Horror films work through sounds. Alfred Hitchcock already knew this – and all suspense directors after him know it too. Try it: turn the sound off in a horror film and the whole thing no longer works.
Acoustic horror
The sound of rain, the special resonance of a metal bridge, the hissing and squeaking of a monster, heavy footsteps. A resounding scurrying. In “Alien: Romulus”, director Federico Álvarez plays with the primal fears of being discovered and pursued – for example in a scene in which young Kay tries to escape the monster. The images are cinematic – eyes wide open, pupils turning to the left, the mouth opened in a silent scream of terror, the trembling of the facial muscles. The horror is only created by the sound.
Young desperados in space
A group of young space colonists set out from a planetary mining camp to plunder parts of an abandoned space station. When they land with their stolen spaceship, they come across “The Uncanny Creature from Another World” – a terrifying alien. It first appeared on the screen in 1979 with shimmering metallic teeth. Actors who were still little known at the time, such as Sigourney Weaver, Ian Holm and Harry Dean Stanton, were in the film.
“Alien” went down in film history primarily because Ridley Scott managed to introduce a strong female character into the previously male-dominated action genre. The producers were against it, but Scott insisted that the character Ripley be played by Sigourney Weaver. Since then, “Alien” has been a heroine’s material: Weaver has played the lead role four times, then Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron followed – and now it’s the turn of 26-year-old Cailee Spaeny, a newcomer who won an award last year for her portrayal of Priscilla Presley at the Venice International Film Festival.
The monster is the monster is the monster
What remains in each episode is the alien originally designed by Swiss artist HR Giger, a prickly, skeletal creature whose spider-like mating tool attaches itself to the victim’s face and plants an egg in its body.
In “Alien: Romulus”, Federico Alvarez follows on from Ridley Scott’s ideas from the first part: instead of sterile, staid space worlds, there is a retro-futuristic, rickety spaceship that itself appears like an organism and glides through space with surprising ease. There are no shining heroes, but rather frustrated or overwhelmed space travelers. The real sensation in 1979 was that Ridley Scott explored deep-seated fears, what goes on in our bodies, psychologically and organically. Despite all the action, he looked above all into the human being’s inner being. The seventh part, “Alien: Romulus”, works more superficially: the dramaturgical motto is above all: run away. Run!
And the end?
None of the six subsequent films has achieved the complexity of the original “Alien”. Federico Álvarez’s seventh part is the weakest in the series so far. The sound effects and production design are good (including the vulva-like birth sacs), and lead actress Cailee Spaeny is also convincing – the ghost train-like finale with lots of alien slime is then just banal splatter and hardly an existential heroine’s journey. To be continued. Certainly!
