Ridley Scott’s Alien is a masterpiece of film that manages to successfully combine the horror and science fiction genres into a terrifying hybrid, but the space drama’s excessive violence nearly led to a much more prohibitive film rating.
1979 marked an important year for both horror and sci-fi when Ridley Scott’s ambitious Alien hit theaters. Scott’s film crafts a claustrophobic drama that both shows restraint and goes for the jugular. Alien has become a pivotal piece of cinema due to Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Ellen Ripley, as well as the rich world that Scott’s film creates, complete with horrendous, deadly alien creatures. It’s not at all surprising that Alien wasn’t just a critical and commercial success, but that it could spawn a whole franchise of films and ancillary material.
The colorful cast of the Nostromo and the extraterrestrial terror that Scott creates with the help of the H.R. Giger inspired monstrosities make it easy to fall in love with Alien’s unique universe. This is a horror film that makes a strong impression not just because of its good ideas, but because it’s genuinely scary and creates a bloody mess. Alien carries a healthy balance between suspenseful silence and visceral attacks. All of the carnage and deaths that take place within Alien are already very powerful, but there was a time when they were even more intense to the point that a harsher rating was possible.
Memory: The Origins of Alien (2019) is a making-of documentary that was released to commemorate Alien’s 40th anniversary. The documentary brings forward a number of never before seen production elements, including storyboards and pieces of deleted scenes that are centered around some of the film's more notable moments, particularly the chestburster sequence. The version of the chestburster scene that's included in the film is exceptionally gruesome, but there was an even bloodier, extended cut of the scene that can be glimpsed in the documentary. The more intense version of the scene rubbed test audiences the wrong way and garnered concerns of an X rating, before it was toned down.
Another scene that posed concerns over an X rating was the death scene of Harry Dean Stanton's character, Brett. Originally, his character was supposed to die by the Xenomorph's "inner mouth" ripping out his heart, but instead they turned to a gorier version where the alien grabs Brett's head with such intense pressure that he expels blood everywhere. The amount of blood in this scene was too intense, so the finished version instead only shows a short scene where the Xenomorph crushes Brett's head and drags him away. Glimpses of the bloodier version have now been revealed, and pieces of this longer death have been restored into the Director's Cut version of the film, albeit not entirely. Alien has a few other scenes that are deleted more for pacing rather than censorship, but the finished cut that Ridley Scott put together still achieves a ton with very little compromise.
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