Return to the Nostromo

Of all the monsters to go bump in the endless night of the movies, few have been as wonderfully frightening as the creature from “Alien.” Designed by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger and first unleashed by director Ridley Scott in 1979, the extraterrestrial with the long, hard skull and lethal oral protuberance injected a distinctly adult vibe and shivery sense of horror into the genre. Two years after George Lucas’ “Star Wars” made blockbuster history with gee-whiz heroics, Scott thrust science fiction back into the foreboding dark.

Originally titled “Star Beast,” the screenplay for “Alien” was written by Dan O’Bannon and retooled by an uncredited Walter Hill and David Giler, both of whom received producer credits on the final film. According to Scott biographer Paul M. Sammon, the director had been busying himself with a version of “Tristan and Isolde” when he read the revised script, and was instantly hooked. (This would be the only film in the series he directed.) The basic plot -- a human space crew under extraterrestrial siege -- had fueled earlier studio efforts, including, as horror specialist Jeff Miller helpfully pointed out to me, “It! The Terror From Beyond Space,” a creaky 1958 galactic adventure with a guy in a rubbery lizard suit.

A successful advertising director with only one feature film to his name, the period drama “The Duellists,” Scott approached “Alien” as a genre novice and outsider. Inspired by the French comic book “Heavy Metal,” he hired Giger (who did the monster and its gooey nest as well as the giant alien skeleton and ship) and comic-book genius Moebius (who designed the spacesuits and wardrobe) while giving the human environment over to cartoonist turned “concept artist” Ron Cobb. Before he began shooting, the director also watched William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” and Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” Like Friedkin and Hooper, Scott would settle on an approach to horror that hinged more on unnerving quiet and our fear of the unknown than oceans of blood and errant body parts.

Twenty-four years later -- digitally spruced up, with some scenes shaved and others padded with previously cut material -- Scott’s film still shreds nerves. Set on a commercial tug named the Nostromo, after the Joseph Conrad novel, the story opens just as a seven-person crew awakens from its programmed deep sleep. Months away from Earth, the crew has been directed by its employer -- represented as a disembodied presence called “Mother” -- to investigate a signal bouncing around space. The crew tracks the beacon to a small planet and sends out an exploratory detail that includes the captain, Dallas (Tom Skerritt), and two subordinates, Kane (John Hurt) and jittery Lambert (Veronica Cartwright). What they discover on the planet -- and unleash on themselves -- is a nightmarishly primordial vision that’s yet to be surpassed by the movies.

At once graphically elegant and viscerally effective, the future conjured up by Scott was dystopian to the core. The blue-collar crew members don’t just have to wage war against an unknown monster; they have to fight a far more familiar enemy -- namely, the faceless, heartless owner-boss who is perfectly willing to sacrifice them on the altar of profit. The sense that HAL 9000 (the computer from “2001”) was now unabashedly working for the Man imbued “Alien” with an unease that seemed of a piece with a downbeat decade defined by recession and paranoia, and still suffering from a throbbing Watergate hangover. The film’s famous tagline -- “In space, no one can hear you scream” -- somehow seemed a perfect coda for the wider culture, but also fit, as it turned out, with Scott’s lonely worldview.

Serious as a heart attack, Scott has made a career out of paranoia, existential dread and doleful endings. That makes him somewhat of an anomaly in Hollywood, as has his unabashed fondness for powerful, independent-minded female characters. Initially written to be played by a man, the film’s other famous creation, of course, is Ripley, the role that turned a little-known theater performer named Sigourney Weaver into a zeitgeist figure as big and fearsome as Giger’s monster. Like her shrieking, shape-shifting foe, Ripley has evolved over the years, mutating from a scrappy survivor to a wrathful mother (in the second film, “Aliens”) to a shaved militant battling contagion (in the third) to the sacrificial lamb of a franchise gone terribly awry (in the fourth).

The last time Ripley appeared, in the dreadfully boring “Alien: Resurrection,” she had taken a dive into the creative void. By that point, she was carrying both alien DNA and co-star Winona Ryder, and had lost much of what made her so recognizably and winningly human. The series had lost its way, stalled out with a puny, generic story and a needlessly grandiose production design that came closer to the workings of an expensive clock than a persuasive view of the future.

Mostly, though, what had gone missing in the years since the first film was the essential terror that hums through much of Scott’s work. Not the fright induced by monsters with slithering tentacles and rapacious spikes, but the chilled-to-the-bone fear that no one can hear you scream, no matter where you are.

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‘Alien’

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MPAA rating: R for sci-fi violence/gore and language.

Times guidelines: Adult language, extreme scares, some gore.

Twentieth Century Fox, a Brandywine-Ronald Shusett Production, released by Twentieth Century Fox. Running time: 115 minutes. In general release.