In a class on genre, it’s only fitting that we explore my least favourite genre, Sci-fi horror. From the time I was a child, I hated every film with an alien in it, I just couldn’t stand it and the very minimal amount of the film Alien I had seen, I loathed, for whatever reason, I would be happier watching a normal horror film but when you add extra terrestrials of any kind, suddenly it gets a whole lot creepier. Aliens, on a more pleasant note, surprised me, I thought it was honestly going to be terrifying, but I actually quite enjoyed it. I liked the tasteful way it was constructed, obviously there were always going to be a few jump scares and some belly-busting action but Cameron’s film is really well constructed from a character perspective and there are a few moments of actual respite in the film, even though they pretty much immediately turn back into non-stop crazy action.

In class, we discussed the film’s significance in terms of not only gender characterisation but also it’s place in the genre of sci-fi whether that simply meant it fell into the Sci-fi genre or was in fact something more (and what that meant). The reading for the week on gender was really interesting, the way it used language to describe the visual language of the film very viscerally but more importantly, discussed the significance of the female characters in the context of the time in which the film was made. In the case of Ripley, we discussed the idea of “the male surrogate”, as I was watching the film, it never occurred to me that this could have been the case or at least the way it was written. At the end of the day, I’m not entirely surprised that there is so much of this in Hollywood especially, as there are many male screenwriters working in the industry (Cameron included).