Alien3: Parallels with Koji Suzuki's novel Ring

leading from

Alien 3
and
Developing the story of Ring

still collating, 
too fragmented to even work out what I'm reading myself as I write it!

a)  Aligning with Koji Suzuki's Ring

August 24th 2016 comes along with a trailer for the movie Rings.

Since having watched the American version of the move Ring I have for quite a while thought about merging the universe of Alien and Ring and what commonalities they had as ideas.

I decide to focus on my thoughts about Alien and Ring again and then suddenly I notice that the original Ring novel by Koji Suzuki was released the same year that Alien 3 was being made, in 1991.

b) Production cuts lead to confusions
Because of production cuts, bad writing and unfilmed scenes, nobody really worked out quite how Ripley in Alien 3 became infected by a face hugger, it seemed rather mysterious that it could have happened.

David Fincher the director envisaged a scene showing the alien queen chest burster leaving through Newt's mouth before it enters Ripley when the pod crashes in the sea of Fiorina and Newt drowns in her cryopod.

c)  Looking for a curse

After reading Ring, I'm almost willing to believe that Ripley's alien infection have been as a result of similar sort idea for a curse, whether it was the Alien Queen's curse because of her rage about the destruction of her alien hive and for being chucked out of the Sulaco through an airlock shaft in Aliens, as if this were outer space version of the well shaft where Sadako had been thrown down by a doctor.

Or perhaps the alien was a virus that had merged with the warning transmission sent out by the Space Jockey in Alien, and the well shaft was the acid burned hole in the platform of the space jockey's platform leading into the egg silo.

Realistically looking for signs of a cursed videotape in the Alien 3 movie results in very loose almost pointless and fanciful, and if the Alien 3 production became drawn to use Ring's plot as some form of loose inspiration, it was based upon someone talking about his or her enthusiastic blurred impressions about the book after a trip to Japan and perhaps nothing more.

But Japan makes its presence known in Alien 3, with Japanese writing on the wall and Japanese surgeons turning up at the end of the film prepared to operate on Ripley

cover for Koji Suzuki's Ring
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Suzuki_novel))

d) Dream sequence
I would want to roughly compare the dreamlike contents of the videotape in Ring to the dream like beginning of Alien 3.

The latter sequence begins with its sequence where the mysterious opened alien spore appears, a face hugger cracks Newt's cryotube and bleeds acid and the survivors of the Sulaco are forced into an escape pod

It doesn't need to make any immediate sense how Ripley got infected, but there might be a way to imagine an explanation at some point.

Clemens looks for signs of an eradicated disease in Newt's corpse

e) References to eradicated diseases
In Ring, a reference to Smallpox. Sadako, a human who was a hermaphrodite and had the gift of Nensha is the last person to have been infected with Smallpox before she is thrown down a well by a Doctor.

The disease in its free state has been known to be eradicated back in 1980.

In Alien 3, Ripley wants the corpse of Newt checked for signs of contagion, namely cholera, a disease as revealed by the character Clemens, in the universe of Alien 3, to have been eradicated 200 years earlier.

In Ring the novel's sequel Spiral (also known as Rasen), the events in the story begin a day after the events of the first book.

A coroner assigned to do the autopsy of the Ryūji Takayama from the Ring story who has died from the videotape curse .

A tumor in Ryūji's heart assumed to be to be his cause of death appears similar to smallpox (which was eradicated 30 years ago).

Alien 3 poster (source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103644/)

f) Passing on the curse
In Suzuki's novel Sadako's rage after being thrown down a well and left for dead, allowed her psychic powers to combine with the smallpox virus in her body to send out a psychic transmission that would be recorded on a videocassette, creating a paranormal phenomenon that is activated when the tape is viewed.

Demanding the viewer replicate the tape, the curse is propagated like a virus through tape copies, sparing anyone who copies it and shows it to someone else.

Sadako who was born as intersexed unable to reproduce and in a way the videotape curse would become her child.

Alien Queen being sucked out of the airlock

g) Any old explanation will do
Since the Alien Queen in Aliens is chucked out of the airlock and dies without leaving an alien spore containing a facehugger,  at the beginning of the Alien 3 film, such a spore appears to have materialised out of nowhere and desperately fans have been trying to explain how the alien queen must have left layed the spore on the ship or brought it aboard for the sake of continuity.

By the end of the production it appeared as if in Alien 3, Ripley becomes infected with an alien by means that don't really make much sense because of the editing of the movie and the fact that a crucial scene explaining Ripley's infection was never filmed.

She discovers within herself an alien queen embryo slowly growing. The way it shows up in her body almost makes it indicate that its the result of a magical curse.

h) A way out of the curse?
There isn't an easy way out but if she allowed herself to have the alien queen embryo extracted by surgery, the life cycle would surely have been continued.

Although the company man at the end of Alien 3 known as Bishop 2 offered her a way out if she would allow them to extract the alien, but she'd rather sacrifice her own life than let this thing live and get out of control

Koji Suzuki's Spiral (See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_(Suzuki_novel))

i) Spiral patterns
The novel Ring's 1995 sequel was Spiral. If a woman watched the cursed video, she'd die giving birth to a Sadako clone.

Oddly Ripley carried a queen.

Alien 3 featured a spiral on the poster.

I half wonder how much Suzuki was inspired by western cinema and who in 1991 connected with the American film industry was reading Ring in the Japanese language

j) Lead character changed from man to woman
When the Japanese version of the Ring film was released in 1998, the lead character of the book , a male character named Kazuyuki Asakawa becomes replaced by a woman named Reiko Asakawa, which rings a bell for those thinking about how Ripley's role originally was generally for a man's but was changed to a woman.

The Ring, 1998