Aliens

Fire in the Sky

The Fourth Kind

Greetings, earthlings. We have sadly arrived at the final week of October, and the final round of horror double features on this blog (for now…) After a month of stellar horror films from various subgenres, I wanted to end with another staple of scary cinema, that shockingly hasn’t had its own moment in the spotlight yet: alien movies. The concept of life beyond Earth has been explored and dreamed about for centuries. From Democritus to Ridley Scott, humanity has proven to be rather obsessed with the idea that we are not alone in this vast, ever-expanding universe, to the point where our culture is, at times, oversaturated with aliens. I point out this oversaturation because when the House of Representatives convened a landmark panel on unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAPs aka UFOs) back in 2023, people moved on from it pretty quickly. Maybe it’s the fact that we have enough terrestrial turmoil and unjust abductions to deal with down here, but the verified presence of unidentified flying objects, coming to us in this day and age, just felt like too little too late. Aliens, after all, are more interesting the less we know about them, and cinema has captured virtually every form of alien life one could imagine. I’m a big fan of creature features and science fiction, but alien movies are not all created equal, and when I really start to think about it, very few actually satisfy my alien cravings, or my “good movie” cravings. Like any child, I was traumatized by the sadness E.T. left me with and mystified by the existential boredom Close Encounters of the Third Kind provided, but I was far more compelled by the campy alien-action-comedies of my youth like Men in Black, Mars Attacks!, Independence Day, Paul, and Slither. I also happen to love every iteration of The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and recently learned to love the lesser-discussed films Pitch Black, Cloverfield, and the African feminist sci-fi odyssey The Bloodettes. I can easily praise the more recent alien film entries like A Quiet Place, Prey, Attack the Block, and NOPE, but the most satisfying and exciting alien films ever created, in my opinion, are Ridley Scott’s Alien, and every subsequent film that has followed in that series. There is a tension and a sophistication in the Alien franchise, not to mention a palpable, dripping sense of terror, that I have yet to experience with any other alien-centric film. I’d rather watch Ellen Ripley kick a xenomorph’s ass—even in one of the bad movies—than ever rewatch Signs, which, to me, is the most disappointing alien film of all time, apart from that one, iconic shot. In my experience, most alien movies throughout time have had to rely upon other gimmicks and premises to pad out their somewhat flimsy alien storylines—even in the ones that I enjoy. The Faculty is a campy teen action-comedy, in addition to being an alien film. Edge of Tomorrow is a time-travelling action, in addition to being an alien film. They Live is a dystopic conspiracy theory mystery, in addition to being an alien film. And, perhaps my fave, The Thing is a paranoid horror whodunit, in addition to being an alien film. I know that many films combine genres and modes of storytelling, but sometimes you just wanna watch a plain and simple alien movie! And I had every intention of doing an alien double feature a few years ago, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Event Horizon is not an alien movie at all, but a very creative outer space horror experience, that I actually prefer to most alien movies. The bottom line is that I am often disappointed or disinterested in alien cinema. Either they’re not scary, they’re not fun, or worst of all, they’re more obsessed with the idea of an alien allegory than an actual alien story. I’m not a rambunctious young child on a bike, riding toward age-appropriate alien shenanigans, and I am not a coddled adult looking for symbols of unification in Spielberg’s next out-of-touch passion project, I just prefer my alien movies to be scary, without any cheap gimmicks or side plots that only distract from the big, mysterious being from the stars. I wish I could tell you that tonight’s alien films satisfied any of my (I think reasonable) alien film demands, but instead I had two mid-at-best alien movies beamed directly into my brain.

Tonight’s first film is considered a classic among alien film lovers, though many admit that it is not a horror film, this Rob Lieberman’s 1993 film Fire in the Sky. Tracy Tormé based the screenplay off the book The Walton Experience, which documented the alleged alien abduction of American forestry worker Travis Walton—but much like the real-life Travis Walton, I was not particularly impressed with the result. Fire in the Sky opens on a fairly compelling quote from Seneca, first century AD, “Chance makes a plaything of a man’s life”, and I was already riveted. It’s a dark and cinematically-foggy November night in Snowflake, Arizona, and a beat-up truck suddenly comes barreling out of an otherwise calm forest. It speeds dangerously fast between tall trees and rough terrain until it finally parks at a dive bar, and the five male passengers all begin to file out. One of the patrons cracks a joke, but none of the men acknowledge it. They just walk silently, single-file into the bar, the same haunted expression plastered on their faces. “We’re sticking to the story, no matter how rough it gets” one of the men says solemnly, before he makes a call to the police. According to these men, their fellow logger, Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney), has gone missing. But how, exactly, he went missing, is just as big of a mystery as his current whereabouts. Lieutenant Frank Watters (James Garner) arrives on the scene to question these frazzled locals, unaware of the can of worms he’s about to open. He asks their apparent ringleader, Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), to tell him who Travis is, and Mike responds, notably in the past tense, “He was my best friend” before we cut to a series of flashbacks. Just the day before, Travis was joyfully riding his motorcycle through town, picking up donuts for his girlfriend, telling his bestie Mike that he wants to finally start their business once this logging contract is over. But Mike just rolls his eyes at Travis, declaring him to be a “dreamer” before they load into Mike’s truck and head off to the woods. Besides Mike and Travis, a few other men are on this contract with them, David (Peter Berg), Greg (Henry Thomas), Bobby (Bradley Gregg), and Allan (Craig Sheffer), who has random, meaningless beef with Travis. After a long day of chopping down trees, the men pile back into the truck and begin to head home. But on their way out of the woods, they suddenly spot a bright, intimidating red light that has overtaken a large portion of the forest. One man theorizes that a plane crashed, another thinks it’s a run-of-the-mill wildfire, but they all agree to drive toward the light to investigate, even as the car radio dies unexpectedly and creepily. Mike pulls into a patch of open grass, and the men all fix their gaze upon the sky ahead of them. Travis goes one step further than looking, though, he gets out of the car and walks toward the open field, eyes transfixed on something above him. All of the men yell and scream and beg for him to get back into the truck, but Travis remains hypnotized on an object that we cannot see, and suddenly, a bright beam of white light shoots at his body, and he is lifted off the ground. He seizes and vibrates, the screams of his coworkers increase, and eventually Travis’ limp body is tossed into the darkness. Paralyzed by fear, Mike lets the men convince him to drive away, but even when he returns on his own to try to find Travis, he is nowhere to be found. Travis, along with that ominous red light that once lit up half of the entire sky, have both vanished like they were never there. Even though all of the men corroborate Mike’s story, Lieutenant Watters doesn’t believe them, but he does organize a massive search party the next day. It doesn’t take long for the whole town to turn on Mike and the rest of the men—pleading with them to just come out with the truth—so they all agree to take a lie detector test, which shows no signs of deception. After five long, hopeless days, Mike receives a call from a man claiming to be Travis, and after searching every gas station phone booth in the vicinity, they finally find him. Travis is a shell of himself: naked, shivering, terrified, and his mouth is so dry he cannot speak a word. Everyone wants answers, details, some sort of semblance of logic to attach to this puzzling phenomenon, but Travis can barely adjust back to his normal life, let alone articulate the life he’s lived for the past five days. Intermittently, Travis will remember flashes of bright lights, fleshy figures, foreign utensils, but nothing substantial. It’s not until he endures an overwhelming welcome home party that his memory fully returns, and we are shown some of the bizarre and cruel things that Travis somehow survived. This sequence of scenes—where Travis relives his abduction and subsequent experimentation—is the most well done and memorable moment of Fire in the Sky. It is the one truly scary part of this film, and it is the main thing that everyone comes away discussing and dissecting, so to speak. It is so meticulously painful and uncomfortable and freaky, I do think it is worth seeing for yourself, I’m just not sure if the movie as a whole is. Factual or fallacy, the events of that one November 1975 evening in the White Mountains forever altered the lives of these men, and their community as a whole, and to this day—though he doesn’t agree with all of the details of the depiction here—Travis stands by his story. In the years since this book and subsequent film were released, several critics and skeptics have come forward with their own theories. Science writers Philip J. Klass and Michael Shermer alleged that Walton had perpetrated a hoax. They suggested a potential motive: an abduction could be considered an “Act of God”, thus enabling the logging crew to avoid a steep financial penalty from the Forestry Service for failing to complete their contract by the deadline, as they were behind schedule. Even director Rob Lieberman suspects that this was a hoax, and decades later said, “My gut feeling had it that Travis was so much smarter than those other guys, that it started out as a gag. They probably laced their beer at the end of the day with a little acid or something and then they put on a show for these guys and they believed it.” Regardless of what really happened, I just wish Fire in the Sky had been more of an alien horror film, instead of a small town conspiracy drama. I want to believe, I really do, but it’s just hard when so many alien movies leave so much more to be desired. Too many are concerned with selling the “authenticity” of their premises that somewhere in the process, they forget to have fun.

The next film I watched was unfortunately guilty of this as well, as every effort was made to make it seem real, and almost no effort was made to make it be entertaining—this is Olatunde Osunsanmi’s 2009 film The Fourth Kind. The title refers to Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s classifications of alien encounters: the first kind involves visual sightings of an unidentified flying object, the second kind manifests as physical evidence like crop circles and animal disturbances, the third kind is an encounter where an entity is fully witnessed, and the fourth kind denotes abduction. This film tells its story in the most muddied and meta way possible, as we open on actress Milla Jovovich as herself, giving a PSA to the audience as the camera dizzyingly spins around her. She explains how she will be playing Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychologist who, along with several of her patients, experienced a truly disturbing and mysterious phenomena. Jovovich claims that everything we’re about to see is based off of real events, with only certain details like names being changed. There are allegedly over 65 hours of real archival footage from Dr. Tyler’s therapy sessions, and this film is going to reenact it all while remaining as true to the story as possible. As we get to know Dr. Tyler through Milla Jovovich’s portrayal, we are periodically shown the “real” Dr. Tyler, in a series of interviews conducted by the director of this film, Olatunde Osunsanmi. Dr. Tyler paints a picture of all of the strange events that started happening around her, which began right after her husband was murdered. It’s been two months since her husband’s death, and Dr. Tyler is trying her best to maintain a sense of normalcy for her children in their cold, little town of Nome, Alaska. But in addition to her grief, Dr. Tyler begins to experience several strange events—mostly the fact that all of her patients begin to describe the exact same memory in their sessions. Every patient is struggling to sleep, and ends up waking up around 3:00 in the morning, and strangest of all, they all see a strange looking owl at their windows. Through some kind of off screen research that we’re never privy to, we’re told that at least 300 residents of Nome have had this same insomnia, followed by visions of an owl, and Dr. Tyler has the strangest suspicion that her husband was suffering from this as well. One patient, Tommy, is particularly disturbed by his experiences, and ends up killing his whole family and himself out of pure, maddening fear. The Sheriff brings Dr. Tyler in for questioning, and wonders if this tragedy could’ve been avoided if she’d refrained from using her experimental hypnosis therapy. Things only escalate further when Dr. Tyler also begins to experience things she can’t explain, the most frightening of which occurs when she’s dictating her own voice on a tape recorder, only to listen back and hear a voice other than her own. This is one of many instances in this movie where something scary is hinted at, but never really shown, and our imaginations are meant to do a lot of the heavy lifting. When it comes to actual, tangible, corporeal, visually-present aliens, The Fourth Kind reveals even less than Fire in the Sky, and relies heavily upon vibes and implications and atmospheric manipulation rather than practical effects. The film goes to great, excessive lengths to make this all seem like a documentary with real human beings involved, but ironically, this only adds to the film’s corny, phony quality. Having seen a myriad of effectively frightening, compellingly realistic found footage and horror mockumentary‍ ‍films, The Fourth Kind just didn’t scare me or impress me, it only made me yearn for something truly scary and impressive. The most interesting aspect of this film, to me, is in the messiness of its marketing methods. The marketing team behind The Fourth Kind created fake news articles attributed to real Alaskan news outlets, which drew notable and reasonable controversy, and resulted in the studio being sued. Additionally, the film makes the claim that several real missing person cases on the West coast of Alaska can be attributed to alien abduction(s), when, in reality, investigators found alcohol use and frigid temperatures to be the cause of most of the reported incidents. The grainy camerawork and clunky acting certainly do not do this film any favors, but what really undermined The Fourth Kind’s efficacy was its stubborn commitment to its meta mode of storytelling. Its heavy handed editing and forced “realism” made Fire in the Sky seem downright subtle and suspenseful in comparison. I promise that I went into this alien double feature with an open mind, and even a sense of excitement and curiosity, but I was, once again, rather unfortunately let down. The truth is out there, but in my opinion, it’s not in either of these movies. Well that’s enough tinfoil hat-wearing for one evening, now if you’ll excuse me, I’m phoning home. Later! 👽