Dissecting Aliens

For almost seventy years, Hollywood has had a love affair with marauding aliens from beyond space bent on world domination and generally making our lives miserable. In 1951, the first real alien menace was thawed out at a remote arctic outpost, and reflected our Cold War fears as that thing from another world. The call to keep watching the skies was a prophetic warning that other alien terrors would soon be coming our way. Come, they did! Theater marquees all over the world paid deference to the invasion with lurid titles like It! The Terror from Beyond Space and The Fiend without a Face. The cycle eventually ran its cinematic course, and was replaced by other fears and anxieties. Then, in 1979, by borrowing very liberally from the lurid sci-fi movies of the past, Ridley Scott unleashed one of the cinema's greatest monsters. Alien was a visceral experience that exploited out repressed desires and hidden fears, and helped to remind us why our Paleolithic ancestors were so afraid of the dark. This book is a celebration of the Alien movies, their precursors and their competitors.