Ridley Scott’s “Alien” is a masterclass in using every facet of filmmaking—sets, props, costumes, sound design, lighting, cinematography—to create and squeeze every inch of emotion out of tone rather than plot. The dreadful anticipation felt in every moment of this far from outdated classic owes less to suspense of the Hitchcock variety and more to the nameless unease that permeates the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It has the nightmarish quality of “The Masque Of The Red Death”, the grotesque beastie of “Murders In The Rue Morgue”, and (in more than a few scenes) the persistent, murmurous beating of “The Tell-Tale Heart”. It’s almost a Symbolist film, and perhaps it’s best that Scott used suggestion rather than literalism to generate horror, since the actual alien, before the golden age of Stan Winston, seems stiff and disappointingly humanoid. Just a few years later James Cameron’s effects team would fully realize H. R. Giger’s slithering arachnid, but in 1979 Scott had less to work with, and the alien is the one part of the film that has not held up; the audience at the screening I went to actually laughed at its first appearance onscreen.

The alien itself was never the film’s strong point, however. The world of “Alien” unites the patchwork, grimy surfaces of the “Star Wars” universe with the vast interstellar emptiness of “2001”. Although set in a future in which space travel is apparently old hat, none of the ships or gadgets in the film dazzle us with their superior technology. The Nostromo and the machines aboard it have a realism unlike the wondrous super-advances of more starry-eyed sci-fi fantasies, instead having a gimcrack quality that evokes the heroic improvisations of the early space program. There are still spacesuits and flashlights, radios that get bad reception, engines that break down like old Chevys, and the weapons the crew uses to fight the alien are cattle prods and flamethrowers rather than lasers or death-rays. The film is a dystopian vision of the future. From greedy corporations to spaceships that look like they were rigged up in someone’s garage out of junk parts, things haven’t gotten much better in the future, it seems. There’s an alarming scarcity of lamps.

The allegorical narrative of Dan O’Bannon’s script opens up the existentialist dimension that has provoked much commentary by film critics over the years. In the middle of a long journey, the crew is awakened by a higher intelligence that is at best indifferent to their existence and may in fact be hostile to them, as is more and more likely as the film goes on. The dark night to which they have been summoned is a long span of waiting punctuated by a series of short sharp shocks. Morality is as null as the space through which they float, and the crew’s personal loyalties—such as Dallas’s stubborn attempts to revive Kane in the face of good sense and the law, or Parker’s unwillingness to burn up Lambert even if it means killing the alien—are rewarded with brutal deaths. The fruit of Ripley’s triumph is simply sleep, with no guarantee of waking again. Sci-fi is prophesy, too, and not merely a set of metaphors for our present condition.

This gives the existentialism a sharper edge, for what the film achieves is a gruesome downsizing of the species. Previous space movies had more or less found a much more hospitable place in the heavens for their human explorers. Kubrick and Clarke had their cosmonauts voyage into space and discover God, Gene Roddenberry had Renaissance humanism to defend him from the barbarians of far-off worlds, and Lucas’s comic book knights were bound by a Force which brought all living beings together. But Scott’s ragged crew of salvage workers experience only a demotion on the evolutionary ladder. At every turn in the story the crew of the Nostromo is humbled by its limitations. Their superior technology fails them again and again. The moral weakness of civilized people, their greed and selfishness, makes them fodder for the alien.

Most signally, their flesh itself is violated in a most horrific way, becoming a mere husk used to incubate a life-form more suited for survival than they are. If Captain Kirk’s crew had been turned into hosts for a parasitic monster, the thoughtful skipper would have remembered his Shakespeare and asked “Is man no more than this?” The creepiness of “Alien” is a result of a visual style that skillfully utilizes images of viscera. Anatomy is the visual theme of “Alien”—skeletons, skin, inner organs, excretions, tissues, and blood. What disturbs about the movie is the same thing that disturbs us in surgery rooms, slaughterhouses, even the dissection unit in high school science class (Ash takes apart the face-hugger the way a tenth-grader pokes around inside a frog) when we’re confronted with the animal functionality of our bodies.

The humid interiors of the two main space vessels seem more like arteries, veins, and glands removed from animals of varying sizes and shapes; the walls of the ghost ship they find on the “planetoid” are organic rather than metallic. The main computer on the Nostromo (really the ship itself) is called “Mother”, and when Dallas hunts the alien in the air ducts, he’s really passing through the valves of “her” heart. The most dramatic human process in which the inner becomes the outer, childbirth, is hideously parodied by the chest-bursting alien, but that is no messier than a normal human birthing (and no quieter for that matter). Even Ash’s synthetic body isn’t spared, his milky innards splashed all over a room. “Alien” is really an immersive anatomy lesson, a dream of smothering not unlike the beastie that visits Kane.

Sigourney Weaver, as the dogged Ripley, brings a tough intelligence to the film that rescues it from the hazards of the horror genre, from which the film draws its essential dynamic. For once, a character in a slasher movie makes all the right choices (aside from a strange insistence on rescuing Jonesy the cat). Ripley wants to quarantine Dallas, Kane, and Lambert, but Ash’s insubordination thwarts her. She is right to want to continue Dallas’ plan to kill the alien in the air ducts, but plans change once she discovers the crew’s real mission. Finally, she’s right to blast off in the escape pod and blow up the ship, though circumstances cause a key oversight. Aside from the aforementioned attachment to the cat, Ripley’s bottom-line savvy removes all the dumb moments in horror films when naive characters do exactly what everyone else in the world would never think of doing. Her final victory is also a rebuke to the film’s bleak Darwinism because if, as Ash intimates, an organism’s superiority is defined on the basis of its ability to survive, then humans might have a future after all. Or, at any rate, sequels.