It came as a surprise to me how many of my friends at school haven’t seen the original Alien film. To me, it is simply a classic. It is a perfect representation of what a horror film should be, focusing more on the psychological than on gruesome shots of blood and cheap thrills to get girls to jump out of their seats shrieking like banshees. Clearly plenty of folks out there agree, as every other year there is a new film claiming to be “the scariest since Alien”.

The film’s rise to fame was done with an excellent idea and an excellent director. Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusset put together a script of a monster of multiple stages. Just when you thought the Facehugger was the murderous alien, it turns out to keep the man alive. It then comes off only to die, leaving people scratching their heads as to what was going on. In the midst of a scene that seems absolutely calm and normal, a character suddenly begins screaming and thrashing, and his chest explodes, giving birth to a snakelike alien. Now the audience gets an idea of what the alien actually is, but all of a sudden it changes shape and size into a new monster of nightmares. Oh, and it turns out Ian Holm is an android.

The pattern of the film was something completely new for audiences, then used to tales of Dracula and the supernatural, or of complete psychotics in gorefests and twitch-violence. The source of the horror was something brand new and never seen before.

Ridley Scott only made it better, making sure the film moved at a slow enough pace as to keep the audience pointing out supposed moments of fright, only for the pattern from all the other horror in the past decade to be completely different. After predicting when a character would bite it and only to be wrong, Scott surprises the audience by bringing something new in. Minimizing on the amount of blood in the film (very little compared to other horror from the 70’s) also allowed a wider range of audience in.

It is an incredibly accomplished film that doesn’t seek to make you afraid of the monster, but afraid of your ignorance to the situation. Psychological horror, the best kind, that H.P. Lovecraft himself had mastered.

So thirty minutes in to what I feel is a classic film, and all of a sudden I hear complaints from a few friends that it is boring and nothing has happened. To me, plenty has happened. A tone has been established, characters have interacted and plot has been created to establish the strictness of the contract with “The Company”. All of these elements are important to the film. As it continues, so do the complaints of things not happening.

Once it was over, I discussed my feelings with my roommate and he pointed out a very good observation: people that are a mere few years younger than us are gaining less of an attention span for film. Of course, I don’t agree that it’s just people a few years younger, but our age group as well, and even those older. Granted it is the sort of thing that every generation speaks of the younger, though to be complaining of kids only a couple years younger than I seems ridiculous. Thing is, it’s true.

If you are aged anywhere between 13-25, think about the number of people you know that don’t like to read, and will only read when they have to or occasionally something like Harry Potter. Now think of the number of friends and even family you have that do read regularly. I don’t just mean magazines or articles online, either. I mean novels that are at least around 150 to 200 pages long, if not more.

Food has become more about instant gratification with the microwave and fast food restaurants. Films are focusing on wit or action in every scene with little room for the dramatic or philosophical. Information on the Internet has to be scannable or people won’t even look at your site. The only thing that hasn’t become more instantaneous is television, whose commercial breaks continue to grow ever longer.

Let’s take a look at horror films for the past ten years. When I was in middle and high school, Scream was still a big deal, as were similar knock offs. It was like a revival of the Halloween and Friday the 13th slasher flicks, where the idea was cheap jumps and plenty of blood. Lately the twitch-flicks have become popular with the introduction of Saw, bringing to focus more on horrible pain that makes you flinch more than scream.

So jumping a group of 18-20 year olds back to before they were even born, to a film where the horror isn’t in the blood or what you see but in what isn’t even there yet, it is only natural that they won’t get the idea. Unfortunately, these are the exact same age kids that love to make jokes and references to Cthulu, a monster written by an author who was a master of horror of the indescribable, unseen and even unfathomable. His stories are not particularly gory, and in fact some tales have no gore at all. It is how they mess with your mind that gets you. Edgar Allen Poe did similar things with his tales.

Also mentioned that evening was the original film Psycho, another classic. However, the young girl commented that she didn’t find any of it scary. Of course, Psycho was certainly a product of a different time, where the idea of an overly obsessive mother of a grown adult man was not a common concept. In fact, the twist ending was quite disturbing, though in this day and age less so as we have seen plenty of psychotic serial killers on the streets and placed into jails and assylums. We even live in a society where the smallest little emotion can be turned into a gigantic overblown personal problem that someone must learn to cope with and live a normal life. I’ve met so many people with “ADD” and “Depression” that it makes me wonder how people even lived fifty to a hundred years ago.

But for its time, Psycho was a very disturbing film. Not because people were killed, but because the psychological issues of the characters were deeply disturbing.

Horror in Hollywood has died. The films do not focus on frightening the audience mentally, and as such the audience doesn’t expect or even understand how such things can be frightening or disturbing. If Alien had not been released until today, I wonder how critics would view it. Would they still claim it a masterpiece, or would it be a boring film that occasionally has an interesting scene?

If you are a young reader that hasn’t seen Alien, Psycho, The Thing or read any H.P. Lovecraft, please, do yourself a favor and do so, and pay attention to how the story and direction tries to mess with your mind and not with your eyes. What you can see is just what it is, but what you cannot see can be anything and everything.