This conversation has flared up in an unrelated thread so to keep things neat, here's its own thread.
For anyone not playing along at home, the question is this: is ALIEN a horror movie with sci-fi dressing, a sci-fi with horror dressing, or a true blend of the two genres?
There's no arguing that ALIEN, as it exists, is a sci-fi horror movie. It's in space, on a spaceship, with alien worlds and androids and motion trackers.
But how important is the science in this fiction?
My argument, and that of others such as author Steve Perry, is that ALIEN is primarily a horror movie, with the science fiction aspect being used pretty much just for dressing and aesthetics.
The core dramatic conflict of the movie - an unsuspecting crew fighting for their lives against a killer monster - is a horror story first and foremost. The dramatic beats that drive the story, as well as the themes, could easily be transposed to a story set on the open ocean in present day.
While ALIEN does make good use of its science fiction setting, it's typically not essential to the plot.
For example, Ash's status as an Android is a shocking surprise, but has no functional bearing on the story - what does, is his role of saboteur. Yet the trope of the mad scientist trying to protect the monster predates ALIEN by many decades, played by human agents.
Likewise the threat of acid blood is just as worrying to a vessel travelling the Atlantic Ocean as it is to a spaceship in the void.
And we know that finding the Alien aboard a human vessel doesn't change the plot, because early drafts of the script did exactly this - and the story plays out the same.
We can remove the sci-fi from ALIEN and retain a clearly recognisable form of the story, but we can't remove the horror. Doing so would require us to write an entirely new central dramatic conflict, which means an entirely new story.
Do you think this is a hot take or do you find this painfully obvious? Let's roll.
M
