I couldn't agree more, Charles. This film scared the living piss out of me as a kid. I watch it now and it still strikes me as such a masterpiece that will never be equaled. The only other film that comes close for me is The Thing.

I never even considered it a horror film - I always thought it resided thoroughly in the sci-fi genre.

It's quite relevant now, too:

Atomized single mother forced to work for faceless corporation under dangerous conditions is unwittingly exposed to hostile aliens. The corporation, and the government, downplays any and all dangers and denies responsibility, even after she is forced to confront the aggressive creature alone.

Pretty good metaphor for working people these days, IMO.

I absolutely agree.

As for the motivation of lesser specters and whatnot, it's almost always revenge. Someone like you let my son drown, or killed my family member, or killed me and now I'm back, etc. It's impressive how highly sustained the revenge motivation can be for these monsters, but those films are generally inexpensive productions that offer good returns.

@2 - Same. Just as Aliens resides in the Action category, and is one of the best in the genre.

I have always considered it a cat film.

Prometheus kind of fucked up the Darwinism angle, however.

"What is in it for them? They certainly do not want to eat their victims." I guess Mr. Mudede has never seen a zombie movie.

Mudede is a broken clock. This is one of the rare times he is correct.

Yeah, yeah, the read on Alien is straightforward and cogent, but that first paragraph! It's a very strange definition of horror, that doesn't include any of the monsters that explicitly want to eat their victims (werewolves, zombies, vampires, cannibals, etc) and ALSO doesn't include any horror movie grounded in the specific fear of inscrutable human malevolence (slasher movies, pursuit movies) or general existential panic. Horror movies aren't always or even often concerned with evil, per se, just fear. Lions don't have to be evil to be scary.

Human beings torment and kill each other and other animals all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with food. Why wouldn't supernatural forces also possess the human predilection for cruelty?

@2, 5: Sci-Fi is a different sort of classification than "Action" or "Horror". Alien is both Sci-Fi and Horror. Aliens is both Sci-Fi and Action. Some Sci-Fi is romance (Her), some is comedy (Firefly) etc. Sci-Fi is a setting, and genres fit within it, in my understanding of genre.

I went through this exact same line of thought recently when looking through Atlantic's list of "30 best" sci-fi tv shows.

Besides leaving off "The Invaders" (like everyone does) they didn't put "The Walking Dead" on there either. Like your argument, TWD is sci-fi because it's in no way supernatural. There is a scientific explanation given for the zombification. The solutions proposed or thought about are based in logic. Therefore it is sci-fi, not horror.

Now, there are horrible things like in Alien. But in horror, I think there is the sense of absurdity, that reality is violated. While some bad sci-fi has misguided explanations, it is never illogical, just based on poor premises. Another part of where the horror comes in is if the participants in the movie are too non-technical or smart enough to understand the reasons for why things are happening. Then I guess you fall back on Arthur C. Clarke's old saw about science and magic being undistinguishable if the science is sufficiently advanced.

In Aliens you have people who are technicians and bureaucracy but still capable of understanding alien life albeit very powerful. In TWD it's a little fuzzier because there is an underlying social message. If you notice, the survivors are mostly Middle Middle Class people. The scientists have fled, were killed (CDC) and betrayed the people. The more clueless types became the bulk of the zombies. What you're left with are people who are not book smart, but cunning, self-preserving smart. Is it horror? No because again they understand the problem as the work of man, not a supernatural being (priests and other members of the controlling classes, such as doctors, police, and so on are also on their list of bad guys, even If they survive).

@12 - True, lots of films can touch on all sorts of genres and be accurately described as such, but I truly think what makes Aliens standout is the action direction (and wouldn't describe Alien as an Action film). That's not all it has going for it, but I'd put it in a conversation with Die Hard or T2 before I'd compare it to it's predecessor. You're not wrong, that's just the space it lives in for me.

Tangentially—defining Sci-Fi, I'm fine with the definition that makes sense to most of us, but it's fun to remember that Ray Bradbury claimed the only science fiction story he ever wrote was Fahrenheit 451, all this alien world and space travel business was in the Fantasy camp as far as he was concerned.

I'm thinking Charles saw that Alien was in the Halloween theme section at Scarecrow Video and may have automatically assumed that Alien is a horror film. It is not a horror film, but it does belong in the same section with staff picks like: The Exorcist, Poltergeist-so on and so on. Alien is best to stay in the science fiction realm. Alien-one may say, could startle the viewer and it does play on the audience's primal fears. Is Rain Man a comedy or a drama? Or a drama-comedy. I laughed when Ray farted in the phone booth. Charles is both right and wrong and genre naming is great because it's up to the viewer to decide how he or she feels. When Dallas is in the shaft with the torch and that sonar beeping noise-I can't help but still clench up my blanket. Alien is not a horror film, but it still does scare me shitless. Poor bastards.

@13 - Hold on, I've watched probably more than 50% of The Walking Dead, and never seen any suggestion of how the zombies continue to function without sustenance. I've always taken this to mean that they have some supernatural means of animation. Even if they're "diseased", blood flow doesn't seem to matter, nor any other form of respiration, and the creatures seem to persist even when locked away from food sources for years (car trunks, etc.). Maybe I missed some explanation of how they transcend the laws of thermodynamics, but in the absence of this, you'd have to assume it's supernatural, right?