I admire its purity

Rating: 10/10 (12 March 2014)

Less is more in the horror genre. Give us a fight between a giant humanoid albino and an octopus-like creature and we'll think of the special effects guy eating a taco in front of his PC screen as he is rendering the octopus' slime. Show us a maze of dark corridors where a monster may be hiding, and our pulse rate rises. We don't need to be bludgeoned in the head with horrific imagery: glimpsing something creepy out of the corner of the eye is more than enough.
Alien's closest kinship is not to the exhilarating but vastly different sequel Aliens, and certainly not to the clunky prequel Prometheus, but to its contemporaries Jaws and The Thing, horror movies as lean and taut as hungry tigers, masterpieces tapping on primordial fears. For Alien, it's predators and rape: the first is self-explanatory, the second a disturbing undertone running throughout the movie, with the creature's attacks portrayed as increasingly sexualized in nature.
The quintessential contained sci-fi/horror, Alien's iconic status is a product of many factors: Scott's masterful direction, a fine cast, Giger's still unparalleled reptilian monster and O'Bannon's script, as vicious and essential as a bear trap ready to snap. The brilliance of the premise - reminiscent of an episode of Van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle - lies in implying a dark, almost Lovecraftian universe full of mysterious looming threats, both horribly dangerous and beyond mankind's understanding. Then of course came Prometheus and started putting tags on what was best left merely alluded to.
At the end, Ian Holm's Ash says it best: "Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility."
10/10