The horror movie that “scared the shit” out of Ridley Scott
While Ridley Scott is best known for his efforts in the crime, historical drama and science fiction movie genres, he invariably made a significant contribution to horror with his 1979 masterpiece Alien. By dousing sci-fi with an air of claustrophobic tension and extraterrestrial terror, Scott helped to rebirth it with a new facet of cinematic brilliance.
It was upon watching George Lucas’ Star Wars that Scott realised that he had wanted to work in the sci-fi genre, a film that truly blew him away. However, there was another work that seemed to inspire the other side of Alien, one of the most iconic movies in the history of horror cinema.
When Scott was young, he had been urged not to watch horror movies by his parents, who felt they could be damaging to a child’s psyche. “My parents classified them along with sex movies,” he had once noted. Still, Scott couldn’t help but notice the poster for Tobe Hooper’s 1974 independent horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, despite his initial lack of interest in the horror genre.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is widely considered one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Made for less than $140,000 with a cast of mostly unknown actors from Texas, the film focuses on a group of friends who become the victims of a vicious cannibalistic family whilst making their way to an old Texan homestead.
Scott once admitted in a feature with The Hollywood Reporter that he rarely feels scared when watching a movie, but that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre changed all that. “I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was prepping for Alien one Saturday afternoon in the Fox studio in a small theatre,” he noted. “It was horrendous, and it scared the shit out of me. I think I started with a hamburger at lunchtime and never took a bite.”
Immediately, Scott wanted to infuse his Alien with the same kind of fear as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which he noted does not have to resort to a visual aspect of excessive blood as so many of the previous horror movies had tended to champion. He admitted, “There’s a lot of people eating people, and there’s a lot of violence”, which is “tantamount to blood”, but the film relies more on a feeling of terror.
The director added, “Tobe Hooper did a [great] job, and it was my challenge to say, ‘How do I get that scary?’”. Given the violence of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hooper experienced difficulty in finding a distributor for the movie, but when it was finally acquired by Bryanston, the film was released and eventually became a classic of horror cinema.
In 1979, Scott’s film also entered into the canon of all-time horror greats. According to Scott, it was Alien writer Dan O’Bannon who urged Scott to go and see Hooper’s movie. O’Bannon was aware of Scott’s lack of knowledge of the horror genre and knew that he had to become aware of its tropes and motifs if he was to make a successful movie in the genre.
O’Bannon had been nervous about Scott’s “European sensibilities” as he watched the film, but by the time it was complete, Scott had a newfound respect for horror and proceeded to douse his Alien movie in the kind of tension and terror that would make it a true masterpiece.
