The Alien State

Page 1 2 3 4 "That was another attractive thing, that you weren't moving the unit to a lot of different locations," he said. "There were a lot of different places that were quite at hand."

The alien, played by singer David Bowie, is persuaded to attend a church service. The First Presbyterian Church in Artesia supplied the locale and church members supplied the extras.

"Our full choir sang," said Ben Cauble, who played the choir leader and minister. "I offered a prayer."

Cauble said the experience was interesting. "They put lights in the ceiling, but they took real good care of the church."

After the two- to three-hour shoot, the congregation served the crew lunch. As for Bowie, "it probably didn't hurt him to be in a church," Cauble said.

Roeg liked shooting in the city because it fit a section of the story so well. "It had a wonderful old factory thing, the other side of the tracks, a sense of the early 1920s, '30s look to it," he said.

This New Mexico-as-alien-place would come up again in the television series Earth 2 (1994-'95). Scenes of unusual geological formations such as the Tent Rocks, Diablo Canyon and Santa Clara Canyon were combined with scenic locations including Jémez Springs, La Bajada Mesa and White Mesa to construct an entire planet inhabited by exiles from a polluted Earth. Interiors were filmed in New Mexico, too, on soundstages at the College of Santa Fe.

Mutants also seem partial to the state. In Monster (1978), pollution unleashes a Loch Ness-type creature in Santa Cruz Lake near Espa–ola that snacks on residents of "Chimayó, Colombia." Atlases don't show a Chimay— in that country, but the real village in New Mexico provided the backdrop and local color. When a meteor embeds itself in a man in Track of the Moon Beast (1976), it turns him into a monster who terrorizes residents in the Sandía Mountains.

A famous New Mexico landmark provides a home for the eponymous creatures in Gargoyles (1972). The gargoyles live in back of the underground lunchroom of Carlsbad Caverns, said Mark Maciha, supervising park ranger.

"There's not really anything spectacular there," he said, explaining why the caverns looked so dull in the film.

A film using the Carlsbad Cavern formations to better effect is Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) with James Mason and Pat Boone. Cavern locations included the King's Palace, the Boneyard and Appetite Hill, Maciha said. Eleven minutes of footage made it to the final film. Even now, straw used in one of the scenes still remains in the caverns.