Alien is a 1979 British-American science-fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott , and starring Sigourney Weaver , Tom Skerritt , Veronica Cartwright , Harry Dean Stanton , John Hurt , Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto . In 2008 , it was ranked as the seventh-best film in the science fiction genre by the American Film Institute , and as the 33rd greatest film of all time by Empire magazine . Daniel Thomas `` Dan '' O'Bannon ( September 30 , 1946 -- December 17 , 2009 ) was an American film screenwriter , director , visual effects supervisor , and occasional actor , usually in the science fiction and horror genres . He also contributed computer animation to Star Wars , worked on cult classics such as Dark Star , Heavy Metal and Total Recall , and both wrote and directed the horror comedy The Return of the Living Dead . The film-poem ( also called the poetic avant-garde film , verse-film or verse-documentary ) is a label first applied to American avant-garde films released after World War II .
Dan O'Bannon worked primarily in two genres.