Alien (1979)

I can still remember the first time I saw the movie Alien as a child. It was playing on TV, on one of those perfect summer evenings, where it stays light long after dinner. There's something about the experience of settling in to watch a horror movie while it's still light out, and then having twilight descend, leaving you in the dark of night by the time the credits roll. The movie's sequel, Aliens - the epitome of the rare, successful sequel, raising the stakes while employing clever innovation over the familiarity of thematic repetition - undoubtedly had a larger impact on my childhood, but this is where the nightmare started. And when I say "nightmare", I mean that literally.

From the slow and misdirectingly eerie opening crawl (in all its retro-futuristic glory); the down-to-(ironically)-earth depiction of blue collar life among the stars (a stellar presentation of plausible characters that feel lived-in); the atmosphere of fear and paranoia that develops (second only to John Carpenter's The Thing) when an unfamiliar alien lifeform is discovered on a cold and forbidding wasteland of a planet; to the shock and visceral terror of the xenomorph's startling appearance - a scene unrivaled in cinematic history; and then the inspired biomechanical design of the creature, thanks to the now late visionary artist H.R. Giger, which taps into our fears of sex and technology and our own bodies and - as a young child with arachnophobia - the primal terror of an eldritch predator, sleek and black, that moves uncannily and lurks in dark corners and tunnels, waiting to strike its prey without warning; all building up to the climactic finish, with its flashing lights and hissing shadows, leaving viewers breathless and on the edge of their seats as so many movies promise, but so few can actually deliver.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Alien is so effective that it manages to transcend the label of a slasher film - even though that's exactly what it amounts to on paper - elevating itself to the level of sci-fi/horror legend. And for the fortieth anniversary of its initial release, I'm going to watch it again - in a movie theater for the first time!