Alien Super 8 Digest Version has ironic alternate ending

A rare version of the film would play better today than when it was released

Sep 10, 2024

In this article I want to talk about a rare 17-minute cut of Alien that was originally created for the long retired Super 8mm film format and is notable for its alternate opening and ending sequences. This got me to look at the history of Super 8 versions and led me to believe that such ‘digest’ editions could play very well today.

From the alternate opening of the digest version. Image courtesy of Disney.

Table of Contents

Memories of ‘Alien’

Like so many cinephiles of my generation, I first caught Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi/horror classic Alien (1979) on video way before I was old enough to really watch it, though if memory serves me correctly, my introduction to the franchise was actually James Cameron’s sequel Aliens (1986). Perhaps due to the fact that as a child I couldn’t really appreciate the artfulness of the original, for many years I preferred the far more exciting, action-packed, and less terrifying second outing. Yet as I grew up and my tastes matured though, I came to recognize in time the fact that Scott’s deliberately paced, economical, and atmospheric film was a masterpiece and a true work of art. (At the same time, I hold the view that Cameron’s Aliens remains a masterpiece of entertainment and one of the greatest sequels ever made.)

I could go on for a while about why I believe that, but my thoughts are best reflected in a 2012 Chud.com article on the film by Joshua Miller, who covered what was at the time every Alien movie for his “Franchise Me” series. One passage about the film’s titular creature and its design by H.R. Giger is worth quoting in particular:

“I’m hard pressed to think of a movie monster that represents a better marriage of concept and design than the Alien. Giger’s designs infected the entire atmosphere of the film, yet managed to stay somewhat contained too. Giger’s visions are biomechanical and sexually fetishistic, but the film itself is not. The Nostromo is utilitarian, plausible…. This helps make the Alien (and the Giger-designed ship on which the Alien is found) feel all the more alien. There is something dangerous about the way it makes you react, it seems sub-primal, further down past even animals. This is aided by director Ridley Scott’s decision to only show the creature in sparing flashes, which – especially the first time you’re seeing the film – make the Alien’s full layout nearly impossible to decipher.”]

Over the years, I’ve collected Alien a few times on the post-VHS formats. Its initial DVD release was actually a pretty nice special edition, featuring some cool features like an alternate audio/dialogue track and an isolated score by Jerry Goldsmith.

Subsequently, I repurchased the film’s newer editions alongside that of its sequels in the 2003 Alien Quadrilogy DVD set and the 2010 Alien Anthology bluray collection mostly because of the new bonus features by Charles de Lauzirika.

One feature I really looked forward to at the time - a new director’s cut of the film by Ridley Scott turned out to be something of a disappointment.* But everything else - the higher-quality transfers, multiple documentaries, concept art, deleted scenes, etc. made the re-ups worth it in my opinion.

*Indeed, Scott included some notes via a booklet in the new set(s) where he admitted that the theatrical version was his true director’s cut while the new version was just a marketing ploy.

By 2024, I thought I’d seen all there is to see of Alien.

But then, a couple of weeks ago I came across an upload via Twitter of what turned out to be a 17-minute digest version of the film produced by the Ken Films company and released sometime in 1980. I had no idea that this even existed, and was surprised to discover it’s been available online for at least 7 years!

Really, you can catch it on YouTube.

And honestly, I wonder why nobody ever released it as a bonus feature on any of these preceding sets. Because despite the limitations it suffers from, it is really well done and works remarkably well in our ADHD streaming video era.

Before we get into that though, let’s talk a little bit about such digests.

A Brief Overview of Digest Versions

Before home video made movie libraries easily accessible to the masses, one way of actually collecting motion pictures was buying or renting Super 8mm film prints. Studios officially licensed theatrical features for a market of cinephiles that could afford them and the tech necessary to run them.

Now, I don’t know exactly how long this practice has been around, but based on what I’ve gathered, I believe it lasted roughly from the late 1950s to the mid-80s.

**Screencap** of the Cover Art for the Super 8 Digest Version uploaded by the Super 8 Database. Original image courtesy of Disney.

Many initial titles reissued this way were apparently from the silent era. But sound films followed as eventually did more contemporary works, such as Jaws, Chinatown, and Star Wars, with studios opening up their libraries for various Super 8 companies like Castle and Ken Films.

Naturally, the format considerably altered the work it presented.

Audiovisual quality would degrade from the 35mm prints and widescreen films would need to be tailored towards the 4:3 frame of the Super 8mm cameras and projectors.*

*This was the same frame as that of television, but how exactly the reframing of the image would occur in this case is not something I’m currently aware of.

But the biggest difference could occur in terms of duration.

In some cases, a film would be released in its entirety across multiple 8mm reels, such as John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), which was 5 reels long. In others, a picture would receive an “abridgement,” meaning it would be cut down. For instance, Straw Dogs (1971, dir. Sam Peckinpah) came out in an abridged 83-minute version (across 5 reels), losing about 30 minutes from the theatrical cut.1

Finally, a film could be released in a short-to-medium length edition called a ‘digest’ that recapped the entire picture by cutting it down to its barest essentials. Digests typically lasted 9-18 minutes, ideally containing all the best or key scenes from a picture from beginning to end. In some cases, a digest could have voiceover narration to explain the plot and cover its gaps.*

*Per Courtney Joyner’s excellent article on the history of Super 8 releases of Westerns, this was the case with the shorter 9-minute 20th Century Fox film digests issued by Ken Films. It is not entirely clear from the text but it seems that some titles received both 9-minute and 18-minute cuts, with the shorter ones having narration and the longer being released without it.

The market for Super 8 digests, however, was apparently killed by the rise of VHS in the 80s as the preferred home viewing format for theatrical features.

Studios had much less incentive to release digest versions on Super 8mm when they could make them available en masse via relatively cheap videotapes, and consumers could now easily rent or own the entire work.

Alien - 8mm Supercut

As I understand it, the 17-minute Super 8 Cut of Alien was released by Ken Films sometime in 1980, building on the company’s established relationship with 20th Century Fox.* However, this doesn’t seem to be the only Super 8 version available.

The Super 8 database lists a full-length Super 8 release by a UK company called Derann Film Services, while a 1980 Muscatone Journal clipping references another US Super 8 digest version released by a company called Red Fox Films (alternatively listed as “Red Fox Enterprises” on the Super 8 database).

*According to Joyner, earlier in the 70s Ken struck a deal to release Super 8 editions of the 5-film Planet of the Apes series to great commercial success, leading to Fox opening its library to Ken for more Super 8 releases.

Regardless, the Ken Films version is the one I’ve seen and so the one I wish to discuss. Specifically, I want to talk about the changes.

The image

Instances of Ian Holm's face being largely cut off. Images courtesy of Disney.

Let’s get this out of the way first: the original film’s 1:90:1 widescreen imagery is really not done justice here. I don’t know how the film was re-framed for 4:3 (pan-and-scanning shouldn’t have been an option as it is a video process) but this has all the issues that typically come with films that were not composed for 1.85:1 when they reappeared on broadcast TV in the old days.

For the most part, there is an effort to keep the key action and characters within the frame. And while the new version mostly succeeds at this, the images now lack much of the detail that makes Alien so fascinating.

Everything looks more cramped in the frame, occasionally zoomed in, to the point you really can’t savor the excellent production design. Moreover, there are also plenty of instances when faces or other crucial elements are cropped or cut off. Look, for instance at how it displays the face of Ian Holm in a couple of scenes.

And of course, the image quality isn’t high. It wouldn’t be high even if you saw the source print at this point, and it obvious deteriorated further in the course of being uploaded to web video. (Though I will say that in the downloaded .mkv edition I have, it looks higher quality than on YouTube or Archive.org, with better color.)

The Editing

All that said, this digest is indeed well-edited and is surprisingly enjoyable. Naturally, given the shorter running time, the pacing is much faster here. And yet, it’s not so frantic as a trailer or an episodic recap video. Rather, it retains select bits of specific scenes and sequences, cutting them together in such a way that there is some sense of temporal and spatial continuity, allowing the audience to watch, understand, and enjoy the chosen moments.

And indeed the digest version manages to retain most of the theatrical cut’s key plot points and scenes in a condensed form, including pretty much all the key scenes with the Alien itself. However, there are some notable and very interesting omissions.

The first major change is right there at the beginning: quite simply, the digest has its own unique opening title sequence!

The theatrical cut memorably opens with a slow and methodical title/credit sequence that sets the tone, mood and pace of the film perfectly, akin to a musical overture.

The camera pans to the right, showing a planet, as we listen to Jerry Goldsmith’s score. Meanwhile, as the names of the cast and crew appear in the center of the frame, the words forming the letters of the title “ALIEN” gradually phase in at the top, their distinct elements initially looking like foreign symbols before they become recognizable as English letters.

It’s not until it ends about two minutes in that we catch our first glimpse of the Nostromo and a title card informing us about its cargo shows up onscreen.

[Clip created by me, source footage courtesy of Disney]

By contrast, the digest opens with what seems to be new or altered footage of the Nostromo flying to the right in closeup (perhaps it is footage from later in the film though reversed, but I can’t tell). The letters spelling ALIEN fade in within the first three seconds and only then do the cast and crew titles follow. The Goldsmith score is reprised, but the sequence is barely thirty seconds long.

It condenses the ‘essential’ information of the theatrical opening and tries to retain the ‘feel’ of it as a whole but also makes evident that this is going to be a much faster version of the picture. It has no time to properly set the tone or mood.

The next big change occurs right after Kane gets facehugged, with the film cutting to black. When it fades in again, we get the lab scene on the Nostromo, where Ash and Dallas remove Kane’s helmet. Thus, the entire trek back to the Nostromo is cut and so is any conflict involving bringing Kane onboard in his facehugged state.

This omission isn’t that big of a deal. It clearly saves time, though it also effectively kills the Ash/Ripley subplot. Shortly thereafter, the digest cuts from Ash’s line about how removing the facehugger could kill Kane to the scene of Dallas listening to music in the shuttle! So, the entire sequence, where Dallas chooses to take responsibility for Kane’s life, which leads to the big reveal that the creature has acid instead of blood is now missing, as though the main characters indeed did nothing to try to remove the thing and just waited for it to die! This was a rather poor choice.

In addition to removing a key sequence in its entirety, it represents a weird tonal shift and paints everyone, especially Dallas, in a very negative light! But that also make it unintentionally funny, even if you don’t know what you’re missing.

The next big change occurs during the big confrontation between Ash and Ripley, which is now, frankly speaking, hilarious, as it flat-out breaks coherence.

As in the theatrical version, Ripley grabs Ash and pins him to a wall. But the sequence then immediately cuts to the part where Ash starts throwing Ripley around and tries to kill her in a completely different part of the ship! This makes no sense spatially at all.

Finally, there is the ending.

The new (old) ending

By far the biggest departure from the theatrical cut is the alternate ending of the digest version. As I’ve mentioned, the film shows pretty much all the key alien sequences. But the ending is a huge exception.

Here, Ripley escapes on the shuttle as the Nostromo explodes, she says she got the ‘son of a bitch’ and then it cuts to a quick version of the end credits.

The actual final confrontation with the xenomorph aboard the shuttle is completely absent. There is no surprise reveal of the creature sleeping in the wall. There is no scene where Ripley harpoons it and blasts it out of the airlock. No, here we are led to assume that the Alien indeed dies on the Nostromo.

One has to wonder what the rationale was for skipping the actual ending here. I can imagine time being a key factor, yet the sequence itself was such a key part of the movie that its absence is noticeable and the film as a whole comes off as anticlimactic.

[Clip created by me, source footage courtesy of Disney]

Yet more interesting is how this decision seems to harken back to an earlier iteration of the ending that I don’t believe was ever entirely filmed but certainly existed in script form. See, you might have heard a lot of stories over the last few years about how director Ridley Scott originally wanted to end the picture with the Xenomorph killing Ripley by biting her head off or something.

Garnering much less attention though is the fact that at one point Alien was scripted to conclude with the Alien dying on the Nostromo and not making it to the shuttle at all. Scott has told different variations of this story over the years, it seems, so I can’t be entirely certain of all the details. But here is how he put it on the Alien Covenant audio commentary track in 2017 about 1 hour 41 minutes into the picture:

“So, is it the end of Alien? It was all written that when Sigourney gets inside that shuttle, they close the door, it’s over. And I felt it was flat, it needs another evolution. So you need a fourth act. So, I sat down and wrote the fourth act, which is what would happen inside the escape shuttle. And it cost money so they didn’t wanna do it. But I think it’s the whole difference in the film. And then when I had to go and pitch it - extra five days shooting, because it came outside, fell, got burned and went back inside and blew it out again…. And it was worth every penny.”

You can read a nice little article that delves into more detail about this fourth act and provides somewhat different accounts of it how it came to be here by Valaquen for the Alien fan blog Strange Shapes. Per the article, there was always a fourth act in the script, insofar as the alien attacks Ripley “just as the shuttle launches.”

This means the film would’ve indeed featured its final appearance before the Nostromo explosion rather than just having it die off-screen.

In any case, however, the Digest version provides us with an idea of what the original ending of the film could’ve looked like and so illustrates how right Scott was about it needing another ‘evolution’ or something punchier.

With such an anticlimactic finale, Alien would not have been the great film it is today, in my opinion. The only downside, however, is that since then, the ‘additional 4th act’ has become a staple for this series as a whole and a kind-of crutch.

Aliens, Resurrection, Covenant, and Romulus all replicate the structure of Alien by having one final creature confrontation aboard an escape ship just as it looks like the main characters have gotten away from the xenomorphs . And while the first two movies made it work in their own way, I can’t say the same for the last two entries, where the inclusion feels gratuitous and has little to do with the actual story. I sincerely hope that if we get more Alien films then there will be no more 4th acts.

Despite all these issues, however, the digest version remains quite watchable and entertaining. It’s quite impressive how much of the film it manages to successfully translate into a 17-minute runtime without it being distracting and the revisions that are noticeable do have their own funny charm to them. I’m not sure to what extent one could enjoy this without having seen the whole film previously but if it were more complete, I do think it could work as a standalone version.

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Ahead of its Time

Now, with all of that, you might wonder: why did I mention earlier that I think this digest version was ahead of its time? My answer is that this digest, if done better, without any re-framing or a strict 17-miunte time limit, could work really well in the contemporary streaming environment.

Because quite simply, we live in an age where our media consumption is often heavily segmented, where we are always distracted and have too much to watch but not enough time for anything. When this digest originally came out, watching short versions of movies was a niche practice. Today, it is arguably mainstream, with film clips and short form videos being regularly viewed on web video platforms.

Look, I love movies. I love TV shows. But I don’t think I love watching things as much as I used to. I unfortunately don’t remember where I read it recently (it was definitely a Substack) but there was an article that commented on how we don’t really watch that much on streaming anymore. We might spend more time looking for stuff to watch, put something on for a few minutes and then turn it off.

And honestly, I feel that’s a very accurate assessment.

I’ve been finding that over the past year or so, I’ve been sometimes spending more time browsing my streaming platforms and picking things to watch (looking at trailers, synopses, genre descriptions) than actually watching them. I have numerous entries in my watchlists that never get seen and I keep adding more.

And sometimes, I discover that stuff I planned to see at some point is no longer available due to licensing issues, which makes me feel like Dev Shaw in the Master of None S1 finale, where he reads about the fig tree analogy from The Bell Jar.

All this leads me to think that Digest versions could play rather well today.

Imagine if studios made official, high-quality re-edits of feature films (complete with proper aspect ratio) available on streaming services, if just as an occasional bonus option. I think having the ability to watch movies this way is something a lot of folks would appreciate and so this practice could generate good ratings for a streamer.

Let me be clear: I don’t want this to completely supplant the practice of watching visual works from beginning to end. I think that this will never entirely go away.

But much as Cable TV in the old days inspired channel-surfing, streaming TV and web video today promote a different kind of engagement. There are too many choices now, too many options. And when you want to enjoy all these things, it helps when they can be either short or digestible in bite-sized increments.

*There are of course movies and TV shows that I watch in their entirety. But it’s not uncommon for me to use the skip button to fast-forward through the ‘boring parts’ of some movies and TV episodes when I stream them.

So, in that sense, the time is ripe for the return of digest versions.

Even if just the Super 8 ones that already exist could get remastered and reissued, I think they’d be accepted and appreciated by modern audiences.

Bonus Features

Here’s a playlist on YouTube by Savage Cinema of Super 8 digest versions of movies. Among other things, you can find links to rare cuts of Jaws and Star Wars.

But what do you think?

What did you think of the Alien Super 8 digest? Have you ever seen any others? What do you think of releasing such versions in general? Would digest versions work today for streaming or is it a completely obsolete practice tied to a bygone format? Please,

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