Imagine spending countless hours crafting one of the most ambitious film scores of your career, only to watch the film on opening night and hear something else entirely. Well, that’s exactly what happened to composer Jerry Goldsmith when he first saw Alien.
By the time Alien hit screens, director Ridley Scott had quietly replaced significant chunks of Goldsmith’s work in the edit. These changes included using Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2 (1930) during the film’s end credits and reusing cues from Goldsmith’s score for Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) elsewhere in the film, while sections of Goldsmith’s new material were cut, reshaped, and, in some cases, thrown out altogether. Goldsmith was, let’s just say, less than pleased. Honestly, he had every right to be.
Yet, even with all this taken into account, Alien remains one of the most haunting scores in cinema.
The 8th Passenger
Before we get to Alien, let’s briefly talk about Goldsmith himself. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he worked steadily in television in the 1950s and went on to become one of the most prolific and recognizable film composers in history. By the time Alien came along, Goldsmith had a résumé packed with heavy hitters like Planet of the Apes, Chinatown, The Omen, Patton, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (released the same year), and many more. He earned 18 Academy Award nominations over his career and won just once, for The Omen in 1977, which feels like one of the great injustices in movie-music history.
Goldsmith’s calling card was always his versatility. He never shied away from utilizing unusual instrumentation, found sounds, emerging technologies, and extended techniques in harmony with more traditional orchestral elements. Which is exactly why, when Ridley Scott came calling, or rather, Alan Ladd Jr., the president of 20th Century Fox, to be more specific, it seemed like a match made in the cosmos. Looking back, though, it was more like an acoustical beacon of unknown origin.
In space, no one can hear you scream
At the time, Scott was hot off The Duellists, and Alien represented a massive leap in ambition. Along with the sci-fi of it all, the Alien story bleeds body horror with its violation of the human body and use of reproduction as a weaponized mechanism of death. The complex alien Xenomorph design (conjured up by artist H.R. Giger) literally drips with terror, perfectly complementing Alien’s gritty, tactile, and industrial production design. As Ripley, Sigourney Weaver delivers a career-defining performance as one of the first female lead protagonists in a mainstream action/sci-fi/horror film, adding a powerful feminist undercurrent to the narrative. All that said, this mix of genre and narrative elements required an unconventional score to achieve balance, and it was a challenge that Goldsmith was uniquely suited for.
In many ways, what Goldsmith composed for Alien was a direct extension of the approach he’d used for Planet of the Apes a decade earlier. With that score, Goldsmith used the orchestra to generate vibrant texture and an atmospheric, alien soundscape. But Goldsmith had learned a lot in the decade between Apes and Alien, and he initially set out to capture a bit more of the wonder and romantic mystery of outer space (think Star Trek) before venturing into the horror realm. Unfortunately, Scott was hoping for a bit more of the former versus the latter.
Sometimes the scariest things come from within
According to Goldsmith in The Beast Within: The Making of Alien documentary, his original instinct was to write the opening “very romantically and very lyrically,” so the film could begin with the cold majesty of space before the horror surfaced, but Scott wanted that dread there from the jump. So, that first draft was scrapped (though it was used a little later in the film, as well as in Alien: Covenant).
The “Main Title” version actually heard in the film was Goldsmith’s rewrite of the piece and built on a foundation of eerie extended techniques, low drones, stacked minor 7ths, and an almost unearthly sonic palette to cultivate ambiguity. A shankha (a traditional conch-shell instrument) run through an EchoPlex provides a haunting uncertainty, as strings and flute emerge from the darkness with simple, slow, two-note progressions, seeping in like a foreboding fog, echoing into the distance as delicately as they appear. Rather than celebrating the beauty of space, this piece establishes the “alien motif,” hinting at darkness to come.
As we visually enter the Nostromo, Goldsmith’s “passage of time” leitmotif comes into focus with flutes, subverting the traditional I-V chord pattern, making it minor using Eb minor and Bb minor. It’s a comforting, almost tender motif, shared by multiple instruments throughout the film, that speaks to the humanity of the crew and to the ordinary rhythms of people going about their work in an extraordinary setting. Goldsmith uses it to humanize the crew before systematically dismantling them. This contrast with the horror or alien cues wasn’t simply a tonal choice; it was a deliberate narrative decision. When the aural warmth disappears, you feel it.
Alongside the general alien and time motifs, Goldsmith introduces two additional Xenomorph-centric motifs and really goes to war with conventional film scoring methods. Extended string techniques (col legno, sul ponticello, harmonics) create sounds that don’t register as music as much as they do biological processes. He also doubles down on non-traditional orchestral instruments, adding the didgeridoo, serpent, whistles, rattles, and heavy EchoPlex use to the mix. This juxtaposition of the familiar with the unfamiliar divides the film into human and inhuman spaces, us against them. Even when the Xenomorph is not on screen, Goldsmith’s textures make us feel its presence, lurking in the shadows.
A word of warning…
Despite delivering some truly great material, Scott requested that Goldsmith rescore 7 cues. Goldsmith begrudgingly obliged, but Scott still wasn’t quite thrilled with what he got. Scott and his editor, Terry Rawlings, had built the rough cut using temp tracks, as directors often do, and had kinda fallen in love with those. Ultimately, Scott found himself wanting something closer to what he already had.
The specifics of what Scott altered are worth mentioning because the changes weren’t minor. Beyond replacing the end credit piece with Hanson’s, Scott repositioned Goldsmith’s end title music to play over the climax aboard the escape pod, a placement Goldsmith had never intended and actively disliked. Some cues were cut (ex, the facehugger falling on Ripley in the med lab) and left silent, or moved, breaking the dramatic logic Goldsmith had built. Perhaps most shocking is the repurposing of Goldsmith’s prior work for Freud, being used for multiple scenes, including Dallas in the air duct, Ripley searching for Jonesy, and the acid floor moment. And don’t forget, Goldsmith wasn’t aware of any of this until he saw the film opening night. Yikes.
Goldsmith later spoke publicly about his frustration, stating, “Working on Alien was one of the most miserable experiences I’ve ever had in this profession. Ridley is a brilliant filmmaker, and I think that was just his second film, and he wasn’t as articulate then about what the music should do.” He felt the score was misused and that Scott was ultimately seeking more of a soundscape than a supportive emotional undercurrent. While not wrong, the final product makes it a complicated argument to win.
Scott, for his part, has never offered a particularly detailed public account of the creative dispute. His position seems to be that the director’s vision for the film took precedence, which is, of course, practically true. Perhaps attempting to make amends, Scott later hired Goldsmith to work on Legend (1985), but that creative endeavor ended very poorly as well, and is a tale for another day.
The irony with the Alien score is that this friction only deepens the, well…legend. Both scores, whether heard in full or as presented in the film, tell coherent, deeply unsettling stories. If you haven’t sought out Goldsmith’s original score, do yourself a favor and spend some time with it. With expanded editions, the isolated score available on the Blu-ray, and multiple, beautiful physical releases in existence, Alien fans are truly blessed.
Alien is, unavoidably, a score defined equally by what is and isn’t in the finished film. And that’s a strange kind of legacy to carry. But then again, that’s not entirely unlike the film itself. Alien is a movie about violation, isolation, about the terror of having something foreign enter your body and remake it according to its own agenda. So in a way, Goldsmith and his score were subjected to something very on brand, indeed. You have my sympathies, Mr. Goldsmith.
