The moment in this big-budget fright flick in which John Hurt gives birth to a killer alien that tears its way out of his chest was also the birth of a new wave of sci-fi violence in movies. Meanwhile, there isn’t anything new about the story. Killer aliens have been popping off humans since the 1950s, but this is the most influential film of its time to go into outer space dressed in horror movie clothes and that plays by slasher rules. Anyone here can die any time and there’s a clear Final Girl (Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, the member of a small space crew and the only one among them prepared to make the hard decisions). If time has softened the scares a bit—and its most famous scene isn’t quite the stomach-churner that it once was in the days before gore became so mundane that dismemberment is now played for laughs—this still survives the years as a beautifully made claustrophobic fever dream in which biology mixes with technology so that its spaceship interiors look like inner body workings complete with orifices and networks of arteries and bones. Swedish nutcase H.R. Giger designed everything about the alien and he doused the big-headed beast in his own sexually surreal preoccupations. Ron Cobb designed the humans’ ship as a kind of high-tech Gothic castle in space. Both visions still look modern today, which is a rare feat in sci-fi films, where the production designer’s work is often as dated as the hair stylist’s. The terrific cast of only seven actors, each one either in the middle of or at the beginning of a long career, helps things along while director Ridley Scott takes his time to set up the tension and immerse us in the film’s world before he starts spraying blood at us. Even square critics like this one.