Metroid: Samus Returns Isn't Just an Action Game—It's a Feminist Horror Tale

When Metroid first hit shelves in 1987, the Nintendo game about an alien-killing bounty hunter felt like nothing else. Set on an eerie, alien world, it eschewed the poppy optimism of most ‘80s games for a claustrophobic odyssey set to spare, menacing tones. But its armored hero, Samus Aran, seemed unremarkable—like every other humdrum videogame soldier—until the game’s finale. That’s when Samus stepped out of her space suit and revealed she was a woman, and you had been one as well for as long as you played the game.

The gender-flip was a gag of sorts that relied on the casual sexism of the era, but a closer look at the Metroid series—which recently released Metroid: Samus Returns, a brilliant remake of Metroid II for the 3DS—reveals something else. Metroid isn’t just an action franchise, but a horror game inspired deeply by the Alien movies, and one whose true terror and power are rooted in the female body.

Both Metroid and Alien came by their defining element almost by accident; Metroid was nearly complete when a member of the game development team suggested making Samus female to “surprise” the player. The original 1979 movie Alien had a similar gender-flip: although the hero of the film had been scripted as male, director Ridley Scott decided to change the character to a woman, Ellen Ripley. “She would be the last one you would think would survive,” he explained later. “But she does, not despite her femininity but in some ways because of it.”

Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto described Alien as a “huge influence” on his game, which similarly owes a profound debt to the haunting art of H.R. Giger. His skeletal designs inspired both the multi-mouthed xenomorphs that stalked through the shadows of the series, and the spiny architecture of the alien world in Prometheus, and make their way into the world of Metroid as well. The Chozo statues that offer Samus power-ups bear more than a passing resemblance to the Engineer that Ripley encounters on the abandoned spaceship in Aliens, and the spiky, pincered enemies that creep through its levels evoke a similar insectoid revulsion.

One game literally refers to Metroids as “xenomorphs,” while the evil mini-boss Ridley—who shares a name with Alien’s director—has a distended skull reminiscent of the film’s otherworldly killer. Even the game’s architecture echoed the tense finales of the first two films. Rather than simply proceeding forward towards a goal, Samus was forced to loop backwards through the dangers of its long, forbidding corridors to confront a very feminine villain: Mother Brain.

But the parallels go far beyond the visual, particularly in how both series challenged the conventions of their male-dominated genres. While Metroid was hailed as ground-breaking for daring to put a woman at the center of a video game, womanhood is similarly central to how Alien flips the script on gendered horror. Horror movies have long revolved around sexualized assaults on scantily-clad women, whose murders are easily read as metaphors for rape—penetrated over and over by phallic knives for the gratification of the male villain. Alien’s parasitic face-huggers and their chest-bursting progeny are a grim subversion of sexual assault and pregnancy, and it’s no accident that the person who suffers this fate in Alien is a man.

While the heroism on screen resides in a female body, the horror is laser-targeted at a specifically male anxiety: the fear of being, or being treated like, a woman. Although numerous films from Rosemary’s Baby to Darren Aronovsky’s controversial new thriller Mother! have forced women to confront the horrors of pregnancy and sexual assault, Alien dared to do something different: take those female-coded terrors and inflict them on men.

The second installments of both franchises dug more directly into the terrors of motherhood. Aliens found new chills with its explicitly female villain, an Alien Queen whose eggs peeled open to reveal a brood of skittering facehuggers. But maternity is the motivating force for Ripley as well, who takes an orphan girl named Newt under her wing and spends much of the film trying to save and protect her. The only reason they survive their confrontation with the Alien Queen is by threatening its eggs with a flame-thrower—nothing, it seems, is as powerful as the pull of an endangered child, or as dangerous as a mother.

In Samus Returns, the hero acquires a very unexpected child of her own: a baby Metroid that hatches from an egg and immediately imprints on her as a mother figure. Rather than killing the baby, she brings it with her and even starts to protect it; when the final boss, Ridley, snatches the baby Metroid away in its claws, Samus stands and fights to save her chittering, alien child rather than simply running to the dropship and disappearing. She doesn’t shout, “Get away from her, you bitch!” but the parallels to Ripley’s final confrontation with the Alien Queen—while wearing a mechanical exosuit—are inescapable.

Women, particularly in action and horror films, are often coded as vulnerable or weak, but Alien and Metroid demand a new understanding of femininity that puts it squarely at the center of the action. Their horror is the violence and horror so often faced by women: not only how terrifying it is to face the threat of sexual violation, but how terrifying it can be to bring life into the world, and how terrifying it is every moment after, to love something that much.

But far from making them weaker, motherhood makes Ripley and Samus fiercer, more lethal, more willing to walk into hell wielding a flame-thrower or a missile launcher and come back with their children or not at all. Their stories insists on a truth rarely acknowledged by the world of action and entertainment: that to be a mother is to be a warrior, to be willing to tear your body apart to either bring your child into the world or keep it there. What could be braver, fiercer and more badass than that?

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