Alien (1979)
"In space no one can hear you scream." Ridley Scott's Alien took the haunted-house film into deep space: a weary crew of space truckers, a distress call nobody should have answered, and a creature from the nightmares of Swiss artist H.R. Giger, whose designs horrified the studio and helped win the film its Oscar for visual effects.
Every part was written so it could be played by a man or a woman, and that's how Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley became one of cinema's great heroines. And when the cast filmed the chestburster scene, they hadn't been told exactly what was coming, so the horror on their faces is real.
The poster gives almost nothing away. Designers Steve Frankfurt and Philip Gips showed no monster, no spaceship and no stars, just a cracked egg leaking a sickly green light above a strange ridged landscape. It has been imitated ever since. In the wide British Quad format, with the title spread across the top and the UK "X" certificate below, all that black space feels even more menacing.
British Quads of the 1970s were almost always folded before they went out to cinemas, so a 1979 copy that has never been folded is genuinely rare. This one keeps its deep, unfaded blacks and that glowing green.
- Year: 1979
- Nationality: United Kingdom
- Condition: Unfolded
- Type: Original British Quad
- Size: 30 x 40 inches
- Product Code: T7214
