ON THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … a special treat! I rewatched one of my favorite sci fi horror movies, the woefully underappreciated Xtro (1982) by Harry Bromley Davenport. It was unfairly lumped in with Alien rip-offs at the time (as well as being condemned by marms for its unflinchingly gory scenes of body horror), and it still hasn’t achieved the full cult status it deserves. This is a grave injustice. First off, it isn’t an Alien rip-off at all. It imports some of the ideas behind Giger’s famous xenomorph, pushing them even further as symbols of psycho-sexual trauma, but its narrative, setting, and characters are totally unrelated to Alien. If anything, it’s more of a radical inversion of ET.
The absent father subtext in ET is both brought to the surface and flipped in Xtro, since its absent father character is also the alien visitor. Like ET, the young boy in Xtro gains new powers through the alien, but these powers uproot him from all human grounding instead of helping him develop his humanity. And Xtro’s ending mirrors ET’s transcendent return to the stars, but it’s a morally unsettling scene rather than an uplifting one.
Straight away the film opens with the father being pulled up into a triangular light from his backyard as his son watches. Cut to three years later. The son now lives with his mother in a London apartment, and no one believes his story about his father being abducted. Instead, his mother and her new boyfriend want him to admit that his father simply walked out on them. Meanwhile in the countryside near the family’s old cottage, a creature arrives in another flash of light. It attacks and impregnates a woman and then crumples into a husk. Soon, the woman’s belly massively expands. She is split apart as she gives birth to a full-grown man. This man is the boy’s father. He tracks down and rejoins his son and wife, which creates an awkward situation for the boyfriend. The father looks and acts the same as he did three years prior, but we know that underneath he can’t be the same. He shares a strange psychic bond with his son, and he forms a more physical connection with him as well by injecting him with something like alien DNA.
Interspersed in the unreal fusion of family drama and alien monster flick that follows are erotic interludes, reality-altering psychedelic trances involving living toys, and potent symbols of puberty. Somehow, all of these disparate elements work together perfectly. Each scene is taut and effective, supporting every other both thematically and logistically to create an uncanny, truly original story. One reason that I think it’s taken so long for this film to garner its due acclaim is that, unlike many other cult movies that were unfairly dismissed at the time for their violence and weirdness only to be later celebrated by horror fans, Xtro’s narrative is unusually morally challenging. It uses the tropes and gore effects of low-budget 80's horror, but it has the ethical complexity of an arthouse film. The monster is not merely pretending to be the boy’s father. He is the father. He really is solely motivated by his desire to be reunited with his son. The son is not tricked or coerced by the father into joining him. He desperately wishes to join him in his extra-human transformation before they even speak. And when they have both transformed into the mature form of the creature and ascend to the stars, hand-in-hand, it really is a triumphant moment for them. So, rather than giving us the typical pat answers of a good versus evil conflict, Xtro leaves us with only questions. Should we judge the creatures on their own terms, relative to their lifecycle and culture, or should we condemn them for the harm they cause to humans? And how is this question affected by the fact that the creatures were themselves once human?
One more reason Xtro is great: it contains my all time favorite jump scare. It’s so good, a gif of the key shot made the rounds on paranormal sites in the 2000’s as photographic evidence of a supposedly real cryptid called a skinwalker. Check it out:
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