It is no accident that Alan Dean Foster's novelization of the Alien trilogy wanders through the subconscious of "seven dreamers"—sifting the contents of each sleeping mind to identify the individual by the texture of their dreams—before presenting us with the coherence of seven characters. Yet there is one facet he cannot reconcile to this happy picture of the unity of our inner and outer faces: that nightmares also come from within.

Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien personified the nightmare, translating internal darkness into physical form through the dark imaginings of HR Giger and his alien. But the terror of Alien was never restricted to this single image, as is often the case with (bad) horror films. During the course of filming, Scott found that the more exposure Bolaji Badejo—the man in the 'suit'—was allowed, the more the alien lost its power to terrify exactly because it was obviously still very human. In the final cut Scott gave the alien a visually miniscule role and yet achieved what both Alien3 and Alien Resurrection failed to do: to have the alien holding sway over the whole film by enlisting our own creative power against us.

In Alien, when Kane descends alone into the unknown depths of the alien ship it is as if he is delving into his subconscious. What he finds at the bottom is determined by the writer's imagination—a person who also had to delve into an inner darkness to encourage something to make the crossing from the subconscious to consciousness. So Kane's descent describes a sleeping potential, a darkness to be awoken within us all.

That the alien is also implanted within, and symbolically bursts out of Kane in a grotesque parody of birth, declaims the human origins of horror. Nightmare is internal. It cohabits our mind alongside consciousness, just as the alien shares the living space of the human crew, using the smaller, darker passages to move around. The Nostromo's various passageways manifest the unseen labyrinths of the mind where thoughts are like footpaths in a forest, leading us on to unknown destinations.

Scott's carefully crafted shots of the alien are always partial, ambiguous; we can't assign the alien body parts, we can't comprehend it because it remains equivocal, incomplete and thus always alien: an embodiment of the unknown within ourselves. The ultimate claustrophobia of the film's setting (space: a pocket of air within an infinity of nothing) reflects the ultimate horror of our inability to escape our own thoughts. We are trapped in a mind only partially under our control. And Scott's film knows when and where to scatter ellipses—suggestive spaces for our subconscious to quietly claim and colonize. His alien grows in stature, fleshed out, fed, nourished and nurtured by our minds.

Twenty-two years and three sequels (with the promise of more) on, it must surely be said that the alien is in the best of health. With one crucial caveat: the alien is no longer scary. The modern dearth of horror as a serious, rather than a spoof category can be put down to a chronic twenty-first century obsession with overexposure—the desire to see every last gruesome detail—and the digital advances that have not only made possible but also normalized this total voyeurism.

In the past, creating a believable alien/monster and making it move in a non-human fashion was constrained by the gravitational and ergonomic restrictions of the human body inside the suit, leading James Cameron to enlist gymnasts and dancers to act as his Aliens. But with computer generated characters there are no such limitations. These digital aliens are lifelike puppets with no strings attached, the strange children of a union between mind and machine, technology and imagination. Yet, paradoxically, instead of liberating the imagination of a film's audience, computer generated creations seem to have achieved a mental imprisoning of the creative eye.

In Alien Resurrection the aliens are paraded in the full glare of artificial light. They swim underwater like tadpoles in a tank; they step past the camera with a tread that could have been lifted straight from the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (or the ostriches of Fantasia). We see everything in full glorious detail, feasting our eyes, disengaging our mind. And in this absolute spotlight, real creative horror has nowhere left to hide. In its place there are only cheap thrills and cheap laughs: a sordid end for Giger's alien.

For me, the shocking power of a film like Alien stems from an understanding that horror originates and exists in a darkness of the mind, a place where we find we are aliens to ourselves. The digital aliens of Alien Resurrection offer no such revelation, present no such unknown quantity for the mind to ingest. These modern monsters are on cue; inserted afterward in their preordained places, I cannot feel their presence. And, as Ridley Scott found, working with the alien meant he not only directed the alien, the alien made demands upon him. Its physicality was felt upon the fabric of the film. The alien cast its own shadow.

Copyright © 2001 Natasha Lomas. All Rights Reserved.

Natasha Lomas did a degree in English Literature and is currently being finished off by an MA in journalism. She lives in London, a city where she feels less alien than usual. She would like to call herself a writer.