This is one of the best trailers in the history of cinema: 46 years ago, it was already a masterpiece even before the film.

While returning to Earth, the ship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal coming from a nearby planet. Awakened from hyper-sleep, the crew tries to discover its source, which is a warning…

46 years after its release, all moviegoers and sci-fi fans will surely remember the synopsis of Ridley Scott’s absolute masterpiece. Alien, a widely dissected seminal work about which almost everything has already been written, became a sci-fi and horror classic that launched one of the greatest franchises in film history.

A hypnotic beginning

The beginning of Scott’s film is hypnotic. The silence of space, infinite, was barely relieved by Jerry Goldsmith’s score. And the film’s title, which emerges from the center, slowly, gradually, brilliantly enhancing the angst-inducing side of veteran director Richard Greenberg. It is to him that we owe the Superman theme song, a year earlier.

“This theme song came from the idea that we needed something disturbing for the audience. It’s disturbing for people to see these letters appear, slowly. We wanted to create tension as the letters appear, which seems very mechanical.” said Greenberg.

“We also wanted to break the rules a bit with this very spaced sans serif typeface, which has never been experimental before. When all the letters are completed to form a word, I think people weren’t ready to read it as a movie title because of the spacing between the letters..

A masterpiece lasting less than two minutes

In fact, even before the movie, the first Alien trailer was already a masterpiece in itself. At just under two minutes long and very effective, it managed to sell the film to the public while keeping the plot as tight as possible. It’s enough to wonder at a time when Hollywood has developed a persistent habit over the years of delivering trailers that some of them, on the contrary, reveal too much…

Here it is again for fun…

The first trailer for Alien, without any dialogue, has become a benchmark because it adopts the structure of a horror film. It is also the matrix upon which future battalions of genre film trailers will be based.

The first 50 seconds act as a teaser, the camera panning across the uneven terrain, and then the egg. When it opens, the trailer cuts to stills from the film.

The montage then cuts between shots of the crew of the Nostromo exploring the alien world they’ve found, Cat Jones looking terrified, and Ripley and crew apparently chasing something “invisible”.

At 1 min 35, the violence explodes in a very fast montage of shots overlaid with an absolutely menacing and intense sound montage. At 1 minute 44 everything calms down again. No more noise until the famous shutter release from the movie appears: “No one in space can hear you scream.”

An absolute masterpiece of montage, tension and raw terror that is still unmatched 46 years later.