‘Alien’ (1979): Post-Industrial Gothic Space and Horror Vacui.
“I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them f**king each other over for a goddamn percentage.”
— Ripley, Aliens
When the 1979 movie, Alien begins, we are shown the gargantuan cargo ship in outer space foreshadowed by at least four planets. The ship is named the ‘Nostromo’. It is of a shape that we are familiar with and its huge towers and monumental vertical construction resemble the cathedrals and castles of our own Earth. But churches, cathedrals, and castles are all present in Gothic horror as a necessary and required prerequisite of the story. And so it is with Alien. The ship is a Gothic space and the story is Gothic melodrama and horror.
When I saw the ‘Nostromo’ for the first time — and still today — it always looks so out of place in space. Where the space that we see is normally full of elliptical shapes and circularity and flowing unobtrusive emptiness the spaceship stands out in stark relief against the almost perfect circularity of those planets in our visual frame of reference. The symmetry and order of space are being defiled with human engineering and construction. An ugly, and artificial metallic presence that really disturbs the perfect geometry of the Universe. And that in itself is…
