It’s always fun to watch a horror movie because inducing horror requires masterful skills. When I first watched it as a child, my horror peaked at the dining area scene where the baby alien hatched from a guy’s stomach. This time, I think I was able to see a bigger picture.

The movie started slowly in the beginning. It spent a lot of time showing the vast and empty universe, and cold and mechanical parts of the spaceship. It was to induce the sensation of isolation and helplessness in a sci-fi setting as if the ship and crew were a small child walking alone at night in dark. The feeling of menace was amplified when they landed on a planet with ruins of abandoned space vessels. They could have started the story with aliens sneaking into their main ship directly, but this ominous narrative created suspense. And as a nail in the coffin, the ship’s AI (Mother) saying that there was no solution and the crew realizing that they were dispensable, and the main purpose of the voyage was to acquire the alien maximized the feeling of isolation and helplessness. The name of the AI was Mother, and it implied that now the crew were like children abandoned by their mother.

This feeling of terror, isolation, and anxiety was contrast to the final scene. After Ripley successfully fended off the alien, the movie ended with her sleeping peacefully and soundly in her capsule. She was all alone but she was able to sleep without worries, which doesn’t make much sense as she went through traumatic events right before. But it works because the movie is about terror from isolation, and once this is addressed, we can find peace and the terror can disappear. In this sense, the movie did a great job of setting things up in space. Its emptiness always reminds us how alone we are and confronting an unknown being naturally generates sense of anxiety and fear.