Following up on my Halloween Season annual event where I share my favorite horror movie scenes up until Halloween night is another cinematic treat. Tonight’s choice is another pick from 1979’s Alien, only this time, surrounding a character named Lambert’s offscreen death.
There’s just something about this scene that's just meticulously designed to really get under the skin of the viewer watching. The reliance on audio being what drives our imagination regarding what the Xenomorph (the alien creature of the movie) is doing to this poor woman (Lambert) makes this scene a masterpiece of horror. We know that this extraterrestrial monstrosity is freakishly designed having the appearance of a man sized scorpion-like insect that is both stealthy and physically capable of overpowering everyone on the ship. We witnessed its literal birth earlier in the movie which was a horrifying situation in of itself with the alien shockingly emerging out of one of the crew-mate’s chests and running off into the ship. So to see this now rapidly grown creature slowly heading towards this defenseless and panicking woman while moving its tail up behind her only to then cut to Rippley hearing her final screams through the walkie sent chills down my spine. The way in which the tension rising score just completely cuts off as the scene transitions from Lambert's ambiguous fate to Ripley anxiously running down the atmospheric dark corridors is the stuff of nightmares.
It’s that classic audience imagination exploiting sensibility of classic horror cinema being “What you don’t see is far scarier than what you do see”. This is for me one of the gold standard examples of how to effectively present that concept. We never see how the alien killed Lambert, but we can hear her blood curdling screams while thinking about the context of the alien’s suggestive traits. To this day, fans still speculate on what happened to this character and several of the theories are utterly terrifying which, again, is the brilliance of that scene. It’s much more thought provoking and scarier this way than just showing the alien bite her or stab her with its tail. The more, shall we say, twisted reproductive implications behind this scene and the design of the alien is the most unsettling thing that I’ve ever experienced in a sci-fi horror title when coupled with the screams heard over the walkie and Ripley witnessing the hellish aftermath. And even in this particular moment where Ripley comes across their bodies, we still only see brief glimpses of what happened adding to the elevated tension.
Truly, this will forever be one of the most chills inducing scenes ever put to screen until the end of cinema is upon us.
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