Xtro: The British Alien-Impregnation Oddity

A man is in the garden of an English country house with his young son. A light comes down. The man is gone. The boy runs inside and tells his mother, and nobody believes him, and the film cuts to three years later and a London flat where that boy is now living with his mother, her new partner, and a French au pair.

That is the first four minutes of Xtro, released in 1983 and directed by Harry Bromley Davenport, and it is the last time the film behaves like anything you can predict. What follows is a British sci-fi horror picture that operates on the logic of a bad dream someone is describing to you at speed — a film with no interest in explanation, no discernible rules, and a willingness to go somewhere grotesque roughly every eight minutes. It has been in circulation ever since, largely because nobody who sits through it can quite put it down afterwards.

I came to it the way most people my age did: a video shop shelf, a lurid sleeve, a running time short enough to risk. It is not a good film in any sense that would survive a film-school seminar. It is one of the strangest things Britain produced in the decade, and those two facts are doing different jobs.

The film has no rules, and that is the design

Most alien films establish a physics and then torment the characters inside it. Alien has a life cycle. The Thing has a rate of assimilation. Invasion of the Body Snatchers has pods, and the pods work the same way in every scene. The audience learns the rules, and dread comes from watching people fail to respect them.

Xtro has nothing of the kind. A creature arrives, does something appalling, and the film moves on to an entirely unrelated appalling thing. Powers appear when required and vanish when they are inconvenient. Nothing established in reel two constrains reel four. Objects animate. A wound closes. A character acquires an ability with no setup and never uses it again.

The lazy reading is that Bromley Davenport and his co-writers simply could not construct a screenplay. The more interesting reading, and the one I think holds, is that the incoherence is the point of contact with the material. This is a film about an abduction, and abduction narratives in their folkloric form are exactly this: a stretch of missing time, a return, and a set of details that do not reconcile. Rationalised abduction cinema — the kind that gives you a government conspiracy and a scientist explaining the biology in act two — has to invent a machinery that the phenomenon itself never had. Xtro skips that step. The thing that comes back has no manual, and the film respects that by refusing to write one.

Compare the British sci-fi horror line it descends from. Nigel Kneale’s tradition — traceable through The Quatermass Xperiment and everything Hammer built on it — was rationalist to the bone: a scientist, a procedure, a hypothesis tested on screen. Xtro is what that tradition looks like with the scientist removed. The professionals never turn up. There is no investigation. It is domestic horror in a Notting Hill flat, and the only authority figure with a theory is a child.

What the film is actually about

Strip the creature effects away and you find a divorce film.

Sam Phillips vanished. Rachel, his wife, has spent three years constructing a life without him: a new partner in Joe, a flat, a routine, a story she has told herself about what happened. Tony, the boy, has spent those years insisting his father was taken by a light, which the adults have processed as a trauma response. When Sam comes back, he wants his son. Joe wants him gone. Rachel is stranded between an old attachment she never got to close and a new one she has not finished choosing.

That is a recognisable and quite ordinary domestic situation, and Xtro plays it fairly straight — the performances from Bernice Stegers and Philip Sayer are pitched at kitchen-sink realism while the film detonates around them. The alien material is the metaphor doing its work in the open: the returning parent as an intrusion, the child’s loyalty as a weapon, the new partner as an obstacle to be removed. Cronenberg had already made the definitive version of this in The Brood, where a woman’s rage at her marriage takes physical form and comes for the people she blames. Xtro arrives four years later with a fraction of the control and a version of the same idea — a family reconstituted by force, with the biology of the reunion rendered literally enough to make a distributor nervous.

The difference is intent. Cronenberg knew precisely what he was building; his contagion films, Shivers included, are arguments in monster form. Xtro seems to have arrived at its own subtext sideways, which is why it can be simultaneously stupid and unnerving in a way that better-behaved films manage only in flashes.

The score, and the man who made it

Bromley Davenport composed the music himself, on synthesisers, and it is the single most accomplished thing in the film. It does not chase the John Carpenter pulse that everyone else in 1983 was chasing. It is thinner, colder and more melodic — long sustained tones and a repeated figure that sounds like a lullaby someone has slowed down and is now regretting. It plays over domestic scenes as often as over the horror, which is what gives the flat its permanent sense of contamination. Nothing in that apartment is safe, and the reason you feel it is the music, because the staging certainly is not doing it.

There is a good honesty note here, and it is one of the reasons I like writing about the film. Bromley Davenport has never been an enthusiast for his own picture. In interviews across the decades he has been notably unsentimental about Xtro, treating it as a job he took and a thing that happened rather than a work he defends. He then directed two further films carrying the name — Xtro II: The Second Encounter in 1990 and Xtro 3: Watch the Skies in 1995 — neither of which shares a character, a creature or an idea with the first. They are sequels in trademark only, which tells you something about how the title travelled: the brand had value long after the film had any advocates.

The case against, honestly made

The film is badly assembled. Scenes end because the reel does, characters make decisions that no human would make, and the pacing collapses entirely in the middle third. Maryam d’Abo, in her feature debut four years before The Living Daylights, is handed a part that consists of being present in a room and then being unavailable. The dialogue is functional at best. The creature work ranges from genuinely disturbing to a rubber shape the camera should have left alone; a director with more money would have shot less of it, and a director with more judgement would have shot less of it anyway.

There is also the question the film’s admirers tend to skate over: a fair amount of Xtro is transgression for its own sake. It goes for the reaction before it goes for the meaning, and the reason it survived the video-shop era is partly the same reason a lot of thin films survived it — a sleeve promising something you had not seen, and a rental market that rewarded the promise rather than the delivery. That whole economy, and the strange afterlife it created for films nobody defended at the time, is the real subject of Censor, and Xtro is one of its exhibits.

The defence is that the film’s failures and its power come from the same place. A more competent Xtro would have explained the creature, and the explanation would have killed it. What is left is ninety minutes in which a family’s worst private dynamic wears an alien and walks around a London flat, scored by a synthesiser lullaby, going wherever it likes. Tobe Hooper would swing at comparable material with a studio budget two years later in Lifeforce and produce something equally unhinged and far more expensive. Xtro got there first, on nothing, and it is the one people still argue about.

Watch it late, alone, and do not expect the ending to help.

Spoilers below

The creature that emerges from the woods kills a couple in a country cottage before finding Rachel’s old address, and what it does when it gets there is the sequence the film is remembered for: it impregnates a woman, and she gives birth — in a single unbroken run of screaming — to a fully grown adult man, who is Sam. The alien has reproduced Sam Phillips using a human as the incubator. It is a genuinely audacious piece of staging and the prosthetic work holds up better than anything else in the picture, mostly because Bromley Davenport shoots it in tight, ugly close-up with no cutaways to hide behind.

From there Sam sets about reclaiming Tony, and the transmission works both ways: the boy acquires his father’s abilities, and starts using them on the household. Tony’s toys animate — a life-sized clown, a toy soldier, a black panther in the corridor — and the film’s most effective stretch is a child weaponising his own bedroom against the adults who did not believe him. There is a real idea buried in that: the boy has been carrying the truth for three years, alone, and the moment he gets power he uses it to punish everyone who called it a story.

The endings are where Xtro stops being a film and becomes a bibliography. Multiple versions circulate with materially different final scenes — one closes on Rachel alone in the flat surrounded by eggs, another resolves the father-and-son thread out in the open, and the extant cuts do not agree on who survives or what has been left behind. Bromley Davenport shot alternatives, distributors chose between them, and the home-video era then preserved all of them in parallel. It is the perfect finish for this particular film. Xtro spends ninety minutes refusing to establish a rule, and then declines to establish which ending is the real one, and forty years later the argument is still the point.