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A legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, Alien (1979) is one of the most enduring modern myths of cinema - its famously visceral scenes acting like a traumatic wound we seem compelled to revisit. Tracing the constellation of talents that came together to produce the film, Roger Luckhurst examines its origins as a monster movie script called Star Beast, dismissed by many in Hollywood as B-movie trash, through to its afterlife in numerous sequels, prequels and elaborations. Exploring the ways in which Alien compels us to think about otherness, Luckhurst demonstrates how and why this interstellar slasher movie, this old dark house in space, came to coil itself around our darkest imaginings about the fragility of humanity. This special edition features original cover artwork by Marta Lech.

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2014

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About the author

Roger Luckhurst

61 books42 followers
Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction.

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5 stars
45 (27%)
4 stars
87 (52%)
3 stars
26 (15%)
2 stars
7 (4%)
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
Profile Image for Owen Hatherley.
Author 43 books546 followers
October 7, 2024
Very good deployment of the 'general intellect'/connection to the zeitgeist explanation for how such a hack as Ridley made (two) absolute world-historical masterpieces, and with some hilarious swipes at Prometheus inter alia.
Profile Image for Murray Ewing.
Author 14 books23 followers
April 23, 2017
I like these little BFI books, but sometimes you’re rolling the dice a bit. Some authors present a wide-ranging critical companion piece to the film in question, others pick a single interpretation and hammer away at it, and if their particular take doesn’t click, you can end up wondering if they’re talking about the film you expected to be reading about. I’m glad to say Roger Luckhurst’s look at one of my favourite films takes the former approach.

Concentrating on the original 1979 film, with only a brief look at the sequels (in a section wonderfully titled ‘Did IQs drop sharply while I was away?’), Luckhurst doesn’t go into a blow-by-blow account of the making of the film — a subject adequately covered in other books, as well as DVD and Blu-Ray extras — but provides a brisk critical commentary on various aspects of the film, including the evolving state of cinema at the time, and science fiction and feminist criticism, among other things. He even ends with a brief look at how the whole film might best be viewed as starring Jonesy the cat. Finally, there’s a more personal afterword on the film franchise’s place in his own life, which underlines his credentials as a fan as well as a critic.

Overall, one of the better BFI Film Classics books I’ve read.
Profile Image for Sophy H.
1,901 reviews110 followers
August 19, 2025
I've probably watched more documentaries and "making of" programs than I can remember regarding Alien. It's a film I love to know about (even though I can still be squeamish watching it after multiple viewings!)

This book by Roger Luckhurst is a great mini dive into all things Alien. I like how he goes through each character, explaining their role, input, influence and reception. There are all sorts of theories bandied about as well, including feminism, speciesism, humanism, Darwinian theory, Freud hints and all sorts of other nuggets of information.

It's a fun and engaging read if you're an Alien fan.
Profile Image for Patrick McCoy.
1,083 reviews93 followers
September 3, 2017
Roger Luckhurst's BFI: Alien (2014) is yet another outstanding entry in the series. After the introduction, Luckhurst discusses the development and context of the film Alien in the section titled "What's the story Mother?" It seems the script went through several rewrites and was connected to several directors before it landed in Ridley Scott's lap. It seems some credit should be given to art designer Hans Rudy Giger who came up with most of the alien designs and many of the interiors and other design features in the film. in the section "Nostomo" Luckhurst discusses the film in context of others and points out the Gothic elements present in the film as well as the Conradian references such as the ship's name, but points out that Scott found Conrad "hard going" and was not particularly a fan. Then he discusses the plot of the film by analyzing each spaceship member's death chronologically. However, in the middle there is a sort of diversion in "An Alien Primer", where Luckhurst analyzes the role of the alien as well as offering some theoretical applications of the meaning of the alien in the film. Whimsically he ends the book with a section about the spaceship's cat in"Jonesey" as well as a final world on the subsequent less interesting sequels and spinoffs in '"Did my IQs drop sharply while I was away?" the sequels, prequels, the franchise.' It was an informative and provoking look at one of my favorite science fiction films of all-time.
Profile Image for Jonathan Maas.
Author 31 books368 followers
April 13, 2022
Great companion piece to the series from Roger Luckhurst, I recommend it
Profile Image for Jay Rothermel.
1,287 reviews23 followers
February 2, 2025
Roger Luckhurst traces the typically absurd collaborative accidents and coincidences that went into making 1979's "Alien" an influential horror classic.


Some excerpts:


[….] There is something spooky about the emptiness of these corridors, an object-world that moves on its own - the riffling papers, the dipping bird toy, the primitive computer screens that beep to themselves, reflected in vacant space helmets. It is a world that has only the barest traces of the human. This introduces us to the emblematic architecture of Alien (and indeed the whole series of films): the corridor, the duct and the tunnel. There are corridors in Star Trek but they are nice and shiny; someone keeps the Death Star's corridors shipshape in Star Wars, presumably wanting to avoid any criticism from Darth Vader, who spends most of his time striding up and down them. And instead of the pristine spaces of 2001 or the research facility in The Andromeda Strain (1971), Alien offers clogged pipes, improvised ducting and rusty metal grilles. The set was built from tons of junked electrical equipment and dismantled aircraft that the set designers collected from dumps and bolted together. It is a classic Scott set: busy, layered, lit low, bursting with information. The closer to the aliens we get, the more baroque and organic these interiors become, the walls of the derelict craft cast directly from rib bones. For the Nostromo, Scott had observed that the ceilings were never visible on spaceship sets, so built them deliberately low, creating claustrophobic enclosures where the tallest actor, Yaphet Kotto, continually had to hunch over as if trapped by his technological environment. The sets were completely immersive, the whole crew having to clamber inside them every day.


[….] When Ripley records her last log entry before sinking back into hypersleep, she calls herself 'last survivor of the Nostromo'. This is a blatant, jarring lie. Jonesey sits contentedly in her lap, and Ripley has risked life and limb to rescue the pesky cat from the clutches of the alien. Disappointingly, at the last gasp, the script reasserts the priority of humanism and discards any consideration of the cat. Hasn't my countdown of the deaths made a similar error from the start: that there are eight crew and two survivors? Big mistake. Didn't the film-makers know that science-fiction fans love cats and that the genre has always known that they were secretly super-intelligent beings merely playing with us?


At some point in my years rewatching this film, I began to realise that the humans might be incidental to Alien, that this is a film about the survival of that clever cat, Jones. There he is, sleeping safely in the pod at the end of the film having impassively watched Kane die, lured Brett to his death (and regarded it with utter indifference) and emotionally manipulated Ripley into carrying him into the escape shuttle. He is responsible for wrecking any systematic search for the alien. He pushes the rational Ripley to make idiotic decisions as Mother counts the Nostromo down to auto-destruct. Yet Jones will survive into the opening of Aliens (Ripley is delighted to be reunited with her only friend again). The cat will be wise enough not to travel back to that rock of a planet, though: it's only the humans that are stupid enough to undergo this kind of repetition compulsion. It's no surprise to find that the film critic and writer Anne Billson has rewritten Alien from the cat's perspective, as My Day by Jones, where the stupid humans are defined by their one useful function, as 'canopeners'.


[….] It is funny how critics of the film see and do not see Jones in Alien. Where he features at all, it is either as another beast aligned with the alien that roams the corridors, or else, in contrast, the cat functions as a marker of Ripley's latent maternal instinct. 'The film leaves us with a woman and cat: domesticity restored', Tony Safford says.69 It is an uneasy domesticity, because viewers already trained by one false ending perhaps suspect that Jones might be another vehicle for alien invasion (we have seen the alien investigating the cat-box in the last seconds of the Nostromo's countdown). Of course that doesn't happen, and in Alien3 it is one of those dumb dogs that is the carrier of an alien, not a cat.


Jonesey is in fact integral to the spectrum of beings explored along the self and other axis in the film. Against the implacable opposition of the alien, a relation conceived only in violence and a murderous struggle to survive, the cat is what Donna Haraway calls a 'companion species' for humans, a mark of 'the yearning for more liveable and lively relationships across kinds, human and non-human'.70 This is not a cosy relationship, but a spiky, intermittent one of autonomous agents in symbiogenesis. Traditionally, whilst dogs are seen as faithful servants, cats are regarded as more autonomous. 'Indeed, rather than constructing the domestic sphere, a cat might well be understood to challenge it,' Erica Fudge has written. 'Our limited knowledge of the universe … is challenged by the cat's refusal to be absorbed into our world view.'71 We are back with the philosopher Derrida's cat staring up at his naked owner with glinting, utterly unreadable eyes. Whilst the main narrative arc plays out a story of the 'survival of the fittest', even unto death, the cat exists to make us think about co-evolution in symbiotic ecologies with others, what Haraway calls the relational ontology of humans existing amongst other animals rather than existing in structures of domination, subordination or extermination. In a rather clever way, Jonesey helps underline the central theme of Alien as a philosophical investigation of the range of possibilities of humans living with its alien others.


Ripley and Jones, bathed in light, sleep the blissful sleep of the innocent, and the screen fades to black. Ripley has a long Via Dolorosa ahead. Jonesey, I presume, will outlive us all….
Profile Image for Stephen.
364 reviews
July 28, 2019
I’ve read two of this series so far (the other “Brazil”) and both have been highly rewarding. This take on “Alien” was excellent. Very well written. Just academic enough (but not too). Insightful. Dotted with production anecdotes. A learned celebration of the Gothic horror and science fiction combine that is “Alien”. I’ll never forget seeing it at the tender age of 15 in the theater and being utterly blown away. Hell, I even remember the trailer and saying aloud to my friend, “what the fuck was THAT?!” How often does that happen?? There’s just something about this film......
Profile Image for Jonathan Walker.
Author 5 books14 followers
July 5, 2017
Excellent discussion from the reliable Luckhurst, whose similar volume on The Shining is also recommended. I'll seek out more of his writing.
447 reviews4 followers
July 9, 2023
I’ve read in the region of a dozen BFI Film Classics. The quality varies. The analysis and approach to Alien in this volume is the most impressive so far. Luckhurst knows his subject matter intimately and obviously adores Alien. He brought a lot of ideas to the table I’d never considered and I’ve watched the movie a couple of dozen times and I think I’m soooooooo smart. Not as smart as Roger.
Profile Image for Jed Mayer.
523 reviews17 followers
April 9, 2017
It takes a very perceptive film scholar to make you see something new in a film you've seen countless times and thought about endlessly, and Roger Luckhurst made me see at least fifty new things about Alien: a compact masterpiece of weird film criticism.
Profile Image for Andrew.
761 reviews17 followers
December 17, 2023
This short and informative monograph on the legendary sci-fi film classic 'Alien' has plenty to recommend it, and some drawbacks that have a negative impact on Luckhurst's work. A combination of historical and textual study, with some cultural analysis thrown in and garnished by a few personal anecdotes, this is a solid read that will find a ready audience among both fans of the Alien franchise and of science fiction films.

Luckhurst makes a very good job at documenting the background to the 1979 film, reviewing both the influences of previous sci-fi texts on the scriptwriter Dan O'Bannon that led to the story that served as the basis for the movie, and the pre-'Alien' careers of O'Bannon, Ridley Scott, H.R. Geiger and other key crew and cast members. Whilst one suspects at times that the author has composed something more along the lines of an extended essay than a book, there is still plenty of factual 'meat' in this 'sandwich'. One cannot read the first third of Alien without developing an appreciation of how much artifice and intelligence went into a movie that could've been regarded as no more than a gory slasher flick set in space.

It is in this analytical context that the author develops his arguments about the film as a text, wherein he attempts (at times less successfully than in other sections of the book) to underline the movie's intellectual complexity. There are some interesting points made by Luckhurst as to the relationship between the movie and its narrative with the work of Joseph Conrad, and also how 'Alien' reflects gothic sensibilities. The discussion of how 'Alien' has been constructed in terms of gender is worthy of consideration, though to be honest I thought the queer theory angle was a dead end. Of course Luckhurst has to bring Freud and Derrida into the philosophical mix, and whilst I get the reason for this, I frankly thought this was a bit of a wank from the author.

Most of the remaining third of the book is focused on recounting the plot of 'Alien' and what happens in the film, with reflections on what it all might mean. There's no problems with this and Luckhurst is on mostly firm ground here. I wasn't that enamoured with his comments on the role of Jonesy the cat; yeah, it's an entertaining perspective on understanding the film, but I'm not sure it really adds any real meaningful understanding to the movie. On the other hand the discussion of Sigourney Weaver's role in the film and Ripley's characterisation is spot on.

The coda of this monograph is a short discussion of the sequels that were spawned by the first Alien movie, and it is worth reading. Perhaps the BFI or some other publisher could look at producing a similar volume on 'Aliens', as it might be said that what James Cameron brought to the franchise is just as fascinating at Ridley Scott's original film. Oh, and the less said about the latter movies perhaps the better.

All up, if you love science fiction films in general, and 'Alien' specifically, Luckhurst's book will be a much appreciated text. If you aren't really that fascinated by the murderous xenomorph and its victims in the fictional universe of the film franchise you might pass on this monograph.
Profile Image for Jack Mansfield.
35 reviews
August 30, 2024
Some excellent points made in this one but, akin to my feelings for the Big Lebowski BFI Film Classics book, there’s a decent amount in here where you feel the author is either overanalysing certain aspects of the movie, or exploring the wider context to a degree that makes you wish for a more focused treatise. I realise those two opinions contradict each other, but there is a truly great middle ground in this book (especially the commentary on Sigourney Weaver and Ripley, and how deeply Weaver was involved in her character) and I wish we’d had a bit more of that.
Profile Image for Gary Ellenberg.
161 reviews2 followers
September 27, 2023
Good but not great. The film was great. The a analysis got to overly intellectual for my tastes. This is a problem with these brilliant English film academics. They over intellectualize certain aspects of the film, and before you know it, you are lost in the weeds. The best part of these books is always the history of the production and the challenges in making said film. This was delivered nicely in that area.
Profile Image for Lady Jayme,.
322 reviews38 followers
March 15, 2025
3.5 stars rounded up. I must admit some of the film criticism went over my head, but I very much enjoyed most of it. And the author is 100% correct about Prometheus and how terrible it is.

I can’t wait to rewatch Alien with a new appreciation for its influences!
Profile Image for Ian.
21 reviews3 followers
May 28, 2025
Some interesting ideas and facts about Alien are presented. I’m not a fan of the book’s structure. Also I don’t get the hate the author has for Prometheus or his claim that it contains pseudo-Christian mysticism.
Profile Image for Mads.
6 reviews
February 11, 2025
Lovely little book. Luckhurst has a great insight, and this is chock full of references to interesting old films that inspired Alien, which have all been going on my watchlist.
Profile Image for Maxim Chernykh.
85 reviews5 followers
December 25, 2023
3.5 stars rounded down

Из-за своего небольшого объема 100-страничные книжки серии BFI Film Classics по умолчанию не предполагают глубокого погружения в материал. Но в случае с «Чужим» несоразмерность текста фильму ощущается сильнее, чем хотелось бы. Вместе с тем, в вопросе знакомства с космическим хоррором Ридли Скотта сочинение Роджера Лакхёрста вполне сойдет за отправную точку (немаловажно, что частота упоминаний Деррида, Кристевой и даже Фрейда не нарушает рамки приличий).

Alien's occupation of our cultural imagination is located in the chest-bursting scene. It is one of those moments of horror that pass into the collective memory: watched, rewatched or never watched, but nevertheless supremely well known. 'For better or worse, Alien brought believable, graphic gore into the mainstream.'

reason to read: "Alien", BFI Film Classics
Profile Image for Ryan Splenda.
263 reviews6 followers
July 26, 2015
Alien is arguably the greatest example of a perfect horror AND science fiction film. The two genres have gone hand-in-hand for years, but this was the first film to effectively blend the two in a way that didn't just produce giant humans or bugs of some sort. Although Luckhurst discusses the ideas of Darwin and reproduction with regards to this film's themes, it's interesting to hear about ideas connected to Francis Bacon and the parasitoid wasp (a major influence on the ideas surrounding the aliens' existence in this film). Additionally, the thematic explanations associated with each character in the movie is explained as they die off one-by-one in the movie (Agatha Christie also may have something to say about this). Overall, it is a very pleasant essay on this classic film that is a part of the canon in both the horror and sci fi genres.
547 reviews68 followers
February 28, 2016
Jolly good summary of the film and the known and acknowledged sources. The trouble with Film Studies is that it's full of intellectually insecure writers who feel the need to take on Big Ideas and show they can chatter about them, leading to empty waffling about neoliberalism and Lacan; luckily the short format means it gets cut back here.
Profile Image for Ed.
333 reviews43 followers
March 15, 2015
The first really poor book in this brilliant BFI Classics series. A disappointment, rather badly written, with limited interest in its insights and some pretty superficial politico/critical theory/psychoanalytical takes on the film.
Profile Image for Andrew Bishop.
105 reviews13 followers
December 27, 2015
An excellent analysis of Alien as a gothic horror film. Plus in the footnotes you learn of a fan novel written from the viewpoint of the ship's cat. All in all, a great discussion of the sublime terror of Alien.
Profile Image for Ghislain.
Author 10 books10 followers
September 25, 2015
L'auteur invite son lecteur à revoir Alien au travers d'un kaléidoscope analytique : script, décors, cycle évolutif du monstre, équilibre précaire de l'équipage du Nostromo. Très bon ouvrage qui aurait pu être plus développé encore.
Profile Image for Brittany Barnim.
13 reviews
August 22, 2024
Any book that theorizes Jonesy was the main character of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) is a banger in my eyes!
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