The 1979 summer edition of Cinefantastique magazine featured a scathing review of Alien, deeming it nothing but a melding of It! The Terror from Beyond Space and Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires. Ridley Scott’s film is a masterpiece of both science fiction and horror and incredibly influential in its own right, but it is true that it itself was inspired by the 1965 Italian movie. Cinefantastique pointed it out first, in a reductive, bitter way, but the legend of Planet of the Vampires is growing, with the cult film reaching new audiences with a new Blu-ray release. Alien is undoubtedly the better film but Planet of the Vampires has charm, atmosphere, and influence. It’s a film which embraces the B-movie trappings that Ridley Scott vowed to transcend.
Planet of the Vampires features a very liberal use of the word ‘vampires’ when zombies would be more accurate. The Italian title, Terror in Space, is more fitting, I guess. Or even the alternate UK title The Demon Planet. If vampire is a descriptor for anyone, it better fits the spaceship crew rather than the villains, who are dressed in black suits with high collars and caps with widows peaks. It’s a film full of fascinating retro design choices, a far cry visually from the grounded realm of Scott’s Alien. Its sci-fi sensibilities are very 1960s, including the very loud computers, much like those in the original Star Trek, which are charming for a while but if you had to actually work on these ships the constant beeping and booping would drive you insane.
It’s when our hero ship, the Argos, lands on a planet when things start to more broadly resemble Alien. Both films share a narrative conceit with some mysterious distress signal drawing the ships to a dark planet. Planet of the Vampires features a dark rocky world similar to that of LV426, although with more gaudy colours familiar to those who have seen Bava’s brilliant giallo films, such as his masterpiece Blood and Black Lace. The landscape looks like the cover of a cheap pulp paperback in the best way possible. The film was produced on a tiny budget, and it shows, but Bava makes the most out of it, literally using smoke and mirrors. Impressively, the majority of the film’s effects are shot in-camera. For another Alien connection, Carlo Rambaldi worked on both films, designing the ships for Planet of the Vampires and constructing the Xenomorph head for the later film.
Planet of the Vampires is like if Alien took place entirely on the planet, with the horror walking the vast landscape rather than boarding the claustrophobic ship. The scale is the film’s undoing in some ways: there are far too many characters to keep track of and it takes some effort to work out who’s alive, who’s dead, and who’s undead at any given time. But much like Alien, the planet is home to a strange ancient ship (“its shape and build is entirely unknown to us”) and within the ship lies “a colossal humanoid” skeleton. This sequence, one of the film’s best, is such a clear influence on Scott’s film narratively but less so in terms of the design. There are none of Giger’s bizarre biomechanical designs but the ship does have grand cylindrical corridors. And the Argos has a circular door which perhaps could connect to the Space Jockey’s ship.
At its core, Planet of the Vampires is a parasite story but less a biological symbiote like Alien and more of a consciousness takeover, with aliens taking over the unconscious and recently deceased. It’s a body snatcher story, familiar to 50s and 60s sci-fi, more in line with any number of Star Trek episodes. But there are still plenty more comparisons that can be made to Alien. The crew hold large guns that look similar to Ripley holding the flamethrower, the crew’s audio log is similar to Ripley’s final log entry, and the ship is set to self-destruct with a ten minute (or megon) timer. Having to destroy the ship before it can take an infecting payload to Earth is a bit like Alien and very much like Prometheus. The ending twist however is related more to Battlestar Galactica.
Comparisons between Planet of the Vampires and Alien can be reductive (I dare to write at the end of this article) and there are many differences between the two films. But I feel, as many others do, that Planet of the Vampires influenced a great many films since its release in 1965, Alien included. In fact, Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon admitted to stealing the giant skeleton from Planet of the Vampires after decades of denying it: “I stole the giant skeleton from the Planet of the Vampires.” But it was hardly the only inspiration because O’Bannon has also famously said, “I didn’t steal Alien from anybody. I stole Alien from everybody.” Ridley Scott however claims never to have seen Planet of the Vampires. If true, it’s his loss.
