The Monster is just an unreasoning external pressure that we cook our characters with, and in doing that we see how they tick. Back when movies were more familiar with people than with monsters, this worked. The less the monster was seen, the more powerful it was. You could make out its shape in the realism and depth of the character's reactions. The creature in Alien occupies a tiny fragment of screen time, but it looms over every frame through the performances of the cast.
Now we no longer populate these movies with humans but with fodder. We've learned how to show the Monster but forgotten how to show people, and they become increasingly flimsy, predictable and mawkish- to stare at them too long is to get bored while waiting for them to be eaten. Instead we fetishize the Monster, and in staring at it too long, it loses its power too- everything has its depth stripped away, nothing means anything, and we've diffused or at least ignored our fears by shining a flashlight on every menacing shadow in the room. These movies have lost the capacity to connect to any real fear, and instead only appeal to our infantile desire to break our toys against each other.
Image by Till Nowak.
