Catching up ...
ON THE FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I watched easily the best Gray-alien horror movie, Dark Skies (2013). It does everything right. We never see the aliens fully or up close. To the extent they are shown, they look more like shadow people than typical rubbery sci fi aliens. Instead, the horror lies in what each member of the protagonist suburban family fails to remember about the traumatic intrusions they have been experiencing. This horror manifests in the harrowing psychophysical side-effects and fragmentary evidence of their brains being edited and remixed every night. Throughout, the Grays remain both incomprehensible and omnipotent, so that the characters never stop feeling as helpless as field mice under an owl's shadow. Dark Skies never even shows us a ship, wisely withholding any definite details that could trigger disbelief.
And by disbelief, I don't mean the usual kind that we suspend in order to engage with supernatural fiction, but rather a stronger disbelief that describes the bounds of real plausibility. After all, this is what makes the Gray alien an interesting monster compared to ghosts or vampires or squirming abominations-- it retains a real plausibility for our secular world that the other legendary creatures have lost. The problem with so many Gray-alien horror films, though, is that they break one or more of the viewer's private rules of reality, which differ for everyone but are always far more fragile than rules of fictional coherence.
Through flexible ambiguity and unrelenting focus on the characters' subjective experiences, Dark Skies somehow doesn't break even the strictest of these rules. And besides passing this crucial test, Dark Skies is just a really well-made thriller, with strong performances, nuanced characterization, and detail-attentive storytelling. Probably owing to a distaste for the subject matter at the time, it was poorly reviewed upon release, but it has since received positive reassessment and become a cult favorite.
ON THE SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I went back and watched the 1975 NBC TV-movie, The UFO Incident, which is a dramatization of Barney and Betty Hill's testimony in their 1961 case of alleged abduction. All subsequent instances of purported alien abduction derive from their paradigmatic encounter narrative. Flying saucer sightings had become a major public phenomenon by the 1950s, coinciding with the height of Cold War paranoia about Soviet spy-craft and nuclear weapons, along with the golden age of alien invasion B-cinema. But before the Hills' testimony (excepting a couple of cases in Brazil that diverge markedly from the canonical tropes) there had never been a serious claim of direct contact and prolonged interaction with the extraterrestrial pilots of the saucers. With the Hills, all of the classic elements appear fully formed: sighting a UFO overhead while driving down a lonely road at night; electrical disturbances in the car; the deliberate suppression of memory of the subsequent abduction, resulting in "missing time"; recovery of the suppressed memories under hypnosis; small gray-skinned humanoids with very large eyes who communicate telepathically and control the minds of the experiencers; capture and conveyance aboard the alien craft, where the abductees are stripped, probed, and surgically altered in some sort of medical lab; and a concurrent rash of UFO sightings in the area. Even the proper name for the Grays, Zeta Reticulans, derives from Betty Hill's claim that she was shown a star map to the beings' home world, which she later drew and found to be a match for Zeta Reticuli, a binary star system about 39 light-years away. (Of course, it's quite possible that these events occurred in reverse order: she consulted stellar charts first, made the drawing, and then "recalled" under hypnosis having been shown something resembling her drawing.)
The TV movie itself is a serviceable dramatization of the Hills' testimony. The Grays are only shown briefly in muddled dream-images during the hypnosis sessions, but even these glimpses are too much, given how terrible the masks are. Despite such flaws, however, I recommend watching it just for James Earl Jones' incredible performance as Barney Hill. Jones not only carries the whole production but actually elevates it to peak Gray-alien horror on par with Dark Skies. His portrayal of stark-frozen terror unto and beyond the brink of madness is so real, it honestly seems to shock the other actors.
Only a few days after The UFO Incident aired, Travis Walton reported his own abduction by the Grays, which supplied the material for his book, Fire in the Sky. Then, in the wake of the Hills' and Walton's success, Whitley Strieber's Communion appeared-- and the genesis of a legendary American monster was complete.
ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I tried to watch something called The Fourth Kind, but it was so terrible, I gave up. Instead, I went through various lists of Gray-alien horror movies and watched a bunch of trailers. I didn't find anything notable that I hadn't already seen.
As for the reality of the Grays: My own personal rules for what a real extraterrestrial visitor could be and do are set by three suppositions based in hard science: (1) faster than light travel will never be feasible for a galaxy-scale civilization (at least, not for one that can avoid detection); (2) all or nearly all sufficiently advanced civilizations become post-organic machine or bio-machine civilizations; (3) if another civilization exists in our galaxy, it is almost certainly millions of years older than ours. From these suppositions we can conclude that if extraterrestrials have visited our solar system, they have done so using undetectable autonomous robotic probes. This scenario falls under the "zoo hypothesis" solution to the Fermi Paradox. (I.e., the paradox that is really more of a question: if intelligent life eventually develops on most planets with Earth-like conditions, then there should be many interstellar civilizations besides our own in our galaxy; why, then, have we not seen any sign at all of their existence?) The zoo hypothesis claims that at least one civilization has spread throughout our galaxy, but it masks its presence in order to prevent disastrous colonial contamination; instead, it opts to study other intelligent species surreptitiously. This would make Earth a kind of wildlife reserve.
The Zeta Reticulan narrative also falls under the zoo hypothesis, but it violates supposition (2), if not (1) as well. It simply wouldn't make sense to send organic beings that require life support in large spacecraft so as to study an alien civilization for millennia in secret, nor would it be feasible without faster than light transportation, nor would this even be an issue for a post-organic civilization. Thus, extraterrestrials would not come in spaceships. They would be the spaceships. And these autonomous probes would not be large visible objects either. This still leaves open the possibility that something like the Grays could be real insofar as unseen alien zoologists in our solar system could be watching us and might even have come to Earth in the past to study human biology up close. But the canonical Grays derived from the Hills' testimony and made iconic by The X-Files et al. almost certainly don't exist. This in turn means that very few if any of the claimed alien contact cases can be enlisted in support, however tenuously, of the only plausible scenario involving the presence of intelligent extraterrestrials in our solar system.
This realization has killed the capacity for most Gray-alien horror to terrify me, at least for any considerable duration. Which is what I'm actually concerned with here: the fear generated by the possibility of the Grays' reality. I guess what I have been chasing after with this topic is the experience of pure terror I felt as a child when I saw alien abduction documentaries on cable and believed 100% that the Grays were out there grabbing and experimenting on people and wiping their memories. No other monster has ever scared me so much.
But I feel that the Gray is now going the way of the changeling and the vampire and becoming simply another nightmare creature that serves as an analogy for terrestrial human pain and helplessness, as exemplified by No One Will Save You. In any case, I have found that with even the best Zeta Reticulan horror films, I'm only able to make contact with ephemeral flashes of the excitingly sleepless, look-over-your-shoulder terror I once felt. Which is sad.
ON THE NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I wrote this! And drew some more. Up next: more drawing.
Pictured: Betty and Barney Hill and Delsey the dog
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