ABSTRACT
The science-fiction horror film, Alien, presents a complex representation of the monstrous-feminine as archaic mother. Alien begins with a long shot of a spaceship, the Nostromo, hovering in outer space, poised above a set of subtitles which tells us that the ship has a crew of seven and is returning to earth with a cargo of 20 million tons of mineral ore. The concept of the parthenogenetic, archaic mother adds another dimension to the maternal figure and presents us with a new way of understanding how patriarchal ideology works to deny the ‘difference’ of woman in her cinematic representation. The archaic mother is present in all horror films as the blackness of extinction – death. The desires and fears invoked by the image of the archaic mother, as a force that threatens to reincorporate what it once gave birth to, are always there in the horror text – all pervasive, all encompassing – because of the constant presence of death.
