From Stephen Spielberg’s E.T. to the acid-blooded horrors that crawl out of your innards in the Ridley Scott quadrilogy, aliens have drawn in audiences for over 60 years.
Corey Stevenson, a film instructor at Carleton, said he’s been watching and studying science fiction films for some time. Alien films in particular have always interested him, he said.
The general appeal of alien movies comes from a notion Stevensen calls “otherness.”
“Alien films are all about otherness, so the message they carry is all about cultural interaction,” he said. “Aliens elicit a response within audiences concerning their anxieties and interactions with this otherness.”
This otherness was not set off by any particular alien film, Stevensen said, but by the generally xenophobic attitudes of the film’s audience.
“When you look at the cultural periods where alien films were most prevalent, specifically the 1950s, the 1980s and the early 1990s, paranoia and fear is already embedded in the culture,” he said. “These alien narratives are a metaphorical way of working through those anxieties and these narratives are very rarely about aliens themselves.”
Take the alien invasion movies of the 1950s such as The Blob or The Day the Earth Stood Still. There’s a connection between this fear of invasion and the communist paranoia in the United States at the time, according to Stevenson.
In the 1990s, fear about invasion from faceless forces, such as big business and the government, lead to films like Fire in the Sky.
“That is generally why many of these abduction narratives feature some form of conspiracy theory or massive government cover-up,” he said.
More modern films like Battle: Los Angeles, play off fears of American security, according to Stevenson.
“Because of the more insulated and xenophobic attitude that has prevailed within America post-9/11, mainstream Hollywood films that feature aliens at the moment tend to gravitate more toward the ‘fearful’ end of the spectrum,” he said.
Though alien films tend to elicit a fearful response from audiences, sympathetic alien films are scattered throughout history within the various waves of alien interest, according to Stevenson.
“The pre-eminent sympathetic alien film would have to be E.T. No other individual film does quite so much to forward a sympathetic or benevolent view of otherness,” he said. “Even Superman, though it masks itself as a superhero movie, can be considered an example of the benevolent alien.”
These types of sympathetic alien films usually have explicitly religious overtones, Stevensen said.
“The specific emotional responses that are triggered by certain films depend very much on both the cultural moment and the goals and themes of the film itself,” he said.
While alien movies do tend to lead to franchises more than other films, this is a result of the the loyal fan base of all science fiction films, Stevensen said. Science fiction films have been steady in popularity for the last 20 years, and alien films have ridden on that wave, he said.
Aliens, because of their ability to take many different forms and roles, can be used for various themes in movies.
“Hollywood has always been very good at taking the cultural temperature and producing films that feed into and perpetuate those feelings,” Stevensen said. “Whether it be the red menace of the 1950s, the government paranoia of the 1990s, or the insidious terrorist threats of the current moment, aliens tend to shift into those molds accordingly.”
The steady popularity of the science fiction genre also means alien-themed movies won’t disappear any time soon, according to Stevenson. On the same token, it means they’re unlikely to become the dominant genre.
“Although alien films aren’t going anywhere, they’re also not exactly popping out of the woodwork,” Stevenson said.
So instead, they carve themselves a niche where they can stay for a long time. Alien films find their niche not only because they pose a plausible what-if scenario, but because they ask humans to look at themselves and their own xenophobic fears, Stevenson said. Though the lesson imparted by the movies can be widely different, many of them carry a common theme.
“The moral message built into these films is often that our interactions with others have more to tell us about ourselves than about the others we encounter.”
