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I was nine years old when I first saw Ridley Scott's Alien. A schoolfriend had taped it off the telly, and one summer holiday afternoon we all gathered in his living room to watch this forbidden fruit, brought to us by the magic of a Memorex E-180.It was the first proper horror movie I'd seen, outside of cheap black-and-white 1950s monster movies, and quite frankly it scared the piss out of me. Almost literally. I never even made it to the end. Around the time the creature's pneumatic jaw slammed into the skull of Yaphet Kotto's Parker and you totally saw bits of his brain, I caved in, faked a need to be somewhere else and fled into the suburban sunshine to walk off my jitters.
I've been chasing that initial high ever since - and from the moment it opens with a distorted, crackling rendition of the 20th Century Fox fanfare that looks like it could have come from the very same VHS tape, Creative Assembly's Alien: Isolation is the closest I've come to recapturing that same mix of cloying dread and intense vulnerability.
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