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Welcome, Popversians, to another edition of The Coldest Open, the column where I, your humble horror host, examine the history of scary cinema through the first moments of its standout entries. If you've been here before, you know that this column is all about entertainment on the big screen, but that doesn't mean that the small screen doesn't have some effect on what goes into it. Case in point - we're just a few hours away from the FX/Noah Hawley series Alien: Earth, and as such, I've decided to point this column toward the movie that started it all, Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien.

The way Coldest Open works is this: I'm going to be breaking down five different hallmarks of every great cold open in horror, then judging whether the movie in question pulls them off. If so, that hallmark will get ranked with a "Cold" verdict; if not, it'll get ranked with a "warm." At the end, we'll tally up those verdicts and determine a temperature, ranging all the way from Lukewarm to Absolute Zero.

Sound good? Alrighty then, get those boiler suits out of storage and turn the snooze off of your hypersleep chamber - let's talk about the opener of Alien. 

Alien's Cold-Blooded Killer

It's not until about the 35-minute mark of Alien that we first lay our eyes on the creature that will eventually spawn the xenomorph (fine, 25 minutes if we're talking about the first time we see the eggs), but I'd like to remind you that, title be damned, there are two villains in Alien, and the other one is the first character we meet. That villain would be the sinister Weyland-Yutani Corporation, spoken for by onboard AI MOTHER (later in the franchise called MU/TH/UR 6000).

Both MOTHER and Weyland-Yutani are heartless machines, and the extended period of "rebooting" that begins the movie explains as much to us. That sequence where data shows up against an empty helmet? Pretty sure thta's Ridley Scott telling us that the real power in this movie is not in the hands of human beings - whether that's literal machines like Ash (spoilers!) or the inhuman corporations that control them.

Verdict: Cold

Alien's First Person to Get Iced

Like the film's monster, death also takes a while to make it onto the Nostromo. But unlike that most evolved of interstellar murderers, we at least see death coming. I'm talking about how much of this movie's intro is spent with Kane, played by John Hurt. Every person with tertiary knowledge of this movie knows that it is poor Kane who will be the first victim of the infamous chestburster, but even those without prior knowledge can get a sense that this character's demise isn't long off.

It's Kane who we first see waking up in the hypersleep chamber aboard the Nostromo. He is in a vulnerable state, both individually (he's recovering from a delicate medical process) and as part of a group (we just spent a few minutes in the cold vacuum of space outside the ship. As if the warning signs couldn't get any bigger, just look to Kane's first spoken line. Joking around with the rest of the crew at their first breakfast togethre, Kane pulls a cigarette into his mouth and says:

"I feel dead."

Verdict: Cold

Alien's Polar Plot Intro

Two years before Alien burst its way into pop culture, another science fiction opened its plot with some text on screen and a ship floating through the void. Of course, Star Wars's opening crawl is a hell of a lot longer than Alien's, which literally just lists the Nostromo's cargo, crew number, and destination. You might argue that this machine-like coldness is another way of introducing the inhuman horror of the movie, but I think what works about it is even more surface-level than that. What works about this first moment of Alien is that it's a very simple intro for a very simple plot.

There's no campground mystery we have to deal with to send shivers down our spine nor are their lengthy character moments to get us interested in following who these people are. The Nostromo is full of just a bunch of folks trying to get home - that's as relatable a goal as can be. And with framework that simple, Scott & Co. can focus on introducing the very complicated, completely mond-boggling horror of the xenomorph later.

Verdict: Cold

Alien's Frozen Snapshots

I won't be the first or last person to refer to Alien as "a haunted house movie in space," but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take the time to chat about how the movie's opening visuals establish that fact. The long, slow walk the camera takes down the corridors of the Nostromo uses low lighting and a whole bunch of corners to make the ship hard to grasp, geographically - like any good haunted house, we feel like the setting might change on us at any moment.

Also, I should note how long it takes for these visuals to give us anything even remotely familiar (that is, the drinking birds pictured above). Everything before that is ludicrously industrial, like a great mechanical throat we are being forced down before the eventual dissolution. Seeing that little bit of human design in the form of those toy birds makes the scale of this strange beast feel even larger.

Verdict: Cold

Alien's Bone-Chilling Music

Much like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien opens by exploring the grandeur of outer space through music. Both that film's score and this one (written by the brilliant Jerry Goldsmith) are awe-inspiring, but the haunting nature of this movie's music makes that awe the cosmic kind, the kind a human being feels confronted with the universe's size compared to their own. 

Goldsmith's score achieves this with his use of high pitches and atonal lulls. If the ket of the composition was in a major chord, this kind of music might sound angelic, but its minor tuning makes it something far more intimidating - still high up in the clouds, but far from heaven.

(As a side note, folks interested in this kind of music should check out Alexander Scriabin's work. Like his mystic beliefs, it is as eerie as it is fascinating.)

Verdict: Cold

Alien's Cold Open Temperature: Absolute Zero

I'll admit that I really struggled to write this week's issue of The Coldest Open. Alien is one of my absolute favorite movie franchises and helped develop one of my favorite science-fiction aesthetics. As I was writing this, I was wondering if I could actually ignore all of that in the pursuit of treating this intro as its own piece, or if removing it would kill my ability to talk about the intro, just as removing Kane's facehugger would've killed him.

In the end, I'd argue that what makes us still able to appreciate this opener is that it doesn't actually feature the most iconic piece of the Alien franchise - that is, the xenomorph itself. With the xenomorph waiting in the wings at this point in the film, we can talk about all the brilliant pictures, sounds, and scripting that set it up. In other words, we can still appreciate everything that works about the basement door that is the intro to Alien, even if we already know so much about the monster lurking behind it. 

And if that means I'm not approaching this fairly, well, neither are you.

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." Join Popverse's weekly explorations of the best opening moments of horror cinema in The Coldest Open, and then check out:

• The best horror movies of all time, according to horror aficionado Greg Silber
• The most underrated horror movies from the past couple years
• All the new and upcoming horror movies for 2025 and beyond

And much gore. Er, more. Much more.