The Hidden: The Alien Parasite Buddy-Cop Film

The Hidden opens with a mild-mannered businessman robbing a bank, murdering several people, and leading half of Los Angeles on a car chase in a stolen Ferrari with the stereo at maximum, before being shot to pieces through a police roadblock. The film has not introduced anybody. You do not know who he is or why. It is four minutes old.

That is the whole method. Jack Sholder’s 1987 picture moves at a speed that leaves you no room to notice how strange it is, and the strangeness is considerable.

The premise, kept above the line

Detective Tom Beck (Michael Nouri) is a working Los Angeles homicide cop with a wife, a daughter and a normal life, and he cannot understand his own case. Ordinary people — a businessman, a stockbroker, a man with no record and no reason — are suddenly committing violent, gleeful, escalating crimes and then dying in circumstances that make no sense.

Then Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan) arrives from the FBI, and Beck’s problem doubles. Gallagher knows things he cannot possibly know, wants things no federal agent should want, and behaves — in every single scene — like a man performing a version of humanity he has studied from a manual. He also has a very specific view about how the suspects should be dealt with, which is that they should be shot a great deal more than the law generally permits.

The two of them chase the thing through Los Angeles. New Line Cinema released it in 1987, into a year that also produced RoboCop and Predator, and it was comprehensively buried by both.

The alien as consumer

Here is the argument, and it is the reason the film has lasted.

The parasite in The Hidden is not characterised through menace. It is characterised through taste. Every host it takes, it immediately uses to acquire the same four things: a Ferrari, loud music, a great deal of money, and the freedom to kill whoever irritates it. It is not gathering intelligence or infiltrating institutions or executing a plan. It is shopping.

That is a proper satirical idea, and Sholder plays it entirely without commentary, which is what makes it bite. The creature is the perfect eighties consumer — pure, unmediated appetite, wearing whatever body it needs to obtain the object it wants, discarding it when the body is used up. It moves from a businessman to a stripper to a politician, and each new host is a purchase. The film’s most quoted beat is the parasite, wearing a candidate’s body, announcing a run for office, and the joke is that this is a lateral move.

The genius is the register. A film that stopped to say any of this out loud would be unbearable. Sholder never stops, so the satire arrives entirely as behaviour, and you leave having absorbed the argument without being lectured. Compare it with Carpenter’s sunglasses a year later — the same target, hit much harder and much more explicitly, and the two films together are a fine study in whether you should say the thing or show it.

Kyle MacLachlan, building Dale Cooper

Here is the craft section, and it is a performance nobody noticed at the time.

Look at where MacLachlan is in 1987. Dune was 1984 and had gone badly. Blue Velvet was 1986 and had made him a Lynch object rather than a star. Twin Peaks is three years away. And what he does in The Hidden is, in retrospect, the whole blueprint for Dale Cooper.

Gallagher is a man who is not quite a man, and MacLachlan plays him with no tics and no menace whatsoever — the choice he makes is sincerity. Gallagher takes everything literally. He answers questions he was not asked and fails to answer the ones he was. He is polite in the wrong places and blunt in the wrong places. He looks at ordinary human objects with an interest that is completely genuine and completely misplaced. He is unfailingly courteous to Beck’s wife in a way that reads as slightly wrong and never as sinister.

That is Cooper. That is exactly Cooper, three years early — the man who is delighted by coffee and cannot quite locate the social register, played straight rather than for laughs. Lynch cast MacLachlan in Twin Peaks off a set of instincts this film had already fully formed, and watching The Hidden now is like finding the sketchbook for a famous painting.

Nouri is the film’s other necessary half, and he is doing unshowy, difficult work: he plays Beck as tired and decent and constantly, visibly recalculating, and the buddy dynamic works because Nouri makes Beck’s slow decision to trust this obvious lunatic feel like an act of professional judgement rather than a script requirement.

What it is really descended from

The collector’s note. Sholder came to this from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 — he directed the sequel to Craven’s film about the rules of sleep — and The Hidden’s real inheritance is the body-snatcher line rather than the action one. The parasite hops from person to person and the horror is that anyone in frame might already be it, which is the 1956 paranoia blueprint with the pods removed and the 1978 remake’s urban dread kept.

The sharper ancestor is Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle, which established the specific shape: an alien policeman pursuing an alien criminal, both of them parasites, both wearing human bodies, with the law-enforcement relationship intact across species. The Hidden is that book crossed with a Los Angeles cop movie, and everything downstream — the whole subsequent genre of extraterrestrial agents policing their own on Earth — is drinking from the same source.

And structurally it is a chase film, in the tradition where the chase is the plot. The Terminator three years earlier is the obvious sibling: an implacable non-human thing moving through a city with a cop and a civilian in its wake, told at a speed that substitutes momentum for exposition.

The case against

It is thin. The Hidden has one idea and it is a good one, and the film has no second act to speak of — it simply runs the same sequence four or five times with a different host, and the pattern becomes visible around the hour mark. The parasite’s appetite is funny once and then it is a formula.

The women are badly served. Claudia Christian is memorable as one of the hosts and the film’s interest in her is more or less entirely the camera’s; Beck’s wife exists to be endangered. And the practical effects, which the film needs at the exact moments it matters most, are competent rather than good, which puts a ceiling on the horror the premise deserves.

The last thing to say against it is that it wastes its own discovery. A film this sharp about appetite could have gone considerably further, and Sholder — a good, unpretentious craftsman with no visible interest in being an author — was happy to make a fast, mean, entertaining picture and go home.

Where it stands

It stands as the best thing Sholder ever directed and one of the great sleepers of the decade, and the reason people keep rediscovering it is the tension between what it is doing and how little it cares. The Hidden has a satirical thesis about consumption, a science-fiction premise with real teeth, and a proto-Cooper performance from a future television legend, and it has all of this while behaving like a disposable eighty-minute cop movie. That gap is the whole pleasure.

Watch it for MacLachlan. Watch it for the opening four minutes, which teach you the film’s speed and never break the promise. Watch it because it is one of the few eighties films whose monster is defined by what it wants to buy, and because forty years on that has aged into something less funny than Sholder intended.

It has had a good disc release and drifts through the streaming services; it is eighty-odd minutes and it does not waste any of them.

Spoilers below

Gallagher is an alien. This is the reveal the film treats as an open secret — MacLachlan’s performance gives it away in his first scene and Sholder knows it, which is why the picture never bothers to stage it as a twist. He is Alhague, a law-enforcement officer of his own species, pursuing a fugitive across space, and he is wearing the body of a man who died and was, essentially, borrowed.

What the film does with that is more interesting than the reveal. It refuses to make the good alien and the bad alien morally distinct in kind. Both are parasites. Both wear the dead. Gallagher has taken a corpse rather than a living host, and the film’s only ethical line runs through consent and appetite — the fugitive kills to acquire, Alhague waits for a body nobody is using. That is a real distinction and it is a narrow one, and the film is honest that its hero is the same species of thing as its monster.

The ending is where it earns everything. Beck is fatally wounded in the final confrontation, and Gallagher — having destroyed the fugitive — does the only thing his nature allows: he leaves his own borrowed body and enters Beck’s, keeping him alive. The final scene has Beck walking out to his wife and daughter, and what is behind the eyes is Alhague, and the film simply lets that be a happy ending.

It is a magnificently unstable last shot. A family gets its father back and the father is an alien policeman. Everything the film has said about the parasite as consumer — taking a body because you want what it can give you — is now being performed by the hero, for love, and Sholder cuts before anyone can ask whether Beck agreed. The parasite that shops for Ferraris and the parasite that shops for a family are doing the same thing with different taste, and The Hidden has spent eighty minutes making sure you cannot quite say why one is fine.