By Richard McKenna / October 28, 2026
The Intruder Within
Directed by Peter Carter
ABC (1981)
The year is (probably) 1983 and I am an Alien-obsessed 12-year-old who spends a huge amount of his free time producing appalling felt-tip homages to Giger that not even my grandparents can pretend to be impressed by. One evening I see an advert on the telly for a made-for-TV movie and am instantly possessed: no matter that it is clearly a tawdry knock-off of one of my life’s most sacred inspirations—the one that is not Space: 1999—I must see ABC’s 1981 The Intruder Within when it’s broadcast. If it contains even a thousandth of the power of its progenitor, it is worth whatever chore-multiplying bargain I must strike with my parents.
If ever an artifact served to underline the American TV movie’s function as an inexplicably watered-down and slightly cockeyed echo of the real excitements of the wider culture, The Intruder Within might be it. Written by hardened hack Ed Waters, who had cut his teeth writing everything from 1957 Roger Corman exploitation shocker Sorority Girl to the TV series Kung Fu and would go on to contribute to prime-time Shatner-ganza T.J. Hooker, The Intruder Within was very competently directed by Peter Carter of Rituals (1977) fame. Aptly named in Italian The Terror Comes from the Past—the past in this case being the release of Alien two years before—The Intruder Within bizarrely has no English language Wikipedia page, which should give you some idea of its odd vibe.
If I tell you it’s set on an oil rig—one owned by the absurdly but incredibly named Zortron Corporation—you can probably guess the story, so I won’t bore you with the details: there’s blue-collar repartee, masculinity crisis-crushing mustaches, a company with a secret agenda and some ugly little eggs that turn up in the mud. A workman who is attacked by The Intruder Within’s version of the chestburster ends up getting a burial at sea, then the eggs get heated and start to look oddly like onion bhajis. Instead of delicious flavor, though, their wonky spines are full of something that has soon turned the rig’s clumsy handyman into a groaning lunatic who ends up jumping off the end of a crane. A jumpy crewman has a meltdown in the canteen and literally says “There’s death here!” Joseph Bottoms (from Disney’s 1979 The Black Hole) plays a shifty Ash/Carter Burke corporate fink who pre-empts Burke’s codification of the bodywarmer as the corporate fink’s garment of choice five years later in Aliens and says things like “Let’s keep this incident among ourselves.” And things eventually escalate until a full-sized creature (improbably referred to in ABC’s promotional materials as “A monster too terrifying for history books”) appears and shambles blindly about the rig much in the manner of a stuntman wearing a heavy latex mask that impedes his vision, before events conclude with a very slow pursuit up the drill tower accompanied by an incongruously jolly tuba theme.
The whole thing goes exactly as you’d imagine upon hearing the words “Alien rip-off set on an oil rig,” though you might be surprised by how decidedly un-rig-like are the rig’s interiors (though the exteriors were shot on a real rig on Lake Erie), which feature the kind of wooden doors you’d expect to find in an old person’s home, and by quite how rubber suit-ey the film’s crowning special effect is. And yet for all its telegraphed obviousness, there is something deeply satisfying about The Intruder Within. Its production values are typical of what you might expect to see on the TV of the day, with performances that are in the main strangely mannered and unrealistic, but also dotted with confusing moments of naturalness: here there’s an actually-very-cute middle-age romance and some surprising character detail. Yes, the special effects are feeble, occasionally so much so that they almost come full circle into Eraserhead-surrealism territory, and The Intruder Within tackles the challenge of matching the chestburster scene by completely replacing any actual chestbursting with a strangely lackluster bit of lighting.
Like many of the Alien rip-offs that came out in that masterpiece’s wake, The Intruder Within tackles some similar themes in a far less delicate and less sophisticated way. But what it does have is an actual mood, something that, at least for me, feels increasingly hard to find in the genre fare of today. It’s silly and shoddy but in some way clearly rooted in physical reality, and that gives it power, possibly more than it actually deserves: the oil rig feels like an oil rig, the sea feels cold and dangerous, the stunts feel risky, the faces feel human, the interiors cramped. It feels creepy, meaning that for all its failings, it is a horror film. It is perfect for Halloween.
