The Alien Within

COMMUNION: 30 Years Later

At age 7, the image burned into my mind. I was always allowed to watch any horror movie I wanted, my parents had no restrictions in that regard. For some reason these few seconds haunted me for years, and still do. A man awakes in the night, irked by the feeling something is prowling around his isolated cabin in the woods. He looks at his cracked bedroom door, peering into the black beyond. “Is that someone there…?” He whispers to the shadows. Suddenly, half of an alien’s head peers around the door — staring at him with one big black eye — before it disappears back into the dark.

I still remember the goosebumps that ran up my spine. It was my first visual introduction to the taboo topic of alien abduction. It was something (through my mother’s work) that I had always heard about, even at a young age. But seeing it onscreen gave it a very real sense. A strange light in the sky is one thing. Not being safe in your own bed is another.

Strieber brazenly told of how the intimate and the alien coexist in the liminal cracks of everyday existence.

On November 10, 1989, Communion opened to abysmal box office numbers and mostly negative…