Neil Gaiman – Blood and Porridge

October 1, 2025

In space, no one can hear the alarm

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20^th Television / FXP

What an exasperating franchise the Alien one is. It kicked off in 1979 with one masterpiece, Ridley’s Scott’s Alien, and continued in 1986 with another masterpiece, James Cameron’s Aliens. But its instalments after that have been, in various ways, maddeningly uneven. They’ve contained some intriguing ideas, themes, characters, sequences and images. Yet those good things were nullified by other things that were utterly duff.

David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) had as its setting a fascinatingly grim, labyrinthine industrial complex that’d been repurposed as a prison. But it was hamstrung by an ill-conceived script wherein most of the interesting characters vanished halfway through and the movie’s interminable final act consisted of indistinguishable bald guys running Super-Mario-like through corridors.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1998) had some great ideas – Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley character reincarnated as a superhuman clone containing bits of alien DNA, the setting of a stricken space station that’s basically The Poseidon Adventure (1974) in outer space, gripping action set-pieces underwater and on a vertiginous ladder. But it suffered from juvenile plotting and dialogue, a crap-looking new monster (‘the Newborn’), and misjudged performances ranging from Ron Perlman’s obnoxious overacting to Winona Ryder’s wan underacting.

In 2012 and 2017 Ridley Scott returned to the franchise and made two prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which again had some nice touches – especially Michael Fassbender’s performances as the angelic android Walter and the devilish android David. But the prequels were ruined by their obsession with creating an over-complicated and unnecessary backstory for the aliens. Also, there were some clunking scenes such as the one in Covenant where Walter and David meet up, Walter starts playing a flute, and David suggests, “You blow, I’ll do the fingering.” Ooh-err, missus.

Recently, we got Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus (2024) and, again, some lovely moments – a sequence where the surviving protagonists have to negotiate a shaft in zero gravity while deadly globules of acidic alien-blood float around them; or a bit where a hitherto nice android (David Jonsson) hooks into some tech in order to open a door, accidentally gets upgraded, and turns into a callous shit. But Alien: Romulus blew its potential by paying too much fan-service to the previous films. “Please,” I was thinking as the film’s big finale approached. “Don’t anyone say, ‘Get away from her, you bitch!’” But wouldn’t you know it? Someone did.

© 20^th Century Studios / Scott Free Productions / Brandywine Productions

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the two crossover movies where the aliens encounter the creatures from the Predator franchise, Alien vs Predator (2004) and Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2007). That’s because I regard both films as unspeakable shite that deserves to be fired into a black hole.

Now we’ve just had an eight-part TV series entitled Alien: Earth. This was masterminded by Noah Hawley, responsible for five seasons of the Fargo TV show (2014-24) inspired by the 1996 movie of the same name made by Joel and Ethan Cohen. It pains me to say that I feel the way about it as I feel about the post-Aliens alien movies. Alien: Earth has some good bits, but those are offset by some crap bits.

Here’s Alien: Earth’s set-up. (Be warned that spoilers for the series are coming.) It takes place in 2120, shortly before the events depicted in Ridley Scott’s original Alien. Earth is controlled by half-a-dozen super-corporations, including Weyland-Yutani – ‘the Company’ – which featured in the movies. Episode One sees a Weyland-Yutani spaceship, which has been on a mission of exploration and has collected specimens of five different extra-terrestrial species, including some worryingly familiar-looking eggs, return to earth, out-of-control, and crash into a skyscraper in Bangkok. Thailand is the property not of Weyland-Yutani but a rival corporation called Prodigy. The young, impulsive CEO of Prodigy, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), sends in rescue and security teams to secure the disaster site – but also to seize whatever cargo the spaceship is carrying.

Lately, Prodigy’s big project has been to ‘upload’ human consciousnesses – souls, basically – into super-strong and super-durable synthetic bodies. The results aren’t just ‘synths’ – the trendier term for the ‘androids’, like Ash, Bishop, Call, David and Walter, who appeared earlier in the franchise – but ‘hybrids’, which have human ghosts in their synthetic machines. However, Prodigy has only been able to do this with young consciousnesses – they’ve transplanted the souls of six children, dying from incurable illnesses, into the artificial and enhanced bodies of six adults. The first operation moved the soul of a terminally sick girl called Marcy Hermit into a hybrid Boy Kavalier has christened ‘Wendy’ (Sydney Chandler). He’s a big fan of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911) and insists on naming all his hybrids after Peter Pan characters.

Boy Kavalier sends the six hybrids, supervised by an enigmatic synth called Kirsh (Timothy Oliphant), to the crash site to test their responses in an emergency. What he doesn’t know is that Marcy Hermit’s brother (Alex Lawther) is one of the medics already there – and, inevitably, Wendy encounters this sibling of her former self. Meanwhile, it turns out that one spaceship crew-member has survived the crash, a science officer called Morrow (Babou Ceesay), who’s unswervingly loyal to Weyland-Yutani and isn’t about to let a rival company steal his alien specimens. Morrow belongs to a third category of non-human or non-quite-human persons in the 22^nd century, besides synths and hybrids. He’s a cyborg, part-machine, and has a mechanical arm that can exude blades or work as an oxy-acetylene torch.

Boy Kavalier gets the five specimens off the spaceship and transports them to his island headquarters, where they’re placed in a laboratory for study. Predictably – and due partly to Morrow’s attempts to retrieve them for Weyland-Yutani – things go wrong and some of them escape. The escapees include one from a much-loved, 46-year-old movie franchise…

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20^th Television / FXP

I’ll start with the show’s shortcomings and my first criticism is an obvious one for fans of the films. The aliens aren’t in it much. Alien: Earth features three of the H.R. Giger-designed beasties, one birthed on the spaceship before it crashes into the earth, one created in Prodigy’s laboratory, and one produced by an egg-released ‘face-hugger’ that latches onto a human victim, but in Alien: Earth they’re little more than a sub-plot. The focus is on the hybrids, synths and cyborgs as they ponder who or what they really are. As such, the show often feels more like a follow-up to another classic Ridley Scott movie, 1982’s Blade Runner.

Also, in Alien: Earth, Wendy gradually becomes able to communicate with the aliens – much to the dismay of her new-found brother. First, she behaves like an ‘alien-whisperer’, but by the last episodes she’s managed to exert full control over them and uses them as attack dogs. This deprives them of agency and – though it’s unsettling to see her direct an alien to tear a platoon of soldiers to pieces – diminishes them as the objects of fear they were in the movies.

And the aliens are inconsistently presented. Several times we see one encounter a group of extras, bloodily slash and chomp its way through them and slaughter them all in a few seconds. But whenever an alien bumps into one of the main cast-members, it immediately becomes slower, clumsier, and more incompetent, which allows the main cast-member to escape. Basically, the aliens can be perfect killing machines or can screw up badly, depending on what the script requires at the time.

And that brings me to Alien: Earth biggest problem. Its scripts are so riddled with holes they’re like slabs of Swiss cheese. The Weyland-Yutani spaceship plunges towards Bangkok and catches everyone by surprise. But weren’t there satellites in space and stations on earth tracking it? Didn’t anyone have an inkling it was on the way? It slams into a skyscraper and is left sticking out of it, but inflicts little structural damage – indeed, there are rich people partying at the top of the skyscraper who don’t even notice what’s happened. This is a whole, humongous spaceship. In 2001, we saw what a pair of passenger planes did to the World Trade Centre. Despite dropping out of the sky, the spaceship manages to end up horizontal after ploughing into the skyscraper. When people enter it from outside, its floors are perfectly and conveniently level.

Meanwhile, Boy Kavalier sends his six hybrids – who’ve presumably cost billions of dollars to create – to the crash scene without any briefing, any guards, any weapons, any protective equipment. Led by Kirsh, they just saunter on board, and it’s purely through good luck that at least three of them don’t get splattered or taken over by the extra-terrestrial specimens there. The illogicalities surrounding the hybrids continue through the series. At one point, Boy Kavalier’s scientists have to ‘wipe’ one hybrid of traumatic memories. But they don’t isolate her and don’t inform the other hybrids of what they’ve done. Afterwards, one of them speaks to her and points out that she’s missing a bunch of memories, and she gets even more screwed up as a result. And the scripts turn the hybrids’ superhuman powers on and off depending on the situation. They’re meant to be superstrong. Indeed, at one point, we see one rip off a soldier’s jaw in a fit of pique. But hybrids Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) spend most of Episode Seven struggling to transport a face-hugged body across Boy Kavalier’s island. As they huffed and puffed, I was reminded of Basil and Manuel trying to shift a dead hotel-guest in the Fawlty Towers (1975-79) episode The Kipper and the Corpse.

Speaking of which, Boy Kavalier’s island seems to range in size from being big, with characters taking hours to cross it, to being the size of someone’s back lawn. A young alien, newly erupted from someone’s chest and still in snake-like form, has the whole island and its foliage to hide amid. Yet Timothy Oliphant’s Kirsh soon catches it with a small-looking piece of netting. The diminutive alien lifeform known as ‘T. Ocellus’ – basically a tentacled eyeball – manages in a short time to escape from captivity, scuttle across the island on its tiny tentacles, and find a human body lying on a distant beach, which it parasitically attaches itself to and takes over.

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20^th Television / FXP

All the alien specimens are highly dangerous – not just the acid-blooded ones – so the lack of security protocols around them is head-scratching. On the spaceship, scientists eat and drink in their presence. They leave alien-housing containers improperly sealed. They don’t fasten those containers correctly on their racks. When one creature breaks free, no alarm-bells go off. In Boy Kavalier’s giant complex, they’re kept in close proximity to one another. Shouldn’t they be all be isolated? You never see any guards near them. Often, the only people in the Prodigy laboratory with them are Kirsh and the hybrids – who are, essentially, children. At one point, a single hybrid is left to supervise the specimens alone. When an external feeding-hatch breaks, he gormlessly opens a door and enters a cell to bring a couple of the beasties their food. That doesn’t end well.

Hawley and his writers are simply being lazy. When you write something, especially a science-fiction, fantasy or horror story, you’re confronted by problems of logic, practicality and consistency all the time. A conscientious writer considers those problems and works out ways of solving them. That’s what’s what human creativity is for – for example, figuring out how an alien creature could escape from a laboratory with a working alarm system. It’s facile to just ignore these issues and hope the viewers won’t notice while the plot unfolds.

All this gives the impression I didn’t like Alien: Earth, but I had some fun with it. For one thing, I thought the show’s retro-futuristic look was wonderful. I loved the scenes on the spaceship, where the set-design nostalgically recreated the style of the Nostromo, the ill-fated craft featured in Ridley Scott’s original.

I also enjoyed the performances. Oliphant and Ceesay are excellent as, respectively, Kirsh the Prodigy synth and Morrow the Weyland-Yutani cyborg, and the scene where they at last square up to each other is the highlight of the final episode. The actors and actresses playing the hybrids do a good job of reminding us that, adult thought they look, these are children: variously naïve, trusting, devious, petulant, confused, frightened. I particularly liked the hapless Laurel-and-Hardy double-act of Gourav and Ajayi.

And though the character is obviously a caricature of fabulously-wealthy-far-too-young sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg, Boy Kavalier is played with entertaining, pantomime-villain flair by Samuel Blenkin. His Peter Pan obsession disturbingly echoes Michael Jackson, another rich and powerful man who gathered children into his lair for unsavory purposes. Also, with his tousled black hair, I thought he bore a troubling resemblance to disgraced fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, now dealing with multiple accusations of sexual assault.

But Alien: Earth’s breakout star is surely the afore-mentioned ambulatory eyeball, T. Ocellus, which in the course of the series plonks itself in the eye-socket of, and takes control of, a cat, a sheep and Michael Smiley. No offence to Michael Smiley, but when the thing is embedded in the sheep, it’s most terrifying. The sight of that bloody-faced ewe, with an outsized eyeball, staring impassively from its place of containment, is the stuff of nightmares.

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20^th Television / FXP

October 25, 2020November 22, 2020

The unsettling Robert Aickman

From the Independent

Six days before Halloween, here’s another reposting of an old blog entry about one of my favourite writers of macabre fiction. This time it’s Robert Aickman, about whom I wrote this piece in 2015.

Over the years I’ve learned to be sceptical of the publicity blurbs adorning the covers of new paperback books, which usually assure potential buyers that the book in question is an absolute page-turner and can’t be put down. However, the blurb on the cover of The Wine-Dark Sea, a collection of short stories by Robert Aickman that was originally published in 1988 and republished in 2014, is bang on the money. It contains a comment by Neil Gaiman, no less, who says of the author: “Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I’m not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully.”

That’s as good a description as any of the feeling I get when reading Aickman. You’re aware that he’s going to perform a trick involving some literary sleight-of-hand. You don’t know what the trick’s going to be, or when he’s going to do it. Afterwards, you’re not even sure if the trick has been performed, or what the point of it was. Then you mull it over. And most of the time, you decide: Wow! That was impressive!

I’ve added ‘most of the time’, though, as a disclaimer to that last sentence. Because, very occasionally, my reaction to an Aickman story has been different: What a load of bollocks!

I first came across Aickman’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when his stories cropped up in horror anthologies such as The Far Reaches of Fear (1976), New Terrors (1980) and Dark Forces (1980). Although in those collections they rubbed shoulders with some grisly items, Aickman’s stories didn’t fit comfortably with the ‘horror’ label. And the claim that some people made about him, that he was actually a ‘ghost’ story writer in the mould of M.R. James, didn’t convince either. Aickman liked to describe his stories as ‘strange’ ones and ‘strange’ is the adjective I’d attach to them too.

It wasn’t just his fiction that seemed out-of-place. Aickman himself seemed out-of-place in post-war Britain, being a man of old-fashioned views and erudite – some would say ‘elitist’ – tastes. He was a conservationist who co-founded the Inland Waterways Association and battled to prevent Britain’s no-longer-in-commercial-use canal system from being filled in; a political conservative; and a connoisseur of ballet, opera, classical music and highbrow theatre. I imagine that by the 1970s, when the UK’s political and cultural landscape was one of Labour governments and frequent industrial action by trade unions, glam rock and bubble-gum pop music, platform heels and loon pants, and cheap, cheerful and massively popular television sitcoms like Man about the House (1973-76) and On the Buses (1969-73), he was not a particularly happy bunny.

Inevitably, this sense of alienation appears in his fiction. His stories feature a lot of discontented middle-aged men (or women) who are set in their ways and don’t do a good job coping with a changing, modern world that seems diametrically opposed to their ways.

I found much of Aickman’s work baffling when, as a teenager, I first encountered it. However, I was impressed by his contribution to New Terrors, a 55-page story called The Stains. It tells the tale of Stephen, a widowed civil servant, who meets a mysterious, wild-seeming, almost dryad-like girl called Nell whilst rambling on some remote moors. Stephen becomes infatuated with Nell, with the result that he takes early retirement from his job, abandons his ties with the ‘civilised’ world and attempts to live with her in an empty, tumbledown house on the moors. Yet the story is no New Age male fantasy. Aickman steers it in a darker direction. Nell seems to embody the natural world, but nature soon intrudes on her relationship with Stephen in a more grotesque way. As their romance progresses, Stephen notices weird moulds, fungi and lichen spreading across the walls and furniture around him. There are even hints that these agents of decay have manifested themselves on his flesh too, which I suppose makes the story an example of what would later be known as ‘body horror’.

The Stains is regarded as one of Aickman’s most autobiographical stories. Many people see in Stephen’s unpleasantly doomed relationship with Nell a metaphor for Aickman’s love affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard. After being involved with him, and then with Laurie Lee and Arthur Koestler, Howard married Kingsley Amis in 1965. Aickman, whose obsession with Howard was described by one friend as a ‘mental aberration’, must have found the thought that she’d chosen the increasingly boorish Amis over him hard to stomach. Incidentally, like several of Aickman’s stories, The Stains shows that he wasn’t afraid to infuse his work – no matter how fuddy-duddy the characters – with a strong dose of the erotic.

My teenage self was sufficiently curious to seek out more of Aickman’s work and I located two collections of his short stories, Dark Entries (1964) and Cold Hand in Mine (1975). Predictably, some of those stories bewildered me, and a few irritated me; but several, like The Stains, have haunted me ever since. By the way, I wonder if a young Peter Murphy got his goth-y hands on the earlier collection and was so impressed by it that he pinched its title for the Bauhaus song Dark Entries, their second single, which they released in 1980.

One story I remember well is The Swords, in which a young travelling salesman goes to bed with a strangely blank woman whom he encounters at a seedy carnival sideshow. Again, this allows Aickman to serve up some disquieting body horror at the story’s close. Also memorable is The Hospice, a Kafka-esque tale of a motorist getting lost at night and asking for shelter at the titular institution. Inside the hospice, he notices odd things about how the inmates are cared for. For instance, in the dining room, he sees that one patient is discreetly shackled to the floor.

And in the award-winning Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal, Aickman tackles one of the commonest tropes in horror fiction in one of its most traditional settings. This purports to be a series of diary entries written by a young woman in 1815 who’s accompanying her parents on a tour of central Europe. She becomes excited when she discovers that they’re in the same neighbourhood as her secret hero, Lord Byron, who lives there ‘in riot and wickedness’. And she soon encounters her own personal Lord Bryon in the form of a mysterious gentleman attending a local contessa’s party. His ‘skin is somewhat pallid’, his nose is ‘aquiline and commanding’ and, most suspiciously of all, his mouth is ‘scarlet’. You can guess where this is heading.

Aickman’s approach to telling creepy stories was subtle, mannered and leisurely. Often, his stories needed a lot of build-up before they reached their denouements. By the start of the 1980s, this seemed anachronistic. The British tradition of horror fiction had been subtle, mannered and leisurely once, in the days of M.R. James and E.F. Benson, but it’d experienced a punk-rock moment in the mid-1970s when James Herbert unleashed a slew of bestselling horror novels like The Rats (1974) and The Fog (1975) that were unapologetically in your face with gore and violence. And a little later, in the 1980s, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series (1984-85) would pioneer a style of horror-writing that was in equal parts perverse, visionary and wildly gruesome.

So when I read in 1981 that Aickman had died of cancer – which, in his typically obstinate way, he’d refused to have any conventional medical treatment for, preferring instead to rely on dubious ‘homeopathic’ cures – I assumed, sadly, that his work would soon be out of fashion, out of print and out of readers’ memories.

Years later, I stumbled across a copy of a posthumously-published collection by him called The Unsettled Dust (1990). It contained one or two stories that annoyed me, but generally I greatly enjoyed it. By now I knew what to expect from Aickman and was mature enough to appreciate his elegant prose, his subtle build-up of suspense, his oddball but well-drawn characters and his moments of utter strangeness. Admittedly, I sometimes wasn’t sure what happened at the stories’ ends. And even after thinking about them carefully, I still wasn’t sure. But what the hell? With Aickman, the pleasure was in getting there.

I particularly liked the title story, in which an official stays at a stately home whilst negotiating the transfer of the house’s running from the hands of its aristocratic inhabitants into the hands of the National Trust. He discovers a peculiar room deep inside the house where, like in a giant snow globe, huge patches of dust are continually and spectrally floating through the air. This illustrates another of Aickman’s abilities, to convincingly weave into his stories scenes and incidents that are totally outlandish. So sober is the tone of everything else going on that you readily accept these mad bits as parts of the narrative.

Nonetheless, it seemed appropriate that I found The Unsettled Dust in a rack of second-hand books in a corner of a small antiques shop in a village in rural County Suffolk – an obscure place to find an obscure book by an obscure writer.

But, happily, I was wrong. Recent years have seen a revival of interest in Robert Aickman, which reached a peak in 2014, the centenary of his year of birth, when Faber & Faber republished The Wine-Dark Sea, Dark Entries, Cold Hand in Mind and The Unsettled Dust. His work has been championed by Neil Gaiman; by Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith of the influentially bizarre television show The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002, 2017); and by Dame Edna Everage herself (or himself), Barry Humphries, who in addition to being a comedian and actor is a committed bibliophile with a library of 25,000 books. And the Guardian, Independent and Daily Telegraph have all printed articles about him lately.

I’ve just finished reading The Wine-Dark Sea and it’s possibly my favourite Aickman collection yet. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, though. This being Aickman, there has to be at least one story that gets on my wick. In this case the offender is Growing Boys, a satiric fantasy about a woman who has to deal with two sons growing at a supernatural rate, to a supernatural size, and becoming criminal psychopaths. An ineffectual police force, an ineffectual school system and an ineffectual father (more interested in running for parliament as a Liberal Party candidate) do nothing to stop them. Aickman uses the story to bemoan the delinquency of the younger generation and the inadequacy of Britain’s post-war institutions. It’s reactionary but, much worse, it isn’t funny.

On the other hand, my favourite story here is The Inner Room. It’s about a haunted doll’s house, which is a staple of many scary stories, most famously one written by M.R. James called – surprise! – The Haunted Dolls House. Aickman, however, treats the subject with dark humour. The story’s climax is unexpectedly and phantasmagorically weird, meanwhile, and reminds me a little of the work of Angela Carter.

Elsewhere, both Never Visit Venice and Your Tiny Hand is Frozen suggest Aickman taking two of his modern-day bugbears and transforming his indignation at them into horror stories. Never Visit Venice lays into mass tourism. Its hero is so disappointed in how the city of the title has been degraded by sightseers that, unwisely, he ends up taking a ride in an infernal gondola that seems to have been punted out through the gates of hell. Your Tiny Hand is Frozen features an unsociable man who becomes addicted to his telephone, through which he communicates with a strange woman who may or may not really exist. Telephones were becoming increasingly widespread at the time the story was written, presumably to Aickman’s discomfort. It’s just as well that he didn’t live to see the situation today when smartphones have practically taken over the world.

Incidentally, so in vogue is Aickman now that there’s even a Facebook page and Twitter account devoted to him. Robert Aickman with a presence on 21^st-century social media? I’m sure he would have loved that. Not.