Very Important Question: Is ‘Alien’ A Horror Movie?
I’m just asking
Answer: Yes. Alien is a horror movie. It’s also a science-fiction movie set on a spaceship. And a monster movie, which is a subspecies of horror. I also think it’s a deeply political movie about class: in the future, workers are even more disposable than they are now. The unseen executives in Alien don’t lay off their employees, they secretly get them impregnated by mysterious, and potentially lucrative, extraterrestrial bioweapons.
But let me circle back to the very important question: Alien is a sci-fi horror movie. The reason I asked the question is that I made the mistake of looking directly at the headlights a.k.a. Twitter.
A freelance journalist stirred up Film Twitter with the following argument: horror movies cannot be set in space. I’m not going to link to the Tweet because this person is getting swarmed by thousands of counter-arguments. There’s a cheap 70s grindhouse movie about man-eating earthworms that’s famous for one scene featuring a bad dude covered in hungry nightcrawlers burrowing into his flesh and if you can think of a better illustration of a Twitter pile-on I’d love to hear it.
So I’d like to, respectfully, offer up my opinion, which is that all science-fiction movies are horror movies but, obviously, not all horror movies are…
