One moment in: 'Fire in the Sky'

Fire in the Sky

Director – Robert Lieberman

Writers – Travis Walton (book "The Walton Experience"), Tracy Tormé (screenplay)

Stars – D.B. Sweeney, Robert Patrick, Craig Sheffer

 

If ever a film was defined by one scene, ‘Fire in the sky’ is it. Otherwise, it is very much feels like your decent but standard "True Story" movie. It has the feel of the made-for-TV Seventies and Eighties films and television I was familiar with growing up – look, there’s even James Garner! He doesn’t do anything, apparently having wandered over from an easy-going crime drama series where he investigates dodgy goings-on. There’s also Robert Patrick as a somewhat assholish friend, and Henry Thomas for five minutes, but we don’t get his story.

 

A group of loggers, coming back from work one night, see the sky aglow which leads to a UFO sighting and abduction of Travis Walton. This is his “True Story”.  There’s some flair in the play with lighting on a country road over the credits and the prowling take from one character to the next as the voiceover introduces them, and in the abduction scene, but otherwise it’s pretty stolid direction from Lierman and screenplay from Tracy Tormé. There’s macho posturing and belligerence and small-town mindedness as the story drags out the dilemma that everyone thinks they killed their missing friend. Which seems routine to my thinking, although it is played as an outrage … and I guess no one else saw the sky light up? I mean, it was impressive and surely able to be seen from some distance.

 

And then, ninety minutes in, it goes apeshit.

 

I grew up when alien abduction was all the rage. I was already frightened of alien attacks from reading the comic origin of Peter Quill, ‘Star Lord’: the moment where the aliens blast away his parents was one of my primal frights. It’s why I have a soft spot for 'Slumber Party Alien Abduction'  in ‘V/H/S/2’ (although I hate its shaky-cam). And I have no doubt that if I had been a kid seeing this moment in ‘Fire in the Sky’, it would have traumatised me and become and instant favourite.

 

I first encountered this scene cropped and made into a mini-vid on Instagram. But watching it again, in context, it had lost none of its power. It is totally at odds with the rest of the drama, like an acoustic folk track suddenly turning into New Wave Synth. It works as a short film within itself, and it sticks out so much because it’s not as if the film on either side bolsters unease. This scene survives autonomously. It is the flashback to Travis Watson’s experience inside the spaceship when he wakes up, abducted. He can apparently breathe the atmosphere and finds himself drifting through the low gravity of the UFO, and then subjected to alien medical procedure.

 

This moment is the stuff of pure nightmare and taps directly into the horror imaginings of human beings as to what an alien abduction would be like. It captures the fears and helplessness and works on such a primal level that it taps directly into the place that delights horror fans. These fears are mostly based upon incapacitation, suffocation, and penetration oral and ocular: rape fears, which fits the legend that UFO abductions feature anal probing, although the film doesn’t go there. Or not that we see. In fact, it cuts out just when it’s hitting peaks, which means you’re left wanting more, an to see what would follow. But the film isn’t so interested in expanding; in fact, this scene differs from Walton’s own account, meaning it isn’t much on the “True Story” stuff either. There was a hypnotic regression afterwards, for example.

 

And so, in the film, when Walton returns, he is traumatised for a while, but there are apparently no physical after-effects. No long-term PTSD for Walton, it seems. And the trauma he does have is got over enough for a reconciliation between Walton and his pal – and it has to be said that the incident seems to have more a long-term effect on Mike, who now lives pretty estranged from society. But it’s all resolved with a meagre joke, a punchline the kind that ‘Police Squad’ mocked, that trivialises the incident.

 

But that one sequence still remains as unforgettable and a treat for connoisseurs of fright scenes.