Memory: The Origins of Alien

Computer:

Nicholas cull: Every film is a product of its time.

And every successful film tells you something

about the time it was made.

It's successful because it resonates

with stories and images that people need to see

at that particular point.

Henry Jenkins: "Alien" is a radical break

with science fiction.

This is not the notion of the alien

that we were building toward in something

like "close encounters."

Clarke wolfe: "Star wars" comes out,

we have a fun space adventure.

And then "alien" comes out, and people embrace it.

And then just a couple of years later, "e.T."

And John carpenter's "the thing" come out,

and audiences resoundingly are like, no, thank you.

We want our aliens to be nice and squishy

and cool and eat candy.

I think there's a special status that comes to some films

that lodge in the audience's collective imagination,

and I think "alien" is certainly one of those films.

William linn: Tolkien talked about the cauldron of stories,

and certainly, "alien" is an example

of a story drawing from a real global set of myths.

If you look at a somatics experiment, what you're going

to see is sand that vibrates in a shape,

and the shape changes based on the different vibrations.

A myth is like something that vibrated from something

deeper that you can't see.

You see a major curse in the form

of the alien, who is very much a fury,

responding to an imbalance.

We're looking at a story where there

is a piece of material prop that is now completely

alive in our imaginations.

It lives in our dreams.

It lives in our cultural conversation.

It's one of the biggest cultural dreams we've ever had.

Diane o'bannon: I met Dan at usc.

He was a real standout.

You couldn't miss him.

He was a wild man, unbounded by conventional reality.

You couldn't call him an iconoclast, because he

didn't have icons to break.

He could be very offensive, and was frequently

offensive on purpose.

He was hot, you know, emotionally hot, emotionally

responsive, very angry.

He was born and raised in rural Missouri and had no television.

They didn't even have a telephone till he was 10.

They lived in the middle of nowhere on 24 acres.

And yet he knew all these things.

They didn't even have a library in the town.

His mother used to send off for boxes of books,

and they would come, and he would read them,

and then they'd send them back.

Dan was always sneaking science fiction.

His mother always wanted him to read good literature.

And his mother would always say, you

haven't got any of that science fiction in your backpack,

have you?

You're not taking that science fiction to school.

His father owned a curio shop, it was called odd acres.

There was a sort of screwy Louie room, you know,

where things were sort of off kilter,

and everything looks like it's leaning.

That was growing up in odd acres.

One time his father faked a ufo landing.

And Dan helped him, and then he had the press out there,

you know?

By direction of the President of the United States,

stay in your homes.

I repeat, stay in your homes.

Reporter: Because in one moment of history-making violence,

nature, mad, rampant, roared its most awesome creation.

Diane o'bannon: There's a lot of bugs there.

And he was always very frightened, in a way,

by the sudden appearance of bugs,

like a stick insect and cicadas, massive invasions

in Southern Missouri, they would have hundreds of thousands

of them come out of the ground and swarm over everything

and then vanish and die.

So these things really gave him the creeps.

And he wanted to creep everybody else out too.

But he was quite an artist.

And when he was thinking of his monsters,

he would sketch them out.

Before "alien," Dan had written a screenplay called

"they bite."

It was "alien" before "alien."

And it involved a cicada-like creature,

but instead of being 13 years underground,

it was several million years underground,

and gradually picks off the people in the encampment one

by one.

It's a version of an alien creature

evolving, needing an evolution, and being

destructive in that evolution.

O'bannon has this great line, says,

"I didn't steal from anybody.

I stole from everybody."

And one of the places that he happily

admitted that he stole from was a 1951 ec comic

called "seeds of Jupiter."

There's just eight pages.

It starts on an aircraft carrier,

and this orb crashes onto the aircraft carrier, breaks apart,

small orb, and it's got like, 50 seeds.

And there are three Navy guys on the ship,

and they're wondering what it is.

One of them's called peach pit, and he likes to put peach pits

in his mouth, and the other two guys

sort of trick him into putting one of these seeds

into his mouth.

And then they slap the guy on the back, it's all good fun

and he swallows.

He gets terribly sick.

He's dehydrated.

It's emergency surgery.

He's going die.

The Navy surgeon takes a scalpel,

cuts open his chest, everybody shocked,

and out pops this hideous, scaly, disgusting mini octopus.

And then it literally scamper across the deck

and plunges into the sea.

And they go, well, we're never going to see that again.

Guaranteeing that they'll be seeing that again.

Tim boxell: The origin of "death rattle" was

in a farmhouse in Minnesota.

The story itself is some sort of astronaut

coming across an object.

It's the kind of statuary that you might see in a temple

in some ancient civilization.

In the process of sending it back, he drops it,

he breaks it, and he releases something

that's about to change his life in a very horrible way.

He is attacked by this thing that gets into his body.

He is effectively raped.

His eyes are gouged out and something goes into his head.

And from that point on, he becomes

a receptacle for something that's taking him over.

Something is transforming a person

into something very, very different,

very unfortunate, shall we say.

As a healthy young kid growing up in the midwest in the 1950s

and '60s, there were things going on in the world

that didn't quite make sense.

Television was very safe and cleaned up,

so I clamored for things that I wasn't

getting from my civilization, from my culture.

Dan o'bannon drew upon his experiences

as a person from the midwest, reading comic books at the drug

store, like I did, and brought that kind of sensibility

and that outlook on the world to this major science

fiction horror epic.

The midwest may seem tranquil and civilized and so forth,

but the fact is, you never know who's next door.

You never know who's going to roll into town, you know,

it's like we're all, you know, one cough, one kiss,

one scratch away from global disaster.

Diane o'bannon: The influence of lovecraft on Dan

was considerable.

The eggs lying dormant on the planetoid

is comparable to the cicada's million

year life cycle, isn't it?

Creatures coming out of the ground after being

dormant for millions of years is superbly

lovecraftian, completely.

I think that's a pretty straight line between the two.

St joshi: Lovecraft, in his own day,

was a pioneer of science fiction.

More specifically, his brand of horror fiction, which he

called weird fiction.

He felt that the essence of horror is the unknown,

and what is most unknown, it is what

is out there in the depths of space,

and what has happened in the far distant past.

Many of the features of "alien" have a lot

to do with lovecraft's short novel,

"at the mountains of madness."

This is a novel he wrote in 1931.

And it's something that he'd wanted

to write for a long time, because he

had been fascinated with the antarctic since he was a boy.

An expedition from Massachusetts goes down there,

and come upon fossilized remains of alien entities, which

this expedition labels the old ones.

Dallas: It's been dead a long time.

Fossilized.

St joshi: In the course of this novel,

they become unfrozen and come to life.

They cannot be defined by normal human or terrestrial biology.

I have confirmed that he's got an outer layer

of protein polysaccharides.

Has funny habit of shedding his cells

and replacing them with polarized silicon.

St joshi: In fact, the explorers find this immense city

that the old ones built hundreds of millions