The Sci-Fi Comedy By A Horror Master That Created Alien
“In space, no one can hear you laugh” could have easily been the tagline for the 1974 space comedy Dark Star, the movie that inspired the first Alien. Despite being the basis for a hugely successful sci-fi franchise, Dark Star is still a relatively unknown film. The very definition of a cult classic, except in this case, the cult members all went on to make their own more successful projects.
The Spaced Out Odyssey
The road from Dark Star to Alien starts with writer Dan O’Bannon and legendary horror director John Carpenter. The two filmmakers were students at the University of Southern California when they decided to make a student film described as the antithesis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Where 2001 was about the grandeur of the cosmos, Carpenter and O’Bannon wanted Dark Star to focus on blue-collar workers in space bored out of their minds.
The Other Resident Alien
Dark Star follows a scout ship in the mid-22nd century assigned the boring task of locating and blowing up unstable planets with the potential to harm future Earth colonies. To relieve their boredom, the crew of the starship Dark Star play pranks on each other and chase after the ship’s resident alien, a beach ball-like creature made out of—what else?—an actual beach ball. In case it wasn’t apparent from the phrase “student film,” Dark Star was a very low-budget production.
The Blue-Collar Connection To Aliens
On the surface, Dark Star and Alien have little in common. One is a satire featuring a philosophical discussion with a talking bomb, and the other is a horror movie with a creature that bursts out of people’s chests. Dig a little deeper, though, and it’s not hard to see how O’Bannon’s work on one led him to write the other.
Alien is often described as a movie about truckers in space. Where Star Wars is about a chosen one accepting their destiny and saving the galaxy, Alien is about Joe and Jane Schmoe just trying to earn a paycheck. And Alien can trace that working-man aesthetic right back to Dark Star.
Anti Star Wars Before Star Wars
In both Dark Star and Alien, the technology is bare bones in that it’s functional rather than extravagant. You won’t find anything bright and colorful like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise here. Just buttons and knobs in a drab industrial palette.
Despite predating Star Wars by a few years, Dark Star feels like a response to the swashbuckling space opera. The movie acts as a view into what the everyday rank-and-file denizens of the galaxy are up to while Luke Skywalker is busy jetting through the cosmos looking for his next adventure. It’s only fitting then that a few years after the release of A New Hope, Dark Star scribe O’Bannon would be the one to write the first anti-Star Wars film with Alien.
A Genre-Defining Hidden Treasure
For such a little-known film, Dark Star went on to inspire many other sci-fi projects. Along with Alien, the movie served as the initial inspiration for the British comedy Red Dwarf and the Rooster Teeth series Red vs. Blue. Perhaps most importantly, the movie was a springboard for two of the most talented filmmakers to graduate from USC.
After Dark Star, Dan O’Bannon went on to write not only Alien but the zombie classic Return of the Living Dead, which he also directed. Carpenter, of course, went on to make two of the greatest horror movies of all time— 1978’s Halloween and 1982’s The Thing.
Witness The Sci-Fi Spectacle On Streaming
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Ultimately, Dark Star walked so Alien could run … and thrust it’s little inner mouth thingy into the hearts of horror movie fans everywhere. Dark Star might have been a $60,000 student film masquerading as a feature-length production, but it also turned out to be one of the most influential sci-fi movies of the 20th century.
As of this writing, you can stream Dark Star for free on Tubi, Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel, among others.
