The Best Alien Clone Remains Terrifying And Timely

Before Species’ spiny-backed humanoid alien has tentacled hair and a projectile tongue, she’s just a sweet little girl. Breaking out of laboratory confinement, she escapes to Los Angeles, undergoes rapid metamorphosis into a young woman, and leaves a trail of mangled bodies in her path.

There’s a lot that Roger Donaldson’s sci-fi horror, released 30 years ago today, has in common with Ridley Scott’s classic, Alien — a sleek killing machine, authority figures prizing the pursuit of knowledge at any cost, creature design by H.R. Giger, and flamethrowers. Instead of encountering unfathomable terrors in the far reaches of space, however, unthinking scientists on Earth create them in our backyard, tricked by extraterrestrial intelligence into combining alien DNA with human. Half-alien, half-woman, Sil (Natasha Henstridge) is rendered even more terrifying by her ability to shapeshift and disappear. She could be anyone, anywhere. And unlike Alien’s xenomorph, she doesn't need to hunt you down; she can be so charming that you’ll invite her inside.

Rather than a cramped spacecraft, LA gives its alien predator a huge playground in which to unleash carnage. Sil might not always know the right human cues, but she knows exactly how to prey on our vulnerabilities, weaponizing her attractiveness and playing into her perceived helplessness. All she wants is a baby — perpetuating her race is hardwired into her — but all myopic men see is a gorgeous, interested blonde.

In one scene, she reduces even an intelligent Harvard professor trying to track her down to his most animalistic impulses. He doesn’t question why there’s a stranger in his hotel room, or why she takes off her clothes at the sight of him. Instead, blinded by lust, he immediately falls into bed. Having got what she wants, Sil promptly kills him. In another scene, a woman ends up kidnapped and burned alive after she lets Sil into her car, but who wouldn’t be taken in by the sight of a naked, terrified woman asking for help?

Sil might be a predator, but Species establishes that humans are just as eager to prey on her. Even as a young runaway, she’s the target of a lecherous drunk. As an adult, the team tracking her down deduces she’s left a local nightclub with a “friendly guy,” but he abruptly turns cold and cruel when Sil changes her mind about having sex. Even the camera seems to be lecherous, lingering on Sil as she takes a shower or tries on her first bra. It’s no wonder she comes to perceive everyone as a threat.

Despite its stretches of dread, Species creates a tremendous amount of sympathy for Sil, who’s the result of an experimental procedure designed to fulfill man’s whims. She’s a confused, terrified girl who doesn’t know why she’s being hunted or why her body is transforming monstrously. As an adult, she’s a fish out of water, strolling down the street in a wedding dress, unaware it isn’t everyday clothing because her creators didn’t bother to teach her how to coexist. The tragedy of Species is that its characters, in creating a monster, fail to see the human.

Sil’s innocence renders the sheer brutality she’s capable of even more macabre. The film wrings horror out of confined spaces, like a train compartment and a nightclub toilet, and until the end, it gives us only glimpses of the monster — a black hand with spindly fingers here, a reptilian eye there. But Species’ most tense sequence once again taps into man’s hubris.

While looking for Sil, a team comes up with the idea of creating a second hybrid to determine its vulnerabilities. Their headstrong insistence on tinkering with science they don’t understand can only end badly, and the ensuing scene cuts back and forth between two team members’ terror at being trapped in a room with the rapidly growing newborn and the panicked project head who’s made escape impossible. The tentacled creature is terrifying in its speed, but so is the man with his finger on the exit button, willing to sacrifice them if it means the monster won’t get out. For all its extraterrestrial frights, man is still Species’ most fearsome creature.