Is there a scene in the history of cinema as awesome in its terror, as primal in its horror, and as memorable a freak-out for the audience that first saw it as the shower scene from “Psycho”? “Alien-2019-movie-posters/”>Memory: The Origins of Alien,” the latest anatomy-of-movie-love documentary written and directed by Alexandre O.
Philippe, makes the case that the chest-bursting sequence from Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979), in which John Hurt, squirming in nightmare agony on a table, watches a fleshy fetus with silver teeth and a shuddery long tentacle erupt out of his stomach, might be the equivalent, in sheer depth of impact, of Hitchcock’s most infamous moment.Philippe ought to know.
Two years ago, the filmmaker was at Sundance with “78/52,” a documentary that devoted itself to a fascinating and nearly fetishistic dissection of Hitchcock’s shower scene — though really, what made the documentary singular and captivating is that it was such a close-up,
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