Oculus Presents: The eighth passenger is Death

Hi, folks, welcome to Oculus Presents.

I'll be honest with y'all: the Hungarian title for Alien is mad dumb. A nyolcadik utas: a Halál (see the title of this post for the translation) is eye-catching, sure, but it doesn't represent the sheer dread in this movie nearly as much as the enigmatic original title - hell, it sounds more like the title of an Ingmar Bergman vehicle than 70's sci-fi horror. On the other hand, the first Hungarian cover for Alan Dean Foster's novelization might be one of my favorite book covers ever.

This edition is a 1987 release from the prolific speculative fiction publishing house Kozmosz Könyvek, translated by Piroska F. Nagy. I'll confess I haven't read it all the way through - I usually try to read books in their original language if I speak it - but the first few chapters had exactly the sort of moody, dreamlike tone you could expect from a cover like that. The work of artist Pál Varga, this cover evokes more the mood of vintage "cold" sci-fi flicks like Solaris or THX 1138, but at the same time it's actually faithful to the story, which is always welcome on a genre fiction book cover. The novelization has been released twice more in Hungarian with deeply "meh" covers (although hopefully better translations: as much as I liked the atmosphere of this version, it drove me nuts that both Ripley and Lambert were referred to as "girl" rather than "woman" by the narration, ugh), but the first edition of it is a real gem of Hungarian sci-fi publishing.