“I did it first.” David Cronenberg and David Lynch claim that ‘Alien’ is plagiarized from their films

Everything about the accusations of these two legendary filmmakers against Ridley Scott’s film

There are few science fiction films more mythical than ‘Alien, the eighth passenger’. Its great success ended up giving rise to a franchise still in progress – this same year ‘Alien: Romulus’ was released – but another thing that it caused, and that many may not know, were accusations of plagiarism, both on the part of David Cronenberg like David Lynch.

“Now we know who the thief is”

The director of ‘Promesas del Este’ has been the one who has criticized the film the most times. Ridley Scott for this reason. In fact, already in 1979 he was frustrated with her and commented to Fangoria magazine the following:

It has no metaphysics or philosophy. The creature ends up being a man in a crocodile suit chasing a group of people around a room. I think my own films achieve a lot more by touching a deep nerve than just the reaction that you don’t want to be eaten by a crocodile. Alien It was nothing more than a $300,000 B-movie on a $10 million budget.

The parasitic device is not used metaphorically, it was not used to evoke anything. In Alien, John Hurt has the parasite inside and continues with his normal life. In ‘They Came from Within…’, the parasite stays inside people and changes their behavior and motives. It is used for more than just causing commotion.

In fact, Cronenberg later recalled that he was not the only one who thought this way, since when a German Festival showed several of his first films, a spectator stood up indignantly and said: “How dare you show this movie! It’s obvious you stole from the movie Alien! There are parasites that come out of the mouth and there is acid that burns the face, just like in Alien!“. When Cronenberg responded that his film was made three years earlier, the viewer responded “Ah, now we know who the thief is“.

All in all, there are surely those who will think that it is still a coincidence, but Cronenberg gave more details in an interview given in 2011 to The Film Experience about why he was convinced that he had really been plagiarized:

Well… you can say that they are influenced by you or that they are scamming you. It’s the same basic thing. Even with ‘Alien’. My movie ‘They Came From Inside…’ has a parasite that lives in you and burns out of your body and jumps to your face and jumps to your face and goes down your throat. I know Dan O’Bannon knew about my movie. In a case like that you wouldn’t mind a little credit for it. But beyond that, if you are influential – and many young filmmakers have told me that I was a big influence and sometimes their films remind me of my old films – you take it as a compliment. You’ve clearly struck a chord. It’s nice that people are aware of that. But beyond that it is inevitable; things become common understandings, let’s say. The whole parasite thing. I mean there are movies called Parasite. But I did it first but, you know, whatever.

An interview collected in the book ‘David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grünberg’ makes it clear what the filmmaker’s source is to be so clear:

I have to say that some of my images, like Parasite, ended up in things like Alien, which was more popular than any of the films I’ve made. But Alien writer Dan O’Bannon has definitely seen these movies. The idea of parasites coming out of your body and using a fluid and jumping on your face, that’s all in ‘They came from inside…’

John Landis told me that Dan was well aware of what he called ‘the Canadian films,’ by which he meant ‘They Came From Inside…’ and ‘Rage,’ when he wrote Alien. And that’s how I know he stole the whole parasite thing from ‘They came from within…’. And Ron Shusett said: ‘He never saw those movies and knows nothing about them’… Dan O’Bannon later denied that he had seen those movies, but John Landis swears that he talked about them all the time and that they knew very well.

Of course, Cronenberg recognizes that “everyone rolls from everyone“, but also notes about O’Bannon that “He was apparently a hostile and very aggressive person. I don’t know, I never met him“. The director of the masterful ‘Videodrome’ would also address the topic again in a talk with Collider in 2015 in which he showed himself emphatically:

Like Alien, for example, which totally appropriated things from my movie ‘They Came from Inside…’, featured a parasite that lives in your body, comes out of your chest, jumps on your face and jumps out of your mouth, and Suddenly you see this in a hugely successful studio movie, Alien. The screenwriter, Dan O’Bannon, had seen it, we know that he had seen my film and, let’s say, he appropriated it.

And what about Lynch?

For his part, the accusation made by the director of ‘Mulholland Drive’ is only known to us indirectly, but it came to us through HR Gigerwho in the early 80s wanted to collaborate with David Lynch in his adaptation of ‘Dune’. This is how he told what happened to Cinefantastique magazine:

Through some friends I asked Lynch if he was interested in my cooperation. I never heard from him. I later learned that he was upset because he thought we had copied the monster from Alien of her baby monster from ‘Eraserhead’, which wasn’t true. Ridley Scott and I hadn’t even seen that movie at the time. If one movie influenced ‘Alien’ it was ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. I would have loved to collaborate with Lynch on ‘Dune’, but apparently he wanted to do all the designs himself.

Giger would speak again on the matter for the book ‘The Complete Lynch’where he pointed out that “People have asked Lynch about me, but he’s not very enthusiastic about my work. I’m told he thinks we stole Eraserhead’s baby for the Alien bust, but that’s not true. I told Ridley Scott that he should see the movie, even though he never did. David Lynch said it was shot exactly the same as his, but it couldn’t be because Ridley hadn’t seen it! Lynch spoke as if it were some kind of homage to his work… He doesn’t seem to want to be nice to me, and I don’t know why.“.

For his part, the only thing that Lynch is known to have said in public about it was in the German magazine Filmjahrbuch Nr. 1 in the mid-80s, where the interviewer told him that when he saw ‘Alien’ he was quite reminded of ‘Eraserhead’ and that those responsible for the first one were surely very inspired by it. This is what Lynch responded: