About the Movie
The space shuttle Churchill, on a joint British-American mission to Halley’s Comet, finds something riding in the coma: a vessel 150 miles long, filled with desiccated bat-like giants — and three perfectly preserved human bodies in crystal cases. Colonel Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) brings the three aboard. Thirty days later the Churchill returns to Earth silent and burned out, with Carlsen the only survivor in an escape pod and the three bodies delivered to a London research centre — where the female (Mathilda May) wakes, and begins feeding on the life force of everyone near her.
What follows, directed by Tobe Hooper from Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires, is the most deliriously ambitious film the Cannon Group ever financed: a vampire invasion, a plague panic, a psychic love story, and the end of London, all in one picture. Patrick Stewart appears as the possessed director of an asylum; Peter Firth hunts the vampires as an SAS colonel; John Dykstra, fresh from Star Wars, stages effects on a scale British cinema had rarely attempted; and Henry Mancini supplies a thunderous march of a score. It runs 116 minutes in its international cut and escalates for every one of them.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Lifeforce is the great glorious failure that became a cult monument. It cost a fortune, performed poorly in 1985, and has been steadily reclaimed ever since as a one-of-a-kind collision of British science fiction tradition — its DNA runs straight back to Quatermass — and blockbuster spectacle. Nobody else in 1985 was making a film that begins as Alien-style derelict horror and ends with London burning under a comet’s tail, and nobody has made one quite like it since.
Its reputation now rests on exactly the qualities that sank it at the time: scale, sincerity, and a total refusal to be a smaller, safer film. In the modern reassessment of Hooper’s career, this is the picture his defenders point to first.
