Lifeforce – 1985 | 116 mins | Science-Fiction, Horror | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Lifeforce (1985), directed by Texan Tobe Hooper but shot at Elstree for London Films, is virtually a pastiche of pulp SF-horror that takes the alien women theme to new extremes of misogyny. Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires, on which the film is based, was written in the mid-1970s and there is a clear allusion to the upheavals of the sexual revolution of that period.

Lifeforce begins with an Anglo-American mission to Halley’s Comet. There, the space shuttle Churchill locates a vast alien ship in which Colonel Carlsen (Steve Railsback) and his team discover the remains of huge bat-like creatures and three humanoids, one female and two male, held in stasis. Carlsen immediately halts the mission and returns to Earth with the aliens. Once resuscitated and freed from her stasis chamber, the strikingly beautiful Space Girl (Mathilda May) rises to suck the lifeforce from her guard with a lingering kiss before she walks naked from the European Space Research Centre. Unusually for a vampire, she immediately takes up residence in St Paul’s Cathedral, surrounded by crucifixes, and proceeds to take the souls of Londoners and channel them heavenwards to re-energise her desiccated angels. Carlsen appropriates a leaded iron sword from a museum, and after the male vampires are banished with the sword, Carlsen and Colonel Caine (Peter Firth) confront the girl in St Paul’s Cathedral where she is channelling lifeforce energy to her ship. Using the sword, Carlsen impales himself to the girl during a final embrace. However, the girl does not die, but ascends to the ship with Carlsen amidst a constellation of captured souls.