films, page 1 of 31

It’s been a while since the last Alien film (Alien: Covenant was 2017), surely long enough for something gestating in this hypersleeping franchise to burst forth and cause merry havoc. And now here it is, Alien: Romulus, which I went to see on a Saturday afternoon at my local cinema. (Two days after its UK premier. I assumed it was best to book in advance, but there were only two other people there. I don’t think this is any measure of the film’s success globally, just a combination of a small town and good weather. Really, I’m glad we have a cinema at all.)

The film opens on a mining colony on the sort of planet where you never see the sun rise, and are equally unlikely to die of old age. The female lead Rain and what I at first thought was her autistic brother Andy, but who turns out to be a slightly malfunctioning android (and I’ve only just got the joke, Andy: Android — but he of course prefers the term “artificial human”, so should have been called Art), are working for the faceless (and hug-less) Weyland-Yutani corporation. Rain, whose parents are both dead (the mother, at least, due to working down the mines), has just clocked up enough hours to be released from her contract and sent off to a proper colony world, only to be told, sorry, due to manpower shortages — mostly, it seems, due to illnesses and fatalities — the company has just extended the minimum contract term and she has to stay for another five or six years. It’s then that her ex-boyfriend Tyler turns up with a proposal. A large chunk of space-debris due to crash into the colony planet’s (spectacularly rendered) Saturn-like ring is an old Weyland-Yutani station, and bound to contain some cryonic stasis chambers. If a small group of them get into it, they can remove the chambers and use them to make their own trip to the colony world of Yvaga, where Rain will be able to see the sun rise at last. Of course, we know from the prologue that this chunk of space-debris is a research station that picked up a certain biomechanical-looking thing from the fragments of the Nostromo… (Which, to pick at a minor point, should in no way have been clumped so closely together. Alien ended with not one but three massive self-destruct explosions.)

I’ve developed my own sketchy thematic outline for the Alien series. The first film is about pregnancy; the second is about motherhood; the third, after struggling through a few rewatches, is, I have to say, about rape (which, despite it being a well-made film, is perhaps why I find it somewhat repugnant); the fourth I haven’t pinned down yet, but might be about hybridisation; Prometheus is about abortion; Alien: Covenant, again, I haven’t pinned down. Alien: Romulus is full of children (twenty-somethings, yes, but still feeling very much like children) who have lost their parents (and most specifically their mothers, as at least two characters mention how they’ve lost theirs — in both cases due to the Company). It might be subtitled, then, “Raised by Wolves”, only the wolf that does the raising isn’t the benevolent she-wolf who nurtured Romulus and Remus, it’s the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and far from feeding these motherless children from its body’s milk, it sucks the life out of them.

The ultimate aim of the research station is to create a new “perfect” strain of humans, through extracting a certain icky black substance from that biomechanical egg it recovered from the Nostromo wreckage. (And this is this film’s only major connection with the — aptly aborted — Prometheus-direction the franchise had been going in, and I have to say it’s done with the sort of light touch I prefer.) So, you could say, by the end of the film we get to see what a real “Raised by the Weyland-Yutani Wolf” child would look like. And I’m sure it would never call in sick, but I also wouldn’t call it human.

My basic feeling about Alien: Romulus is similar to how I felt about the recent (2022) Hellraiser film. Both are returns to a franchise that had been going awry, if not downhill. Both bring a more 21st-century sensibility — to me, they very much feel like they’re made by the current generation — and both are aware that they’re bearing the responsibility to pay proper respect to their originating films and provide something sufficiently box-office-worthy to enable their franchises to survive. As a result, they’re basically well-made films which provide some nice minor surprises, lots of nods to their originating films (maybe too many, sometimes), and a satisfying watch, but never stray into the truly challenging, truly shocking, truly visceral or mind-blowing, as those originating films did. That might be unfair to ask — great films are rare — but every sequel will be judged against its original. And anyway it’s probably better, in both cases, to have a solid success so the franchise can continue, than the sort of big-idea-loaded messes that Ridley Scott’s last two contributions were (despite being well-directed, shot, plotted, and acted). But, at the same time, you come away missing that essential something from the franchise, and that essential something is, it has to be said, the sort of transgressive, shocking, visceral weirdness that made the originating films so original. The original Alien seemed to exist in a constant state of shock at how weird its alien was; by Alien: Romulus, even the gloopier moments are handled in an almost offhand way, without that element of reverence or awe — that sense of the dark sublime.

(There seemed to be, in Alien: Romulus, a lot of business with doors, multi-layered difficult doors, with obstructive locking systems. I can’t help wonder if that doesn’t reflect, in some way, the creative atmosphere around a film like this, with the weight of so many requirements — commercial and artistic — putting a constant series of checks, blocks, and dead-ends in the way of really free creativity.)

The stand-out in this film, as all the reviews I’ve read so far agree, is David Jonsson as Andy the android, particularly when he gets an upgrade and suddenly becomes a corporation man. The other notable android — sorry, artificial human — is what for a brief second seems like a nice tribute to Ian Holm, as we see another of the same model of android that was Ash in the first film. But then he talks. And the special effects technology is not up to giving us a mock-up of Ian Holm moving his mouth in anywhere near a convincing way. (Film-makers: lay off relying on this until it’s convincing! It’s just creepy, and not in a good way.)

What I’d really like to see, I think, is an Alien mini-series, long enough for a nice, slow build-up and deeper characterisation. Aliens worked so well by tying the SF-horror of the original with another genre — military SF, or the Vietnam War movie — and I’d love to see the series tied to something like a political thriller, full of the sort of commercial shenanigans we only get to glimpse in the films. (Which makes me realise that, in the Alien films, the political and the commercial are one and the same. I’m sure my motherhood/reproduction-based reading of the films can be completely replaced by one saying that the whole series is basically about capitalism. Certainly this film.)

Anyway, basically a good film, and if I expect too much of it, that’s only because the first two instalments in the franchise are so good. I can only hope there will be more — while also hoping there won’t be so much more it becomes like Disney’s over-ploughing of the Star Wars franchise. But then again, Disney owns 20th Century Studios, which makes this, basically, a Disney film, so I can’t be sure that won’t happen…

Re-reading Barker’s fiction, The Hellbound Heart presents itself as something of a quandary. Overshadowed as it is by its adaptation as Hellraiser (1987), the question is, is this novella a standalone piece of fiction, or just a stage in the production of the film? In his biography of Barker, The Dark Fantastic, Douglas E Winter writes: “Clive insists that The Hellbound Heart was not conceived as a template for a film… but as he wrote the short novel, he realized that it was ideal for low-budget film-making.” But an October 1987 interview by David J Howe for Starburst, quotes Barker as saying that he wrote the novella “with the specific intention of filming it. This was the first and only time that I have done that, but it was useful in that I worked through a lot of the visual problems in the novella and the final screenplay didn’t take that long to draft.” The only reason this matters to me, in this re-read, is I thought the first two-thirds of the novella didn’t quite click, and I wondered if this was because the focus was on a film as the finished product — and so, the visuals and outward drama, rather than the inner lives of the characters. But equally, it could just be that sometimes fiction does take a while to click, even in its finished form.

The Hellbound Heart was first published in 1986 in Night Visions 3, an anthology edited by George R R Martin, which gave a third of its space to each of Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Tuttle, and Clive Barker. Barker’s only contribution was the novella.

The story of both novella and film are virtually identical. Julia is in a passionless marriage to Rory (Larry in the film), which was ruined before it even got started thanks to a one-night stand with his far more adventurous but driven-to-extremes brother Frank. When the couple move into Rory’s now-empty parents’ house, it turns out the long-missing Frank is there with them, only in an all-but-disembodied state. He used the house to experiment with an occult ritual involving Lemarchand’s Box (the Lament Configuration in the film), to summon the demonic Cenobites. Thinking this would open up whole new realms of hedonistic indulgence, Frank quickly finds their version of “extreme” is way more extreme than his, and now he just wants to escape back to reality again. Blood from a cut to Rory’s hand starts the process of reforming his sundered body. But to complete the process — and fully escape the Cenobites — he needs more blood and bodies. The besotted Julia agrees to provide them. Unaware of any of this, Rory asks his somewhat pallid friend Kirsty, who’s silently in love with him (but is his daughter in the film, which works better dramatically but less well thematically), to talk with Julia. Kirsty finds herself facing the Cenobites, and does a deal that will either return Frank to their S&M hell, or let them take her in his place…

As I said, for me, the story only really kicks into gear, as a piece of written fiction, in the last third or so, when Kirsty becomes the protagonist. Julia, the main mover of the first part of the story, doesn’t have the presence she does in the film, with the result that when the narrative wanders off to follow Frank or Rory, it feels less like a diversion and more like the story’s still in search of its narrative centre. But when Kirsty takes over, even though she’s presented as a much less passionate woman — she’s “the girl with the pale handshake” who “had long ago decided that life was unfair” — her perspective is the one that makes the full horror, weirdness and threat really click into place.

The Hellbound Heart does that thing horror does so well, of both indulging in something and issuing a stern warning against it. Here, that thing is one of Barker’s key themes, the “further reaches of human experience”, and the quest into other realms for its fulfilment. It’s clear, here, that Julia is suffering, as a human being, by living such an unfulfilled life with Rory, having been awakened to something stronger, darker, and more passionate by Frank (even though that relationship probably contains just as little love). But there are no gradations here between dour lovelessness and the Cenobites’ realm of unbounded “pleasure”. Because the Cenobites have taken things so far that they, too, have stagnated, caught at the point where what they provide has long since ceased to be pleasure in any sense of the term. Right from the start, they’re presented as an image of over-repletion, tired, empty and chilly:

“A fitful phosphorescence came with them, like the glow of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold; charmless.”

“…he saw nothing of joy, or humanity, in their maimed faces: only desperation, and an appetite that made his bowels ache to be voided.”

They’re accompanied by a scent of vanilla — a byword for blandness — “the sweetness of which did little to disguise the stench beneath”. The quest for the far reaches of human experience has taken them to a dead end, a one-note world (like the bell that tolls when they appear). Frank, who just wants his sexual fantasies made real, ends up in the position of a jazz enthusiast turning up to hear some legendary saxophonist, only to find their art has advanced to the stage where they honk the same, single note, as loud and long and ugly as they can, on a bent instrument with a split reed.

According to Winter:

“The evil of appetite is a repeated theme in Barker’s work, and in The Hellbound Heart he offers a searing condemnation of lust in the guise of love — and the pursuit of pleasure in fulfilment of a spiritual void. Frank’s sin is not his self-indulgence, but his hollow — and thus hellbound — heart…”

But elsewhere, though very briefly — in the one moment where the character of Julia starts to come to life in the novella — we get a glimpse of how the promise of pleasure, in a world devoid of it, can attain an almost spiritual dimension, capable of transforming everyday reality. Watching the news on TV while she thinks of the promise of the slowly-regenerating Frank, Julia is already in another realm of being:

“What did the world have to tell her? Little enough. Whereas she, she had news for the world that it would reel to hear. About the condition of the damned; about love lost, and then found; about what despair and desire have in common.”

But, like all of Barker’s fiction that deals with transcendence, transformation, and elevated realms of being, this is still just about the body. The Cenobites — “angels to some, demons to others” — are utterly physical, “their anatomies catalogues of disfigurement”. Their realm, their power, lies entirely in what they do to your body, your nerves. Frank’s return from death means not some magical rebirth, but the disgusting business of remaking a new body out of other, freshly-slaughtered bodies. In bed with Rory, trying to distance herself from her own despair, Julia thinks of herself as nothing but a body with its physical processes, reducing herself to the least she can be as a human being. Next to the Lead Cenobite (better known as Pinhead), the book and film’s crowning image is of the body revealed beneath the skin: Frank as nothing but a pulsing, naked nervous system, “this too vulnerable body”, as Julia thinks of it.

It seems odd, then, that the centre of this tale would turn out to be the supposedly passionless, pallid Kirsty (though even in her, the ever-lubricous Frank sees possibilities), but probably she only seems passionless in comparison to Julia and Frank. Kirsty loves Rory and will do anything for him (he just doesn’t ask much); hers, then, is a very human form of passion. And she can see the horror in Frank and the Cenobites that Julia can’t, because Julia is blinded by her own desperation. (Perhaps the real villain of the novella is Rory, for being so inadequate to the women in his life.)

Perhaps, though, the reason the first part of the book doesn’t have the impact I wanted it to have is simply because I already know the story from having seen the film so many times. (If so, it’s something the film doesn’t suffer from, as that’s still a thrill to watch.) It’s hard — certainly for me, having never got used to watching pre-Hellraiser films till after I’d seen Hellraiser — to really appreciate what a game-changer the world presented by this novella-and-film-combo really was, for the horror of its day. It sits alongside Alien and The Thing as a milestone in the genre.

The puzzle box, for instance, did away with years of the same old cinematic occult rituals (pentagrams and women sacrificed on altars). And it wasn’t just a visual coup; the box captured as never before the difficulty and self-absorbed, driving obsession of such a magical operation (while also no doubt chiming with an audience who’d grown up trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube, and were now glad they hadn’t).

And then the Cenobites themselves: a whole new class of demon, with the suaveness of the vampire, the grossness of the zombie, and that added Barkerian element, a philosophy, and the eloquence to defend it.

Hellraiser is a more finished form of The Hellbound Heart, and one that works all the better for having actors bring it to life. It’s a rare film whose strong emotional drama matched the impressiveness of the day’s cinematic effects (whose new levels of “rubber reality” all too easily dominated 80s genre films, to the point where they were visual spectacles first and human dramas second). I’ve only seen the two immediate sequels (both have nothing on the first film) and the very latest reboot, which neatly franchise-ifies the first film’s elements into something that feels just a little bit too packaged to retain the raw-nerve edge and sense of danger of the original. As for Barker, Hellraiser proved him to have a cinematic sensibility as developed as his literary and artistic ones, thanks to its occasional arthouse touches of surrealism and dark beauty (seen best of all in his short film The Forbidden) — though, I have to say, that’s an element of his work as a director that didn’t survive into his subsequent movies.

And speaking of what’s next (skipping over my favourite Barker novel, Weaveworld, which I’ve reviewed before): another novella-and-film pairing, with Cabal/Nightbreed.

Following on from Rendezvous with Rama and Solaris, next up in my sporadic reading of SF that deals with the cosmic weird is the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (coincidentally — or not — another book adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky). First published in the Russian literary magazine Avrova in 1972, then in book form after a five-year delay (the brothers became somewhat frowned upon by the Communist authorities), it first came out in English in 1977, translated by A W Bouis. I read the 2012 translation by Olena Bormashenko (you can read an interview with her here).

The novel is divided into four chapters, dipping into the life of Redrick Schuhart, or “Red” as he’s known, between the ages of 23 and 31. Red is a Stalker, one of a small group of “desperate young men who, despite the grave risks, sneak into the Zone and smuggle out whatever they find”. What, then, is “the Zone”?

Six of these mysteriously transformed areas appeared, suddenly, after an incident known simply as “the Visit”, during which it’s assumed aliens briefly landed on Earth. (It was later calculated, from the path the scattered Zones describe across the surface of the Earth, that they originated from the star Deneb in Cygnus.)

The Zones’ weirdness is never fully catalogued or even remotely explained. Everything about them seems to defy human understanding of the physical universe. There are, for instance, pockets of sudden, intense gravity (known as “bug traps” to the Stalkers, “graviconcentrate” to the scientists), stepping into which will immediately crush you flat. There are similar areas of intense, blistering heat. A substance the Stalkers call “hell slime” (a “colloidal gas” to the scientists) turns anything that touches it into a similar slime. A voyage of just a few hundred steps into the Zone, then, is fraught with mortal danger, and a need to be constantly ready for something new, deadly, and unexplainable at any moment. The authorities, naturally, stop people from entering, so Stalkers go in at night.

Why go in at all? The Zone is littered with objects of immense value — alien artefacts that scientists are still struggling to understand, but which the black market has found uses (and prices) for. “Spacells”, for instance, are inexhaustible batteries. “Black sparks” are used in jewellery for their property of absorbing light then emitting it in modified form. There’s a bracelet that seems to promote health, and a substance called “blue panacea”. There are also highly dangerous items such as the “death lamp”, which emits a deadly ray (and whose current whereabouts are unknown, along with the Stalker who found it). Other objects are simply mysterious, though are studied at length by scientists. For instance, the numerous “empties”, which are pairs of saucer-sized copper-coloured disks that remain paired together, with a constant 18-inch gap between them, yet no physical connection. In an echo of Lem’s Solaris, numerous papers have been written about these things without anyone coming any closer to understanding how they work, or what they’re for.

The weirdness of the Zones (though we only see one, in the town of Harmont, in an unspecified country) isn’t, though, the focus of the tale. Rather, Roadside Picnic (whose name draws an analogy between the alien detritus of the Zones and what human visitors to a forest might leave behind after a picnic), centres on the lives of people trying to make a living from it. To the Stalkers, the Zone is both a “treasure trove” and “an evil temptation” — “The damned hag. My lifeblood,” as Red says — a place that draws them with the promise of much-needed gains, while ruining them both psychologically and physically. The constant mortal danger, for instance, instils an ingrained cynicism about their own and others’ lives. (Do you rescue a fellow Stalker when he loses his legs to hell slime, or leave him, perhaps even give him a quick death?) And if they do escape, they’re at constant risk of discovery by the authorities; all of them have spent time in jail. There are weirder effects, too. Red, for instance, has had several moments in the Zone when his perceptions become preternaturally, almost painfully, acute. These moments seem to be leaking into his outside-the-Zone life, too, like LSD flashbacks. And then there are the children. Although the Zone is not radioactive, Stalkers’ children tend to have mutations. Red’s daughter is known as the Monkey for her pelt of silky fur. Another Stalker’s daughter is exceptionally beautiful, yet resembles neither of her parents.

As the Stalkers’ dealings with the Zone are on a practical level — how to survive, what to retrieve, how to sell it on afterwards — none of them really pause to think about the deeper implications. That aspect — the more cosmically weird aspect — only gets brought up once, in a conversation with a scientist, Dr Valentine Pillman, to whom the most profound fact about the Zones is their mere existence. They tell us, he says, that we are not alone in the universe, and this single fact outweighs everything else about them. That said, he’s aware that what’s found in the Zones “could potentially allow us to skip a few rungs in the ladder of progress”, if only any of it could be even remotely understood. The current state of Zone-related studies, though, is just a series of “miraculously received answers to questions we don’t yet know how to pose”. (Pillman has the best line in the book, when he speaks of the possible world they might live in if all of the Zones’ mysteries were unleashed: a “time of cruel miracles”.)

So, if Roadside Picnic isn’t explicitly about the weirdness of the universe that’s implied by the Zones, what is it about? One obvious possibility, considering it was written and published in the USSR, is that it’s a criticism of capitalism, in the way the semi-miraculous weirdness of the Zone is immediately exploited in every possible way by these (evidently Western) humans — and, of course, the way this exploitation leads to a moral and spiritual decay in the exploiters. But equally, I wondered if the novel wasn’t a highly-veiled satire on living in a totalitarian state, in the way it presents ordinary human beings doing their best to make a living in the face of this incomprehensible but powerful thing, which operates under no stable set of rules and can issue instant death without a moment’s notice.

The best take I found on the novel, though, came from Theodore Sturgeon, who emphasised the positive moral qualities brought out in the book (the full article is here):

“Add the Strugatskys’ deft and supple handling of loyalty and greed, of friendship and love, of despair and frustration and loneliness, and you have a truly superb tale, ending most poignantly in what can only be called a blessing. You won’t forget it. ”

The ultimate prize to be found in the Zone is the Golden Sphere, a rumoured object said to be able to grant any wish. It sounds like pure fantasy, but none of the Stalkers question it, and in the final chapter Red sets out to find it. But if the Golden Sphere is the Holy Grail, and the Stalkers the flawed knights that seek it, Red is no pure-souled Galahad. Yet, however cynical and bitter he thinks he’s become, the mere proximity of this ultimate magical object brings out, from some long-dormant depth, a benevolence for all humankind that surprises even himself. And, in a way, this may be the best thing this Holy Grail has to offer him: if it can’t set the entire world magically to rights, the mere possibility of its existence might, nevertheless, restore his deeper humanity.

Areas of weirdness like the Zone have popped up in this blog before. Ballard’s ever-spreading area of “time dilation” in The Crystal World, for instance. William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land could be seen as a sort of inverted zone-of-weirdness, in that its weirdness covers all the world except the one, final island of human normality in the Great Redoubt. Ryhope Wood from the Mythago Wood books is a fantasy zone-of-weirdness, with its own version of “cruel miracles”. The earliest example I can think of is in Lovecraft’s “Colour Out of Space” (the Strugatskys’ Zones have odd colour effects, too), while a more modern take is in Annihilation, based on Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (which I’ve not read).

Reading Roadside Picnic, I felt sure John Clute must have covered Zones, as a category, in the Encyclopedia of SF. And yes, they’re there — and, as a bonus, they’re not even given the wildly unexplanatory sort of nomenclature he so often uses (“Polder”, “Braid”, etc.). I guess Zones are just too strange, and primal, to be given any other name than “Zone”.

Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker was based on his pick of a number of scenarios the Strugatskys suggested, based on their book. It reduces the novel to its simplest element: a journey into the Zone, in search of the central room where wishes come true. The fact that the Stalker leads two men, known only as the Writer (a cynic, to whom the world is “hopelessly boring… ruled by cast iron laws” with no room for miracles or wonders) and the Professor (a physicist, who, it turns out, sees the wish-fulfilling room as a potential creator of would-be-tyrants and world-dictators), made me at first think it was going to be about bringing the “two cultures”, science and art, before a source of mystery and awe. But by the end it’s apparent the actual dichotomy is between these two — who are both intellectuals — and the Stalker himself, a much more innocent and instinctual man, who leads people to the wish-fulfilling room but feels no need to partake of its wonders himself. If this film is about art then the Stalker, not the Writer, is the artist, leading people to the vision, the wonder, and letting them decide how to see it, what to do with it. (He believes the dangers of the Zone aren’t there to ensure only the “good” or the “bad” reach the room, but those “who have lost all hope… the wretched.” The essential survival qualities, for him, are “pliancy” and “weakness”.)

It feels rather like a science fictional version of Waiting for Godot, with an ending almost opposite to the Strugatskys’ burst of hope. Here, the Stalker, who is driven by faith in humanity and a basic sense of wonder, feels worn down by the cynicism of those he takes into the Zone. Nevertheless, he’s drawn back to guiding people into the Zone, for, as his wife says: “It’s better to have a bitter happiness than a dull, grey life.”