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Re-run of the Repressed

or why every franchise monster you’ve ever loved ends up as a dog on a leash …

[Contains mild spoilers for Alien: Earth, Halloween, Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine and A Nightmare on Elm Street]

The idea for this issue has been gestating in my chest ever since I watched the last couple of episodes of FX’s Alien: Earth series, so look away now if you don’t want any spoilers.

Jeri the synthetic Xenomorph from the 1994 Dark Horse limited series Aliens: Stronghold by John Arcudi and Doug 

In those final episodes, as Wendy and the rest of the Lost Boys assert their autonomy to escape Prodigy control they wind up recruiting a Xenomorph as a sort of acid-breath-Lassie that comes at Wendy’s call to tear their corporate henchie pursuers into dog food.

What this series really crystallised for me was the way that in any long running horror franchise there is an almost inevitable slide towards the domestication of the monster. Something which begins as pure unbridled terror, always seems to end up completely defanged: a pet.

But to work out why something isn’t scary anymore perhaps we have to explore what made it scary in the first place.

How horror gets horroring

In terms of scare factor, or the horror affect, there are two main theories and they both begin with Freud. I think most people these days would agree there’s probably quite a lot wrong with Freud, but his concept of the Uncanny outlined in his 1919 essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ (the Uncanny) is quite a useful jumping off point for this discussion.

In this essay Freud defines the Uncanny as, “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”.  Heimlich means something that belongs to the house, familiar and intimate, but can also mean concealed, kept from sight or withheld from others. Consequently, Unheimliche describes something eerie and frightening. Something that was intimate, hidden and/or buried but which is now revealed. The unexpected and terrifying return of that which has been repressed. 

The Shape A.K.A. Michael Myers … Bill Shatner at his most cutting

Years later in his seminal essay for Film Comment magazine, “The Return of the Repressed”, Robin Wood used this psychoanalytical framework to explore how movie monsters can be read as the reemergence of what society represses in order to function. Specifically (but non-exhaustively), female sexuality, threats to the nuclear family, questions of race, class and heteronormativity.

The evidence seems hard to argue with. Taking these one by one, readers will be only too familiar with the “horny women die first” or “sex signals death” trope. This can be seen in the opening of Friday the 13th, the death of Tina at the hands (talons) of Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) or the gruesome end of Mike and Harriet in My Bloody Valentine (1981).

Freddy also maps to the idea of parental sin (in this case he really is the return of repressed familial guilt), while Night of the Living Dead transforms racial violence into stumbling disinterred flesh. Frankenstein’s creature and Jason Voorhees, both throwaway children, are proxies for the dispossessed underclass and finally, homoeroticism and inversion of the family are common themes in many vampire movies.

As Wood points out, each of these films present opportunities for society (ie the monster’s victims) to attempt to deal with the repressed that the monster represents. In what Wood terms reactionary horror, victims must return to the bounds set by society (ie “good values“) in order to banish the threat (A Nightmare on Elm Street, I’m looking at you). In more progressive films (e.g. the original Night of the Living deadand The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) the underlying injustice/original sin must be exorcised before the status quo can be restored (at least temporarily).

Weird be getting weirder

But not all horror seems to work this way. Mark Fisher uses his book The Weird and the Eerie (2016) to suggest that there is another category of monster altogether: those threats that are ontological, that is to do with the nature of being, rather than merely psychoanalytical. For him, something like Lovecraft’s cosmic horror or Carpenter’s The Thing are eruptions into human reality of “the outside”. 

Where the psychoanalytical uncanny can be said to make the familiar strange, these xenosemic horrors introduce the genuinely untranslatable. The term (from xenos, foreign, and sema, sign) describes monsters that operate outside human symbolic systems entirely. In contrast to hidden meanings that are uncovered, these are meanings that were never human to begin with. 

If all monsters are scary because they function either as something which has been hidden through repression or something that is totally outside human meaning, then both are essentially categories of the unknowable “other”. Given this understanding it’s possible to see how successive franchise outings tend to cancel this out.

Phase 1: eruption (“I admire its purity”)

In this phase we get the monster as its purest manifestation of “the outside” or “the repressed”. 

If we think of the original Alien, the title tells us everything that we need to know about the eponymous creature. Back in 1979 there were no taxonomies, it was just “that goddamn thing”. Much of its horror derived from its unintelligibility. 

Similarly, Michael Myers was credited as just “the shape” in his inaugural outing and described as “purely, simply, evil,” by Doctor Loomis, the psychologist who treated him for years. Myers’ fixation on Laurie appears to have no logic or motive. (In fact, Myers is an interesting example of an entity that sits within both of the categories we’ve defined here. Although he’s positioned as the return of repressed familial violence, he functions in the film as a kind of xenosemic intrusion, in that he is both motiveless and essentially unkillable.)

Freddy Krueger for his part is at his most psychotically primal in, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Returning to the notion of the Unheimliche, he inhabits the most familiar and intimate place that his victims should be safe within, their dreams. In NightmareFreddy hardly speaks at all, and while an origin story exists, the film itself doesn’t explore it. 

Phase 2: codification (“There are certain rules that one must abide by”)

Once that first movie has been a success, well then, the amputated head is well and truly rolling. 

Subsequent franchise films demand lore and as fans and films build meaning around the creature, it starts to become explicable. Mythologies arise, witness Jason’s immortality, the Alien lifecycle (absent from the original instalment) or Freddy’s dream lore. Even naming a creature lessens its otherness. The viewer’s attention shifts from asking the question, “what the hell is that?” to “who dies next?”

Phase 3: icon (“Welcome to prime time, bitch!”)

Success breeds success and consequently, the monster becomes a brand identity. It appears on lunch boxes, becomes a Halloween costume, or is the focus of thirteen limited edition Funko Pops (yeah, yeah, I’ve got them all too).

Now franchise instalments increasingly dwell on filling out esoteric bits of lore, providing backstory and/or are peppered with endless easter eggs. 

Terrifying

Phase 4: domestication (“This is a multi-million dollar installation. He can’t make that kind of decision. He’s just a grunt.”)

By this final stage all of the creature’s otherness has been neutralised, the poor creature’s ability to scare hollowed out and filled with merch. Witness Alien: Earth or those annoying pet raptors from Jurassic World.

Here Xeno! Fetch!

Each successive phase of domestication builds upon the last, smoothing over the entity’s essential unknowability, locating its contradictions and otherness within a familiar web of meaning, estranging it further and further from its original horror affect and turning it into (gasp!) a product.

The villain was old man capital all along!

In much the same way that Adorno theorised that radical art is always disarmed by the culture industry, horror’s monsters face extinction not from pitchfork wielding mobs, but from familiarity and the relentless appetite of our cultural metabolism.

And yet, some monsters resist. 

Carpenter’s The Thing endures perhaps because it never spawned a franchise. There is no mythology, no merchandise, no (un)happy meals. Similarly, the “It” in It Followsremains unnamed and undigested (for now at least). These remain what they always were: unknowable, unassimilated and genuinely terrifying. 

The monster that stays wild stays scary.

Playlist:

My debut fantasy novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World is the Barnes & Noble Speculative Fiction Pick for April 2026. It’s available here.

Alien³: of bald caps and bad dreams

[Warning: contains a brief mention of sexual violence and major spoilers for Alien³ ]

Welcome to an occasional series of posts where I kick around sequels that are widely derided and make a case for their re-evaluation.

– Bangs gavel –

So, in the dock before us today we have: Alien³.

The case against the second sequel to Squidly Rott’s (sorry) haunted house in space film is pretty well documented, but let me summarise it here.

  1. In its first ten minutes, the movie does away with two of the emotional anchors of its immediate predecessor, Aliens, namely Newt and Hicks. Emotionally it’s all downhill from here.
  2. There are long stretches of the movie where there’s not much tension (and very little else).
  3. The quadrupedal alien, aka man’s worst friend/xeno-woof, is objectively goofy.
  4. The inhabitants of Fiorina 161 (Fury) present a cast of poorly developed characters, most of whom all blur into one dude with a skinhead and a Bible-itch.
  5. They kill Ripley
  6. THEY KILL RIPLEY
  7. I SAID THEY KILL RIPLEY!

Traditionally, the movie’s apologists have pointed to the chaos around the film’s production and it’s worth taking a moment to remember exactly how much of a definition of development hell this movie was.

So stay frosty, people, I’m going to do this as quickly as I can, (you can also just skip ahead. For those gentle readers with a yen for this sort of grimoire there’s an in-depth account here):

The mere existence of this book speaks volumes

Producers Walter Hill & David Giler hired William Gibson for a cyber-punk styled sequel that Fox airlocked, then Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) came aboard with Eric Red (Near Dark) just as Sigourney Weaver became disillusioned on the series’ obsession with guns, so David Twohy (Critters 2) delivered a Cold War-in-space draft without Ripley until Fox demanded her reinstatement, after which Vincent Ward (The Navigator) pitched his space-monks on a five-mile wooden planet with writer John Fasano before being jettisoned because, well, actually insane, whereupon rookie David Fincher inherited the mess with Larry Ferguson (Highlander), whose portrayal of Ripley Sigourney Weaver rejected, which forced Hill & Giler back, only for them to be secretly rewritten by Rex Pickett when Fox hated their ending, in a move worthy of Weyland-Yutani itself. Giler then produced another nine(!) revisions of the movie, but by this point they were already building sets.

(Phew.)

David Fincher has famously stated that working on Alien³ was the worst experience of his life due to Fox’s overbearing presence. After filming wrapped, there were extensive reshoots and extra sequences inserted into the film at the studio’s insistence prior to its release. (And let’s not even mention those dire publicity photos of poor old Sigourney in a bald cap).

Buy me a cup of tea?

Eventually, the movie was released in 1992 to very mixed reviews and domestic underperformance. Fincher himself (perhaps unsurprisingly) treats the film the way the rest of us treat the last two Indiana Jones sequels. I mean, there were only ever three Indy movies right?

Alien 3 DC | Movies / Series | Filme aliens, Filmes classicos e ...
Whoever produced this poster’s strapline clearly had no sense of irony.

But, despite (and perhaps because) of this, Alien³ is deeply weird and eerie, certainly possessed of a more haunted and tragic atmosphere than any predecessor or sequel. Certainly, I can’t imagine any contemporary franchise instalment taking the risks this film does and one could make the case that the film’s balls-out nutso bravery flies in the face of the reheated duds that have come in its wake.

So, working through the common objections one by one:

Newt & Hicks, nixed.

Yeah, a difficult one, but I think Newt and Hicks not making it to Fury works pretty well as a statement of intent. This film is a departure from what has come before and it sets the tone unashamedly for what’s to come. This isn’t going to be a gung-ho film about space marines.

Newt and Hicks’ deaths also mean that Ripley is grieving throughout the narrative and Weaver’s performance is easily the best thing about the film. In fact, I’d argue that it’s her best work in the series. The loneliness, vulnerability and strength that she brings to the portrayal of grief here are visceral.

Nothing to see here, (prison) guvnor

Similarly, I’d argue that the long lingering shots of the corridors and ventilation shafts that comprise Fury’s prison facility are freighted with a deep sense of liminal horror. The opening scene, where the camera creeps through the crash debris of the EEV, its slow tracking through the tunnels and shafts of the lead-works combined with the surveillance footage of deserted corridors, crackling fluorescent lights and humming machinery are all reminiscent of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s deep-time classic Homo Sapiens. These are all spaces that should be populated, but aren’t, possessed of a sense of dread, of something missing or withheld, charged with the same creepypasta unease as the Backrooms.

if you’re enjoying this, you could buy me a cup of tea

Depopulated, de-centred

Nowhere is this eerie payload more evident than in the emergence of the creature itself. This chest-bursting moment is at complete odds with the gross-out splatter-core of the original movie. In both the theatrical version and the assembly cut the alien’s birth is intercut with Hicks and Newt’s funeral, but in each version, the xeno-woof (theatrical)/oxo-morph (assembly cut) emerges from its animal host in an unpeopled space. In the assembly cut ,the birth is even followed by a long, lonely pull-out from Babe the ox showing the birth site surrounded by empty space.

Even with poor Spike the dog’s death throes in the theatrical cut, the birth scene has an odd, disassociated feel to it more than one of straightforward horror. Partly, I think, this is because at this point in the series chest-bursting had become an expected staple of the Alien movies, but also because, yet again, this pivotal scene is happening unbeknownst to Ripley and the prison population. The humans are de-centred in their own story.

This Whippet was originally planned to star as the Xenomorph for a ...
Whippet … good? (with apologies to Devo)

Xeno-woof/Oxo-morph

Much has been made of Fincher’s dog-in-a-suit xeno-woof, but in the film’s defence the only dog shots are mercifully brief and, in the assembly cut, were cleaned up by the DVD restoration team with greatly improved compositing. For me, the creature works as a classic form of weird ontology that upsets categories, is it a dog/ox/alien? The cute post-birth puppetry of the bambi-burster only reinforces how disturbing the creature’s mutability is.

Look at me! I am soooo cute!

But also, I will eat your fucking face.

A seven foot walking cock with metal teeth

It’s no secret that H.R. Giger designed the xenomorph to be a seven-foot ambulatory cock with metal teeth, but Alien³ is the only movie in the series that draws an explicit parallel between the creature’s threat to bodily autonomy and sexual violence.

From this point of view, it’s possible to view the prisoners’ lack of individuality, specifically their shaved heads, uniforms and blurred identities as a way of collapsing them into a kind of faceless hostile masculinity.

Certainly, from her first entrance into the prison mess hall, Ripley is the focus of a predatory male gaze and her female identity is blamed explicitly by the prisoner’s leader, Dillon, for bringing “temptation” into their midst.

This ugly mood comes to a head most starkly when a group of prisoners attempt to sexually assault Ripley at the lead-works, but is also directly paralleled in the way in which the alien itself “leers” over her later when it traps her in the infirmary, its secondary jaw hovering with what seems to be sexual menace.

Both of these grim moments stage Ripley’s body as a site of threatened violation, reinforcing patriarchal stereotypes and drawing uncomfortable parallels between male and monstrous aggression.

Chip in, so I can buy a bald cap of my very own?

THEY KILL RIPLEY!

Yes, they do. But there’s a grace and beauty in her final sacrifice. It can be read as a final and definitive act of agency and autonomy. A noble fuck you to Bishop 2 and the Weyland-Yutani goons trying to exploit her and the alien embryo that she carries.

Again though, the film (at least in its theatrical version) delivers a strange and disturbing final image. In her last moments, as Ripley tumbles to her death, the alien bursts from her chest. She grabs it, holding it in an uncanny mirror of a mother-infant embrace, cradling it until they’re both swallowed by the molten metal below.

It’s a touching and deeply weird moment, which feels to me at least, like a fitting and dignified capstone to the trilogy.

In the end, Alien³ may be flawed, but I would say that its utter strangeness and sombre mood make it far more than a failure. Yes, it is bleak, but it’s also a very weird and eerily singular film with an emotional impact that, for me at least, lingers long after the credits have rolled.

But, more importantly, what do you think?

Playlist:

My debut fantasy novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World is published on April 7th 2026 by Titan Books. Pre-order it here.

new story at egg+frog

my short story The Mating Ritual of the 3D Printer is now up at the excellent egg+frog a new journal of British writing. Read it here:

hulk is tired

I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but I think I might be a bit bored with speculative fiction. Or perhaps, speculative fiction is a bit bored with me.

Could it be that we’ve just been seeing too much of each other during lockdowns one through three?

“It’s not you, it’s me,” spec-fic might say on our regular date night held in the corner of a friendly tavern (built beneath the shadow of towering rocket-ship).

Certainly, I seem to have read a lot of speculative fiction lately that simply moves the genre furniture around the house rather than adding a new wing (or preferably) trap-door to it.

It’s a thought that reminds me a little of what Robert Eaglestone thinks is genre’s birth defect. For him, literary fiction is really where it’s at.

“It says everything,” he says. (Which is the whole point apparently.)

From his perspective, genre fiction, too-often, is only ever talking to and about itself.

And while I think this observation does articulate some of my own weariness, how to square this with his rather contradictory special pleading for lit-fic itself, which he regards as a non-generic type of writing whose tendency to be in conversation with its own history is validation of its uniqueness rather than a flaw.

As an aside, I wonder if beneath some of the slightly sniffy attitudes expressed towards spec-fic in literary circles lies the fact that it often sells a lot better than literary fiction.

Having all that filthy lucre smeared over your tentacles means that genre
cannot be art at all, rather it is something commercial, hybridised and
degraded. That said, Dickens and Cervantes both turned out contemporary
best-sellers and you can’t get much more canon than little Davy Copperfield or the Madman of La Mancha. (It’s possible then, that perhaps critics will even regard Stephen King a little more kindly in a hundred year’s time.)

So, I’m not entirely sure where this slightly circular and self-indulgent post has got me.

Perhaps, I should start seeing other genres?

I’ll be honest about it with speculative fiction. We’ll go to the usual place on date night, drink half a bottle of chianti and work out some ground rules. Without them, in this sort of situation, someone will always get hurt. (Most probably be me.)

Or perhaps, after all, it really is just as the picture below says: Hulk is tired and Hulk should have a nap.

Image of the hulk sleeping. “Hulk is tired.” He says, “Hulk will sleep and everything that has made Hulk tired will change”
Hulk is really tired.

autonomicon

autonomicon is a simple bot inspired by Alan Trotter and Allison Parrish’s work that generates Lovecraftian automatic writing by pulling random snippets from an online resource storing Lovecraft’s corpus and splicing it together with words suggested by a simple statistical API.

To use just click the ’Summon’, button to get the next word from the bot or select one of the word tiles to add your own choices into the mix. The algorithm determines which words are the most likely to follow the last word displayed (the numbers beneath them are a measure of probable occurrence).