Beyond the Bloodbath: The Abyssal Depths of Xtro
There’s more than just blood and guts at the core of this nauseating cult horror classic
by Cian Tsang
Roger Ebert called Xtro “an ugly, mean-spirited and despairing thriller” in his scathing review of Harry Bromley Davenport’s goopy sci-fi horror film, when it was first unleashed upon the big screen forty years ago. It’s impossible to argue with him on that particular front: to watch Xtro, a movie about a father abducted by aliens in front of his young son’s eyes—and who years later returns to the family he left behind as a necrotic, inhuman sex criminal—is to stare in awe at an artifact of uncommon evil, a merciless carnival of acrid imagery whose existence is purely parasitic. It’s an exploitation movie in the truest sense of the term, latching itself onto the success of Alien and shamelessly siphoning whatever lifeblood it could from Ridley Scott’s totemic masterpiece.
Such is the extremity of the movie’s grotesquerie that it managed to land itself on the notorious list of “Video Nasties”—movies deemed by the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions to be morally compromising and therefore potentially impoundable within the country. That badge of honor only served to crystallize Xtro’s reputation as an object of transgression, a must-watch for connoisseurs of depravity. A cult fanbase inevitably formed, orbiting around this ghoulish thing with its strange gravitational pull.
Like a lot of the trash from its era, the technical achievements of Xtro remain undiminished—what it delivers on in bucket-loads is the promise of truly grisly low-budget thrills, soaked in exorbitant quantities of ubiquitous goo and garish lighting. The creature effects are still genuinely unnerving in all of their jittery, unvarnished glory. It’s the physicality of the transfigured father in particular that burrows into your brain and eats away at your imagination—the way his anatomy and locomotion seem entirely aberrational, removed from anything we know in the natural world, warped by time spent in some stygian dimension. There’s also the movie’s notorious birth sequence—the Alien chestburster taken to provocative extremes—in which a fully grown man violently erupts from his victim’s womb, an almost paralyzingly nauseating marvel of lacerated flesh and cascading organs. This is authentically primal filmmaking: salmonella-raw, jagged and rusty, which only makes the wound that much more hideous.
If Xtro only had the one trick up its sleeve, it would probably still have amassed the following it has today by virtue of sheer obscenity… but is that really all there is to it? I’m not so sure. Certainly the movie’s most immediate and basic pleasures are in the shock factor, the in-your-fucking-face-ness of it all. Everything that Ebert found so unpalatable about the movie is, for me and all those other gorehounds, precisely what makes Xtro so engrossing to behold. This is a movie whose primary function is to be as vulgar and corrosive as possible, operating on the level of pure blunt force trauma. It wages all-out nuclear warfare on our sensibilities and emerges victorious, no matter whether we respond to its provocations with disgust or delight.
But if you’re willing to probe and excavate a bit deeper, I think there are complexities at play here involving the psychological mess of family, separation, and abandonment. Whether or not these complexities are consciously infused into the text is dubious—Davenport’s two sequels are unapologetically hollow genre exercises, voids in which no intrigue can possibly survive—but regardless of intent they cling to every frame like the sticky, viscous byproduct of some diabolical experiment. The burial ground of good taste very often proves to be fertile soil for profound ideas to germinate.
To watch Xtro is to stare in awe at an artifact of uncommon evil, a merciless carnival of acrid imagery whose existence is purely parasitic.
For all of its superficial similarities to Alien, it’s in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that Xtro finds its true companion piece. To capitalize on a popular movie’s iconography is one thing, but in its depiction of familial disintegration, Xtro is something else entirely: an emotional, tonal, and thematic inversion of Spielberg’s work, shrouding the familial reconnection narrative in a deeply troubling miasma of sexual perversion.
Consider the moment in which Sam (Philip Sayer), the abducted father returning to Earth, tries to reingratiate himself into his son Tony’s (Simon Nash) life by telepathically infecting one of the boy’s dreams with visions of violence, a dream from which he wakes up inexplicably drenched in blood. The family doctor can’t make sense of where all that fluid could’ve possibly come from, but Tony can. “Daddy sent it,” he says, and when the doctor asks him how, Tony simply answers: “Dunno. Just felt something sticky.”
In Xtro’s hands, Elliott’s empathic connection with E.T. becomes something almost unspeakably ugly. The implication that an act of violent sexual trespass, of forceful insemination, has somehow psychically occurred, is utterly horrifying in isolation, but what makes it even more so are the reactions of the adults around Tony, the people who are meant to provide a support system for this vulnerable child—including his mother Rachel (Bernice Stegers)—who either dismiss the incident as the conjuration of an overactive imagination, or worse still place the blame on Tony’s shoulders, waving away the bloodbath as nothing more than an elaborate prank. The first thought that comes to Joe (Danny Brainin), the new father figure in Tony’s life, isn’t of concern, but of accusation: “What’s he done now?” Tony’s story about Sam disappearing into the cosmos also convinces people of his proclivity for fabrication. “Psychology 101,” Joe calls it, putting what he perceives to be Tony’s deception down to the coping mechanism of a child trying to come to terms with loss and loneliness.
By pulling at that particular skein, Xtro also bears a certain amount of resemblance to such movies as The Curse of the Cat People and Return to Oz, in which children who’ve experienced some sort of significant rupture or displacement in their lives, whose psychological fabrics have been torn asunder, are forced to retreat into oneiric sanctums when the adults around them prove unable or unwilling to comprehend their traumas. Those movies, like E.T., are ultimately about the power of magic and miracles to overwhelm the disappointment of reality, but Sam’s magic is wholly corruptive, penetrating and ravaging Tony’s innocence. It seems extremely unlikely that such a diabolical presence would emerge from the mind of a child seeking emotional refuge—instead, Sam feels more like a creature molded by the anxieties of a mother trying to stave off the breakdown of her new family unit, a projection from the mind of a woman confronted with a creeping sense of uncertainty.
It’s this stealthy shift in perspective that makes Xtro so fascinatingly slippery as a psychodrama. As the extent of Sam’s evil crystallizes, we become increasingly distanced from Tony’s mental space and instead sink deeper and deeper into that of Rachel—who, desperately clinging to her son as the structures of normalcy around her dissipate, attacks the suitability of her estranged husband by depicting him as a ravenous violator, bringing with him not tenderness but pustular perversity.
In Xtro’s hands, Elliott’s empathic connection with E.T. becomes something almost unspeakably ugly.
The movie opens up, I think, once you accept Rachel as its psychological center and beating heart. Take the alien pregnancy sequence, for instance, a set piece that on the surface seems unambiguous in its purpose to be as singularly upsetting as possible. Sam, still occupying his new alien body, ambushes and sexually assaults a woman in order to use her as a conduit through which to transform himself from unrecognizable monstrosity back into his old human form.
There’s the initial onslaught of nausea at the sexual atrocity, which renders Sam immediately and utterly irredeemable, but then there’s the specificity of the destruction involved in the birth—the desecration of the viscera and genitalia, the relish with which Sam, whose sole purpose back on Earth is to forcefully seize custody of his child, symbolically devours the umbilical cord. Considered as manifestations of Rachel’s maternal fears and frustrations, the one-dimensional brutality of these images gives way to shades and wrinkles: we begin to see the panic at the prospect of becoming alienated from your own brood gnawing away at the subconscious; we’re forced to recognize the annihilation of the female form by childbirth, how the act of bringing something into this world requires on some level the immolation of the birthgiver. There’s something quite Larry Cohen-esque about all of this, tapping into the anxiety of losing something irrevocably in parenthood rather than gaining anything precious.
The absence of any substantial paternal bonding sequence in the movie makes perfect sense in this light, too: in Rachel’s mind, the existence of any sort of rapport between Sam and Tony is intolerable, unthinkable. Bereft of any endearing qualities, Sam’s only strategy to get close to Tony and to rip him away from Rachel is to hijack the boy’s body and mind, cornering him in an alley and orally infecting him with a pulsating alien oedema that robs him of his innocence, filling him with all of his father’s vices and appetites. From this point onwards, Tony succumbs to Sam’s unholy embrace, seeking violent retribution against the curmudgeonly neighbour who kills his pet snake, participating in the sexual violation of his mother’s au pair whom he and Sam murder and then cocoon in seminal fluid, before finally shedding his humanity altogether, decomposing in a blaze of light and ascending towards his new home amongst the stars. The movie’s ending isn’t frightening so much as it is destabilizing in its empathy, lingering on Rachel’s crumpled figure in a sea of nothingness, the harrowing lacuna that’s left behind when all hope of recovering the life you once had is lost.
If Xtro is to endure for another forty years and beyond, I suspect it’ll probably be primarily as a curio; a uniquely sinister specimen preserved in a jar for people to gather around and gasp at. And why not? As far as atrocity exhibitions go, it’s hard to top for immediate revulsion. But for those who have the stomach not to avert their eyes, who gaze long enough into the abyss and are willing to trawl through the mess, the movie might just reveal hidden strata that complicate their feelings and leave them unmoored—struggling and desperately grasping for meaning in a sea of nothingness all their own.
Cian Tsang is an essayist and Ligotti superfan based in the UK. You can find him on Twitter @CianHHTsang.
