​THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: ALIEN

THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: ALIEN

14/11/2022

Transitioning from the minimalist isolationism of previous chapters, the score slowly accrues and accrues, culminating in Lieutenant Ripley's blind chase through the Nostramo, where discord wails and screams and clashes with the klaxons and hisses and tormented engine sounds of the ship itself.

Thirteen For Halloween: Alien

Perhaps a somewhat obvious subject for this entry, and certainly one that's been commented on, analysed and dissected to the Nth degree. But, when it comes to horror soundtracks, some subjects are impossible to ignore.

Whilst the latter instalments in the Alien franchise would take it down a more action-horror route, the original Alien remains one of the most consummate

exercises in quiet, claustrophobic tension and existential dread ever created in cinema.

And nowhere is that more apparent than in the film's score.

Whereas many film soundtracks require context in order to appreciate, the quiet, chilling frames and escalating, discordant wails of Alien exercise a fascination all their own. The sublime use of vast and aching silences, punctuated by chillingly isolated frames of coldly distant notes in the film's opening sequences establish a sense of cosmic dread; communicating without a word or moment of exposition one of the film's most abiding themes:

Lovecraftian, cosmic insignificance.

Out amongst the stars, in the vast and hideously empty darkness, humanity itself is anomalous flotsam, a scrap of nothing with delusions of poetry. Whilst the physical threat posed by the eponymous xenomorph is significant, the greater horror of Alien is existential: The cast of characters are, from the outset, established as beyond expendable. Within the horrific, capitalist class-structures in which they operate, selling their labour to a faceless corporation whose influence is at least as profound and horrific as any Lovecraftian deity, in the environment of outer-space itself; the vast, crumbling, industrial mining-ship they operate, the strange and unknown worlds they are obliged to explore. Everything in the film, from the visuals to the score, to the scraps of discussion we overhear almost as interlopers and voyeurs, is designed to convey the utter irrelevance of these over-ambutious apes, and their hubris in daring to walk amongst stars they aren't meant to know, and that are, at best, coldly indifferent to them.

The score communicates this quality through startling economy and minimalism; when silence serves, silence reigns, and is often as chilling, shocking and disturbing as any musical cue. When the latter is required, the score is economical to the point of brutalism, sparing in a way that allows the natural sounds of the environment do much of its work (even in moments of utter terror, such as when we spy something descend from the rafters behind a character in the foreground, isolated, singular notes of discord or suspense are utilised, which have the effect of emphasising the industrial rumblings, hissings, clangs and bangs of the perpetually-in-disrepair Nostramo).

One of the most powerful examples of bizarre, haunting visuals complemented by minimalist musical strains comes when the crew descend to the surface of the uninhabited world designated LV-426:

Having discovered a downed alien craft whose design, in classic H.R. Giger style, simultaneously resembles an immense, bio-mechanical phallus and a pair of splayed women's legs, the crew discover what may or may not be the ship's cockpit, where a gigantic, fossilised alien form sits fused with its command throne. The image is so strange, so unsettling, it has the effect of making the audience collectively gasp; a reaction helped along by minimal musical rattlings that sound almost tribal, like bone-drums being played around the camp-fires of some other-worldly jungle.

Later, following moments of the most extreme and distressing body-horror, with a murderous, bio-mechanical nightmare loose on the ship, Tom Skerrit's Captain Dallas descends into a series of vents and tunnels, armed with a flamethrower to dispatch the creature. In what is one of the most iconically fraught sequences in this or any film, the rest of the crew track both Dallas and the monster by use of motion sensors that beep and blip more urgently the closer the pair come to one another. The electronic beeps and blips of the device themselves are terrifying beyond belief, but when complemented by a score so subtle as to be almost subliminal, the scene becomes an exercise in escalating dread unlike any other.

Then, there's the manner in which the score escalates and elaborates as the situation aboard the Nostramo decays. This single factor, this unknowable, alien, animal thing, destabilises one of humanity's most profound accomplishments; a ship that can traverse the stars themselves. All it takes to utterly desolate this marker of humanity's accomplishment is that one molecular element of chaos.

And the score reflects exactly this:

Transitioning from the minimalist isolationism of previous chapters, the score slowly accrues and accrues, culminating in Lieutenant Ripley's blind chase through the Nostramo, where discord wails and screams and clashes with the klaxons and hisses and tormented engine sounds of the ship itself.

Then, a lull; a moment of false peace, in which it seems she's escaped, only for the xenomorph to be present inside the escape pod with her, the musical discord that marks its revelation matched perfectly to the sinuous, serpentine motions of the beast itself.

And, ultimately, when all is done, the beast blasted out of the airlock, Lieutenant Ripley retreated into the same hyper-sleep from which she arose at the film's beginning, a slow, serene, but faintly uncertain, distressing credits sequence across the emptiness of space, the score quietly insisting that waking existence is the nightmare, and that Ripley, in the precious years in which she drifts, dreaming, is perhaps the fortunate one.

Further Reading

THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN THIRTEEN HORROR SOUNDTRACKS: THE MIST
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2022: THE LAST BROADCAST
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2022: THE LEGACY OF KAIN: SOUL REAVER
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: AMERICAN MCGEE'S ALICE
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THIRTEEN HORROR SOUNDTRACKS - SHADOW MAN