One of the earliest Alien rip-offs was made for US television. We take a look back at 1981’s The Intruder Within.
Much like Jaws, Star Wars and Mad Max before it, the success of 1979’s Alien prompted studios and producers the world over to make their own hastily-made rip-off movies. Thanks to – shall we say – enterprising filmmakers like Roger Corman and Norman J Warren, we got cheap and cheerful fare like Barracuda (1978), Battle Beyond The Stars (1980) and Inseminoid (1981).
One of the earliest Alien clones to emerge like a shambling monster, though, was The Intruder Within – a low-budget TV movie that cheekily borrowed all sorts of ideas from Ridley Scott’s hit, but transplanted the entire thing from a spaceship in the future to an oil rig in the post-energy crisis early 1980s. As you can probably imagine, it isn’t a lost classic, but it’s fascinating to revisit, both to see just how much Alien elevated its B-movie concept by comparison, and note how even the most rushed knock-offs can come up with one or two promising ideas of their own.
Set on a rusting, cold-looking rig somewhere in Antarctica, The Intruder Within introduces Jake (Chad Everett), a self-described ‘tool pusher’ and leader of a bunch of rough-and-ready drilling workers. In the first clear nod to Alien, the rig’s owned by a sinister-sounding corporation called Zortron, which is seemingly paranoid about its rivals discovering exactly where it’s drilling.
The company has even installed a geologist, Scott (Joseph Bottoms), who airily tells Jake that they’re on top of a rich, previously untapped seam of oil that Zortron doesn’t want anyone else to know about; but Scott is so obviously sinister that it’s clear from the fifth minute that he’s lying. He’s also clearly modelled on Ash, Ian Holm’s character from Alien – so much so that we suspect that he might later turn out to be an android. (Spoiler alert: he isn’t.)
Matters soon take a sinister turn when, instead of hitting oil one day, the team instead dredges up some sort of writhing, eel-like creature from the depths. Scott dismisses it as a previously unknown form of sea lamprey, but viewers at home will note its tiny arms and will likely conclude that it’s a distant cousin of the chestburster. No sooner has the critter wrapped its jaws around a young worker played by Matt Craven (who previously foreshadowed his own fate by screaming into the camera to give us an early jumpscare) than a new arrival on the rig – the Ripley-like Colette (Jennifer Warren) – has shot it with a flare gun.
The now toasted creature rolls into the sea, but the horrors have scarcely begun; that worker quickly dies from his attacker’s venomous bite, while Scott sneaks off with what appear to be a handful of tiny, spiky eggs.
Perhaps because the budget couldn’t stretch to too many creature effects shots, writer Ed Waters and director Peter Carter take the monster movie premise of Alien and throw in a disease subplot as well. Accidentally pricking a finger on one of the eggs in Scott’s quarters, an older worker, Sam (Paul Larsson, who later played The Blaster in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) gradually loses his mind and eventually throws himself off a gantry into the sea. More TV-friendly body horror hijinx follow, all culminating in the eventual birth of a humanoid creature that looks like a cross between Giger’s xenomorph and the bio-suit out of The Guyver.
Given its vintage and made-for-TV origins, The Intruder Within doesn’t look too bad. It was shot on a real oil rig – albeit one located in Ontario, Canada rather than near the South Pole – but this immediately adds an added sense of realism without adding greatly to the budget. When Jennifer Warren’s Colette makes her entrance via helicopter early in the film, it almost begins to resemble John Carpenter’s The Thing for a few seconds.
The special effects aren’t too bad either; they were the work of James Cummins, a 21 year-old artist who’d initially gotten a job as an assistant to the makeup effects veteran Stan Winston. Having worked with the master for a few months on The Exterminator, Dead & Buried and the little-seen Andy Kaufman sci-fi comedy Heartbeeps, Cummings wound up designing the monster for what was initially called The Lucifer Rig. Although Cummins had three months or so to work on his designs, according to an old piece published in Famous Monsters Of Filmland, he had just three or four weeks to actually construct and paint them. (A big thanks to The Schockpit for the reference to that article.)
Ambitious though The Intruder Within is for a TV film, there are reminders of its ABC Friday Night Movie origins everywhere – most obviously in the portentous lines of dialogue and looks to the middle distance designed to create a pre-commercial break cliffhanger. For an Alien-inspired horror film, The Intruder Within is also glaringly tame – no doubt to avoid offending viewers tuning in when it aired at 8:30pm one evening in February 1981.
Read more: Beyond Alien | Exploring 1979’s other horror movies
Curiously, your humble writer had a bout of false memory syndrome over the film. The Intruder Within aired on British television at some point in the 1980s, and I distinctly remember seeing it when I was possibly around five or six years old (still too young for this sort of fare, but we’ll skip past that). For years afterwards, I had distinct memories of a scene where one character, Robyn (Lynda Mason Green), sheds her skin to reveal the final monster. On watching the film again years later, I discovered that no such scene exists: we see Robyn writhing around in agony, then cut to a wider shot of her body’s shadow on the wall and the monster’s outline emerging from it.
Imagine the chestburster sequence from Alien, but done with shadow puppets and low-key lighting, and you’ll have an idea of what it looks like – infinitely less gory and graphic than I’d remembered it. For some reason, my youthful brain had simply imagined what was happening to the unfortunate character in the scene.
The Intruder Within is therefore the complete opposite of the Alien clones that filled the horror section of VHS rental shops in the early 1980s. In the Italian 1980 horror flick Contamination – which is sort of Alien in a shipping harbour – rubbery alien eggs explode, sending goo flying everywhere. That goo, when it lands on a victim, also causes them to explode in a chain reaction of splattery special effects. Another Italian rip-off, Alien 2: On Earth, is positively filled with decapitations and monsters bursting out of people’s faces.
Compared to these and others like them, The Intruder Within is the model of restraint. In the place of gore, British director Peter Carter goes for atmosphere, and dialogue-heavy scenes that foreshadow the monster that will finally appear late in the story. In the process, Carter’s film amplifies the Lovecraftian undertones that ran beneath the surface in Alien; after about an hour of dodging awkward questions, Scott the Creepy Geologist finally tells Jake and Collette the truth.
Millions of years ago, humanity’s ancestors were hunted and almost wiped out by a deadly species of predator. But then the Great Flood of The Bible intervened, leaving the monsters and their eggs trapped on the ocean floor. As Scott puts it, wide eyes flashing, “A strange, unknown creature so powerful, it lies dormant for centuries, surviving for one purpose – to someday rule this land, just as it did before…”
It’s a line that could have come straight out of a HP Lovecraft story (though the author, an atheist, probably would have blanched at the mention of the biblical flood). Lovecraft constantly wrote about monstrous gods who once ruled the planet and might one day return to subjugate or destroy us all; it seems almost certain that screenwriter Ed Waters – who later wrote episodes of TJ Hooker and The Equalizer – had read at least some of Lovecraft’s stories.
At any rate, all the portent and build-up is undone somewhat when the film’s survivors successfully defeat the creature mere minutes after it emerges. Interestingly, no-nonsense hero Jake theories that the monster wants to use the rig’s drill to somehow dredge up more of his comrades from the deep – implying an intelligence that the xenomorph in Alien tends to lack. The aquatic critter’s ambitions are cut short, however, when it’s blown up with a shot from Colette’s trusty flare gun.
Read more: Alien | The birth and curious death of HR Giger’s Space Jockey
The Intruder Within therefore suffers from the same problem just about all cheap-and-cheerful Alien tributes had, both at the time and for years afterwards. So much of Alien’s brilliance lay in its sheer artistry: the strength of Ridley Scott’s direction, of course, but also the work of artists HR Giger, Ron Cobb, production designer Michael Seymour, and more besides. Strip all that away (and slash the budget) and you have just another B-movie.
Again, though, there’s lots to admire in The Intruder Within – an entertainingly villainous performance from Joseph Bottoms, some fun, wobbly practical effects, and memorably ripe dialogue (“Well, what is oil if not something that was once alive, Jake?”).
It’s also among the first horror films set on an oil rig – as far as this writer can discover, even the first – having emerged well before the likes of Proteus (1995), The Rig (2010) and Kim Ji-hoon’s Sector 7 (2011). The 2024 videogame Still Wakes The Deep, developed by The Chinese Room, is also set on an oil rig that becomes overrun by mutant creatures.
Although largely forgotten about these days, The Intruder Within is, in its own, modest way, something of a trailblazer.
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