The Story Behind The Shot: John Hurt’s medical malady was the making of ‘Alien’
Few actors have died onscreen as regularly as John Hurt, who made shuffling off his mortal coil into an art form. However, no matter how often he perished across film and television, the seminal chest-bursting scene from Alien will always be the most famous.
The scene had been present in the story since the very beginning, back when it was Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s Star Beast. However, it took an entire team to make it iconic. Ridley Scott came on board as director, and he knew the screenplay needed some revisions, which allowed him to transform what he called a C-level film into an A-list masterpiece.
The production designers and effects teams shouldn’t go unmentioned, either, because the sequence wouldn’t be anywhere near impactful if the creature itself were laughable-looking or the way it exploded from the prone body of Hurt’s executive officer Kane didn’t look convincing enough.
Through a modern lens, it might draw a snicker or two from the youth of today, but back in 1979, audiences had never seen anything like it. Neither had the cast, for that matter, with the shooting script handed over to the ensemble being very deliberate – and a little sneaky – in obfuscating what was about to happen.
“They were crafty,” Sigourney Weaver admitted to Empire. “They pitched the story so that you feel John Hurt’s character would be the only true hero among us.” Whether that was true or not, he would never reach the end credits in one piece. She knew it, and so did everybody else, but it was the perfect example of the ‘why’ leaving everyone unprepared for the manner of the ‘how’.
Everyone gathered around knew what was going to happen, but as Weaver recalled, “All it said in the script was, ‘This thing emerges’.” Hurt was kneeling under the table with his head poking out from a secret hiding hole, with a fake body propped up on the table. It was simple and a classic old-fashioned technique, but hiding what was to follow turned it into a stroke of genius.
Famously, Veronica Cartwright’s reaction is completely genuine, with the actor having no idea what she was going to be looking at when Hurt’s chest cavity ripped open, and neither was she filled in that various bits of goop and goo was going to be sprayed in her direction.
It was a perfect storm of controlled chaos; Scott knew exactly how it was going to unfold, but he decided not to share the minutiae. The gathered performers also knew that something would come bursting out of Hurt’s fake body, but they didn’t have a clue what. The audience sure as shit wasn’t expecting it, which turned Alien into a word-of-mouth sensation when whispers spread that the unheralded haunted house in space flick had an all-timer of a jump scare.
When the chest burster first attaches itself to Hurt’s face, it’s jarring and an indicator that the most recognisable faces in the movie weren’t guaranteed salvation. When it burrows its way from the inside out, it raises the stakes even further and elevates Alien towards greatness. It’s been replicated in every single entry in the franchise, but none of them have come close to replicating that one-of-a-kind sense of shock and awe, never mind bettering it.
