“I did it first”: David Cronenberg and David Lynch claim Alien, the 8th Passenger is a ripoff of their films – Film News

Everything about the accusations of these two legendary filmmakers against Ridley Scott’s film.

Few science fiction films are more legendary than Alien. Its enormous success ended up giving rise to a franchise that is still going strong – this year “Alien: Romulus” will be released – but another thing that it provoked, and that many may not know, were the accusations of plagiarism made by David Cronenberg and David Lynch.

“Now we know who the thief is”

The director of Lords of Crime was the one who most criticized Ridley Scott’s film for this reason. In fact, in 1979, he was already frustrated with the film and commented the following to Fangoria magazine:

“The film has no metaphysics, no philosophy. The creature turns out to be a man in a crocodile suit chasing a group of people in a room. I think my own films achieve much more success by touching a deeper nerve, more than just the reaction that you don’t want to be eaten by a crocodile. Alien was nothing more than a $300,000 B movie with a $10 million budget.

The parasitic device is not used metaphorically, it was not used to evoke anything. In Alien, John Hurt he has the parasite inside him and continues with his normal life. In Chills, the parasite stays inside people and changes their behavior and motivations. It is used for more than just shocking.”.

In fact, Cronenberg later recalled that he was not alone in thinking this way, for when a German festival screened several of his early films, one spectator stood up indignantly and said: “How dare you show this film? It’s obvious you stole it from the movie Alien! There are parasites coming out of his mouth and there is acid that burns his face, just like in Alien! When Cronenberg responded that his film had been made three years earlier, the viewer responded, “Ah, now we know who the thief is.”.

Still, I’m sure some people will think it’s just a coincidence, but Cronenberg went into more detail in a 2011 interview with The Film Experience about why he was convinced he had been plagiarized:

“Well… you can say they’re influenced by you or they’re stealing from you. It’s the same basic thing. Same with Alien. My movie Chills has a parasite that lives in you and burns out of your body and jumps into your face and down your throat. Dan O’Bannon I knew my film. In a case like this, you wouldn’t mind a little credit for it. But beyond that, if you’re influential – and I’ve had a lot of young filmmakers tell me that I was a big influence and that sometimes their films remind me of my old films – you take that as a compliment. Obviously, you struck a chord. It’s good for people to be aware of this. But beyond that, it is inevitable; things become a common understanding, so to speak. The parasite issue. I mean, there are films that are called Parasite. But I did it first, but, you know, whatever”.

An interview in the book David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grünberg makes it clear what the filmmaker’s source is for being so clear:

“I have to say that some of my images, like the parasite, ended up in things like Alien, which was more popular than any of the films I’d made. But the screenwriter for Alien certainly saw those films, Dan O’Bannon. The idea of parasites coming out of your body, using a fluid and jumping on your face, all of this is in Chills

John Landis told me that Dan was very familiar with what he called “the Canadian films,” namely Chills and Enraged in the Fury of Sex, when he wrote Alien. And that’s why I know he stole the entire parasite scene from Chills. And Ron Shusett said, ‘He’s never seen these films and doesn’t know anything about them’… later Dan O’Bannon denied that he had seen these films, but John Landis swears he talked about them all the time and knew them very good”.

Cronenberg acknowledges that “everyone films everyone,” but also notes of O’Bannon that “he was apparently a hostile, very aggressive person. I don’t know, I never met him.” The director of the masterful Videodrome would return to the subject in a conversation with Collider in 2015, in which he was emphatic:

“Like Alien, for example, which totally borrowed things from my film Chills, it had a parasite that lives in your body, comes out of your chest, jumps on your face and jumps out of your mouth, and suddenly you see it in a studio film, which was a huge success, Alien. The screenwriter, Dan O’Bannon, had seen the film, we know he saw my film and, let’s say, appropriated it”.

What about Lynch?

In turn, the accusation made by the director of City of Dreams we only know indirectly, but it came to us through HR Giger, who in the early 80s wanted to collaborate with David Lynch on his adaptation of Dune. This is how he told Cinefantastique magazine what happened:

“Through some friends, I asked Lynch if he was interested in me collaborating. I never heard back from him. I later learned that he was upset because he thought we had copied his baby monster’s Alien monster in Eraserhead, which was not true. Ridley Scott and I hadn’t even seen this movie at the time. If any film influenced Alien, it was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I would have loved to collaborate with Lynch on Dune, but apparently he wanted to do all the designs himself.”.

Giger would speak again on the subject in the book The Complete Lynch, where he noted that “people have asked Lynch about me, but he’s not very enthusiastic about my work. I’m told he thinks we stole Eraserhead’s baby for the Alien bust, but that’s not true. I told Ridley Scott he should see the movie, even though he never did. David Lynch said the film was filmed exactly like his, but that couldn’t be because Ridley hadn’t seen it! Lynch was talking as if it was some kind of homage to his work… He doesn’t seem to like me very much, and I don’t know why.”

In turn, the only thing Lynch is known to have said in public about the film was in the German magazine Filmjahrbuch Nr. 1, in the mid-80s, where the interviewer commented that, upon seeing Alien, he was reminded a lot of Eraserhead and that those responsible for the first were certainly very inspired by it. This was Lynch’s response:

“You might be right. But I’m not one to judge. Giger once said this is one of his favorite movies.”.

*Translation from a partner website of QuandoCinema

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