In Space, No One Can Hear You Repress: Alien as a Queer Sci-Fi Masterpiece

There’s a moment in Alien where Ellen Ripley - sweaty and stripped down to a tiny white vest and bikini briefs - pads around the ship alone, barefoot, preparing to blow the whole damn thing to hell. It’s not the famous chestburster scene or the airlock finale, but it’s the one that’s always stayed with me.

It’s a scene loaded with vulnerability, power, tension, and something else that took me years to name: desire. A desire not for anyone else in the frame, just for her: the ultimate reluctant hero, survivalist, gender outlaw, and queer icon.

Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) gave us a haunted house in space. The film was a game-changer for sci-fi horror and a masterclass in suspense. It’s also, quietly yet unmistakably, a queer film. Not in the rainbow-flag-waving sense, of course, but in the deeper, stranger, more delicious way that queerness can live in the margins, in bodies and in monsters. You can find it in the way gender bends and warps, in slippery dynamics of desire and power, and in the abject weirdness of the Xenomorph. Alien isn’t just a film about fear: it’s a film about alienation, in every sense of the word.

Ripley - not your average final girl

Let’s start with Ripley, because duh. When Sigourney Weaver first emerges as the unlikely final girl of Alien, she’s not just surviving, she’s redefining the idea of what a female protagonist in sci-fi can be. Ripley was originally written as a male character and, despite casting Weaver, the character wasn’t rewritten much at all - and I think it shows. She’s not sexualised, maternal, or “strong but emotional” in the way so many female leads are retrofitted to be. Ripley is competent, tough and emotionally contained. Crucially, she’s not particularly interested in anyone else’s approval.

She also looks different. She’s all sharp cheekbones, cropped curls, and utilitarian jumpsuits. She’s not a glamorous space princess; she’s a working-class crew member on a glorified mining ship. And in a genre obsessed with hyper-feminine aliens and male saviors, Ripley’s performance of gender feels non-conforming. She’s not playing by the rules of how a “woman” should be on-screen in 1979 and that alone feels radical.

Also, let’s be real, she’s hot. That casual confidence? The deep competence? The way she takes control of every scene without trying to dominate it? It's queer catnip. Watching Ripley navigate the terror of the Xenomorph while refusing to be rescued was the moment I realised I didn’t just want to be her, I might also want to make out with her, ideally in a spaceship air duct.

The life cycle of a Xenomorph

Let’s move on then, to the alien. One of the most terrifying, beautiful, and frankly horny monsters in cinema history. Designed by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, the Xenomorph is sleek black flesh, dripping acid, and biomechanical eroticism. It’s insect and machine: phallic and vaginal, masculine and feminine. Its head is a literal gleaming dome of gender ambiguity, and its tail? Let’s just say Giger wasn’t not thinking about penetration.

There’s also something inherently non-normative about the creature’s life cycle: an egg, a facehugger, a chestburster, and then finally the sleek, hypersexual killing machine. It’s a process of transformation and emergence that echoes many queer experiences. The horror the creature evokes is not just about violence, but about the transgression of bodily and societal norms. Its existence resists containment, classification, or assimilation; it is terrifying because it is unknowable and ungovernable. The queerness of the Xenomorph is not just in its appearance or behaviour, but in the way it unsettles the world around it. It becomes a site of projected fear - of bodies that change, of genders that blur, of life that refuses to play by the rules.

Turning body horror on its head

One of the most talked-about themes in Alien is the way it inverts gendered body horror. While most horror films of the time (and let’s be honest, many today) associate terror with female bodies (think slasher virgins, demonic pregnancies, evil mothers etc.), Alien flips that lens. The now-iconic chestburster scene is effectively a grotesque parody of childbirth, only this time it’s a male character (played by John Hurt) who experiences the invasion, gestation, and violent delivery.

It’s hard to overstate how radical this reinvention was in 1979. It’s still radical today. By reassigning vulnerability and victimhood to men, it throws traditional gender roles into chaos. For a queer viewer - or anyone who’s navigated gender dysphoria, bodily control, or medical trauma - it’s hard not to feel a pang of recognition. Our bodies are often the sites of fear and fascination. We are both the host and the threat.

Survival of the queerist

One of the most subtle threads running through Alien is loneliness. The ship is vast and impersonal. The crew are colleagues, not friends. There's no romance, no love story, no intimacy to distract from the fact that this is a hostile environment filled with industrial machinery and corporate indifference. Sound familiar?

For many queer people, especially in earlier decades, survival meant navigating institutions that are indifferent to your experience. It can mean isolating yourself for safety, or feeling failed by the systems around you. Ripley is the only one in Alien who listens to her gut, the only one who takes the threat seriously. She is a lone voice of resistance in a ship full of silence and the only one who refuses to prioritise corporate profit over human life. That’s not just feminist; it’s queer as hell.

And when Ripley finally escapes the spaceship alone with only a cat (I mean, come on!!!) for company, she doesn’t rejoice. She’s exhausted. But she’s alive. In that moment, Ripley isn’t just a final girl; she’s a survivor of systems that were never built for her to thrive in.

Final thoughts: a woman, a cat and a monster

Alien is still relevant today, not just down to its near-flawless direction, production design, and performances, but because it doesn’t settle for simple answers. It’s a film about fear, yes, but not just fear of death - fear of the unknown, the uncontrollable, the unknowable. It’s about navigating the tension between what you are and what the world wants you to be. Ripley didn’t just survive the alien, she survived a system that tried to erase her.

In a world that still struggles to understand queerness, Alien doesn’t ask you to understand. It just asks you to watch. It’s a queer film not only in metaphors, but in its structural rejection of normative expectations - no clear hero, no love story, no tidy resolutions. Just a woman, a cat, a monster, and a message: survive, even when no one is listening.