Lifeforce

Lifeforce opens with a simple, irresistible premise: the crew of a joint British–American shuttle on a routine mission find a spaceship tucked into the coma of Halley’s Comet. From that clean, audacious seed the film grows something odder and louder than you expect — a space-haul that turns into a London emergency and then into a metaphysical feeding frenzy.

Tobe Hooper steers the whole thing, and he doesn’t bother keeping the genre neat: science fiction rubs shoulders with vampire and zombie tropes, adventure with pure, unsettling horror. The discovery on the comet — hundreds of desiccated bat-like creatures and three humanoid bodies in glass — is the kind of image that guarantees the movie won’t settle for comfort or cliché. At the centre of the mess is Col. Tom Carlsen, the astronaut who returns in the shuttle’s escape pod and has to explain how curiosity and compassion led to disaster. That personal account — equal parts confession and diagnosis — is what stops Lifeforce from being mere spectacle and makes it oddly human, even at its most outré.

The movie hinges on a tidy but unsettling switch: an apparently dead human is not dead. A guard drained by the female alien revives a couple of hours later, carrying the same ability to draw the life out of others. That simple reversal — death that isn’t final and a contagion that’s intimate rather than viral — gives the story its particular creep.

Another turn pushes the paranoia further. Under hypnosis it emerges that there’s a psychic link between the returned astronaut and the alien woman, and that she can change shape. Once identity becomes unstable, trust collapses in a hurry. People stop being safe because they can’t be sure who they are looking at.

So the set-up asks two related questions: what do you do when death is borrowable, and what happens when the person you saved is also the person who puts everyone at risk? Those questions aren’t philosophical exercises; they drive every chase and every decision in the film.

As a narrative engine, the premise works because it keeps moving between the intimate (a single revived guard, a single psychic bond) and the global (the threat spreading through a city). The movie prefers extremes — personal guilt and public emergency — and that choice gives it an edge.

Col. Tom Carlsen is the film’s personal compass: the astronaut who comes home with more than a story and is forced to live with the consequences. The fact that Steve Railsback plays him is bare casting info; what’s important is that Carlsen’s choices — he opens a container, he shares life force — are the human decisions that ripple into catastrophe.

He isn’t an abstract hero. He’s the man who made an intimate mistake and then becomes a witness and a vessel for the horror he helped unleash. That psychic link to the female alien folds him into the monster’s story in a way that keeps the stakes close and messy, not distant or theoretical.

Because the threat is tied to him personally, Carlsen’s arc carries the moral confusion of the film: rescue and ruin end up joined. His survival in the shuttle’s escape pod becomes less a victory and more an explanation; the movie repeatedly comes back to the idea of being complicit without having meant to be.

Put simply: Carlsen matters because his small act is how the movie turns cosmic weirdness into a domestic crisis. Without that human mistake, Lifeforce would be a series of set pieces; with it, the film asks you to stay with guilt and the urgent need to fix what you broke.

On one level Lifeforce is a horror-adventure about a city being drained. But under the chewing, the film keeps circling a handful of human preoccupations: mortality, freedom and the cost of protecting those we care about.

Mortality is everywhere — not just in corpses but in the way characters respond when death becomes uncertain. The revived guard, the undead soldiers, even the shuttle crew’s fate are variations on the same question: what do we owe the living when life can be transferred and stolen?

Freedom shows up as both desire and danger. The alien woman’s capacity to leave confinement and change shape reads as liberation; the film then complicates that freedom by showing how it destroys human life on contact. The tension between wanting to free something and choosing to lock it away is threaded through the action. And parental protection — whether literal or symbolic — underpins the big choices. Characters make desperate, sometimes brutal decisions to keep others safe, and those decisions force the audience to reckon with sacrifice. Loss, courage and a ragged kind of heroism spin out of those moments, so the movie ends up as a brawl between compassion and catastrophe.

Released in 1985, Lifeforce sits squarely in an era that loved big, often clashing ideas. The mid-80s appetite for mixing genres — let’s have science fiction and gothic horror argue in the same frame — is baked into the movie’s DNA.

That willingness to be loudly hybrid gives Lifeforce a particular 80s personality: it doesn’t fuss about being neat. Instead it piles spectacle, myth and moral panic on top of each other until the seams show, and then keeps going.

The result is a film that feels like a product of its moment without depending on period signifiers to make its point. What dates it is the scale of its ambition — a globe-sized threat delivered through intimate human mistakes — and that scale is a very 1985 kind of confidence.

Seen that way, Lifeforce reads as an 80s movie because the decade allowed filmmakers to be comfortably excessive; the film’s excess is part of its logic, not a flaw to be hidden away.

Some aspects of Lifeforce still land with a satisfying thud: its central vampire idea — body-draining life force passed between people — remains unsettling because the threat is intimate and contagious in a peculiarly human way. The film’s willingness to treat the undead as an absorbing, social problem (martial law is declared) keeps the stakes clear and oddly believable.

Other moments are more of a mixed bag. The two male vampires’ early apparent destruction — grenades, bodies blown apart — quickly gives way to them surviving by shapeshifting into the soldiers who killed them and then spreading the infection across London. The quick pivot from annihilation to contagion can feel both thrilling and a little convenient.

Some sequences still carry punch: the idea that life forces are being channelled to the female and then beamed back to a spaceship in geosynchronous orbit over London is as bonkers as it is memorable. And the movie’s finale — where human desperation and mythic ritual meet, ending at St Paul’s with an explicitly sacrificial move — keeps the emotional math simple and grimly effective.

So the film ages as a mix: its core set-pieces and its refusal to soften big ideas hold up, while certain plot pivots and the film’s appetite for sudden, operatic shifts can feel uneven to modern eyes. That unevenness is part of the movie’s personality, however — and will either charm or frustrate you depending on how much genre whiplash you enjoy.

People remember Lifeforce because it begins with an arresting image: a shuttle bringing back a sealed spaceship from Halley’s Comet and three humanoid bodies in glass. That initial shock — the intimate strangeness of bodies preserved in orbit — gives the film a visual hook that lingers.

The narrative choices that follow deepen that impression. The female alien’s awakening and her first victim, the guard who is drained yet revives two hours later with the same lethal ability, turns the film into a contagion story that never quite stops surprising you with where it will go next.

There are human beats that stick too: Carlsen’s testimony about opening the female’s container and sharing life force reframes the disaster as a personal failing, and the subsequent discovery that the male vampires can shapeshift and are infecting London gives the situation scope. The movie moves from a closed spaceship curiosity into a city under pressure. Finally, the film’s mythic gestures — the theory that these visitations explain vampire legends, Fallada’s impaling of a male vampire with leaded iron, and the culmination at St Paul’s where life force, sacrifice and escape collide — turn it into a story people recall not just for shocks but for the strange logic that ties its scenes together.

Yes — but with a rider. Lifeforce, directed by Tobe Hooper and released in 1985, is the kind of film that rewards people who enjoy ambition folded into chaos. The core image — a shuttle finding a sealed spaceship and three humanoid bodies — still hooks the imagination, and the personal through-line of Carlsen returning in the escape pod and telling what happened keeps the spectacle anchored.

If you like your sci‑fi loud and willing to mix myth with contagion, the film’s central mechanics (life force being stolen and channelled, the male vampires surviving by shapeshifting and multiplying across London) deliver plenty of memorable, often batty moments. The movie’s finale — desperate, sacrificial and oddly ritualistic at St Paul’s — gives those moments a dark, definitive shape.

If you prefer neat plotting and quiet understatement, Lifeforce will test your patience: it often chooses momentum over tidy logic and trades plausibility for mood. But that’s part of its character. It’s a 116‑minute ride that wants to overwhelm as much as it wants to explain.

So should you watch it now? If you enjoy films that are entertainingly out of step with themselves — where human error, myth and grand spectacle collide — give Lifeforce a go. It won’t comfort you, but it will surprise you, and sometimes that’s the whole point.