough, I came across a guy called H. R. Giger and if I hadn't got that monster, you would not have had that movie. I saw the drawing – the drawing was drawn for the book, not the film – and I was so kind of taken, I flew to Switzerland where he lived because he didn't want to get the plane as he was scared of flying. I met him in Zurich at his home and I persuaded him to travel by train to come to England and live at Shepperton studios for ten months. And he did.”

Without Giger, Scott said, “It wouldn't have been the same movie. Whilst the cast was wonderful, with Sigourney [Weaver] and Harry [Dean Stanton] and those people, but without that eighth passenger it wouldn't have been the same film."

Image: 20th Century Fox

Of course, Alien laid the groundwork for a variety of sequels and crossovers, many of which have their defenders as to whether or not they’re actually any good. The only one besides Alien to enjoy near-universal praise is Aliens from 1986, directed by James Cameron. But while Aliens is definitely thrilling, it’s much more of an action movie than its predecessor. And while many interesting things have been done with the Xenomorphs since Alien, the creepiness of H.R. Giger’s designs will always be most at home in the shadows of a horror picture.

Alien will arrive on Netflix on September 1.