Alien

In space, no one can hear you scream. Like many, I am rewatching the Alien franchise films this week in anticipation of Romulus. This is one of my favorite movies of all time, and is arguably the greatest sci-fi film ever made.  Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger created something truly transcendent, genre and mold breaking. This film is a masterclass in pacing and tone - Jaws in a spaceship some might say. Beyond this though - this film is without any doubt the singular best example of symbolic overdeterminism. Alien though terrifying in its literal premise is not a film about a crew stuck on a spaceship with an extraterrestrial. It's a film about reproductive anxieties faced by men and women. The most incredible thing about the horror genre is that it can be used to discuss the things we are too scared or uncomfortable to delve into without a veneer. But the more you watch, the more obvious this becomes - everything in the ship is phallic or representative of female organs, and there's a constant fear of penetration, and later gestation.  The creature was designed to be overtly sexual by Giger in an attempt to unnerve the audience by confronting them with imagery so familiar it's scary. The symbols in this film hide in plain sight: the nature in which the face huggers attack, the phallic shape of the xenomorph, the chest burster scene, even the Nostromo being shaped like filopian tubes, it goes on and on and you notice more the more you watch. This symbolism continues on through the franchise, and becomes a bit more sophisticated in the later films. It's brilliant, stands the test of time, and works on so many levels: a true classic, a titan of the genre, a testament to the boundaries films can push if the director is just brave enough.