Scientists have found alien DNA (?) and are growing it in an incubator, where it grows at an impossible rate and tries to escape, ultimately succeeding (which is why there is a story). Or the scientists simply followed instructions radioed to them . You know the trope. But what are the examples of it?
I have looked at TV tropes but couldn’t find a specific trope.
Two examples I can think of are Species and Venom. In The Fifth Element a similar process is used to create the titular character, albeit she is not a horrific alien.
There must be others,* possibly also as episodes in series. Do you know any?
I distinctly recall an example where the scientists just manage to nuke the alien in the cage, another where the alien escapes through a vent, yet another where a scientists was trapped in the cage and devoured by the alien. Unfortunately the names elude. me.
Alien in definitely along those lines. From egg to facehugger to 7 foot killing machine in a very short period of time.
The Thing as well perhaps? the takeover and metamorphosis of the hosts is certainly quick
True, but what I am particularly interested in - and didn’t clearly explain, I see - is the subgenre where the scientists realize the danger involved, and raise the alien in some kind of glass/plastic container or safe room, to keep the alien from escaping or infecting the environment.
You are correct that the OP is partly about the broader genre of impossibly fast growing aliens.
One of the earliest stories in this genre, if not the earliest, is A for Andromeda (1961) by the astronomer Fred Hoyle.
The Aliens send us explicit instructions for the construction of a computer and a biological growth tank, which eventually produces a humanoid alien. I think the alien tech was necessary for the incubation process and the rapid growth, rather than an inherent characteristic of the biological material itself.
I really hate these kinds of stories, partly because the growth rate , especially without food, is absurd. The whole Alien franchise is rife with these, especially the Alien vs. Predator films, where the filmmmakers clearly want to get the adult aliens out there and attacking people, but they’re hamstrung by their own mythology, so the creatures grown absurdly quickly to get the carnage rolling sooner. Movies about cloning almost always have absurd growth rates, for much the same reason. At least in his collection Tuf Voyaging George R. R. Martin combines a time machine with his cloning/genetic manipulation devices, to explain Tuf can create an adult T. Rex in no time at all.
But we’re getting away from the “creature growing rapidly in captivity, where it was hoped it would be trapped” trope. The 2017 movie Life falls into this category, with “Calvin” the Martian not only growing at a fast clip, but being absurdly powerful and Way Too Damned Lucky. It’s clear that the guys making the film were more interested in seeing the Creature succeed than in plausibility.
I thought of “A for Andromeda,” too, but in Fred Hoyle’s book (sand its sequel) the being created isn’t exactly a Monster That Escapes. But I think the folks making Species cribbed from it. Most of the rest of their film consists of ludicrous science.
Another example of what the OP may be looking for is the 2009 film Splice, although “Dren” the creature isn’t exactly hermetically sealed away. The science is still ludicrous, though, and it still breaks free.
Arguably the graddaddy of “absurdly fast growing aliens in captivity” is Ray Harryhausen’s Ymir in Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957)
I vaguely remembered a recent movie like this in which the alien grew onboard an orbiting space station, so I had to Google to find Life, from 2017, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds.
I’m surprised hoe rapidly it vanished and was forgotten. It started out with a great premise and wonderful CGI effects, but I got disgusted with the film granting Calvin ridiculous advantages at every opportunity.
It’s a genetically-modified animal, not an alien, but George the Ape does this in Rampage. Also, earlier, a lab rat on a space station.
One of the John Carter books (I think it might have been called The Mad Scientist of Mars) has something like this, with a protoplasmic mass of mouths and eyeballs outgrowing its containment. Here, Burroughs “solved” the “but what does it eat?” problem by having it eat pieces of itself.
Blob monsters, by the way, seem to grow rapidly, as well. Often they grow by absorbing victims, but in some cases (Caltiki, the Immortal Monster 1959) it grows when simply exposed to radiation.
An even earlier candidate for “first example” is Arch Oboler’s radio drama Chicken Heart, which first appeared in the 1930s (based on a real new story about chicken heart tissue kept alive in a lab for a very long time). The recording was lost, but Oboler recreated it for a record in 1962, and others have re-recorded it since then. The titular chicken heart starts outgrowing its petri dish, evolving digestive organs and pseudopods to grab more victims, and eventually over-runs the earth. Bill Cosby parodied it in his album Wonderfulness (where I first learned about it), and it showed up on a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. But, aside from that, I don’t think anyone ever adapted it for visual media.
Other examples include The Blob (in its various incarnations), X- The Unknown, Kate Wilhelm and Theodore Thomas’ novel “The Clone”, and Robert Sheckley’s “The Leech”. But most of those weren’t kept in a box, and grew by accumulating foodstuff.
It’s not really unknown. It was released in the US under the title The Creeping Unknown. Chiller Theater on WPIX, a New York independent station must have practically owned a copy, because they showed it frequently. It was easily the classiest movie they showed, light years better than The Cape Canaveral Monsters or Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman.
They sorta did try to keep it confined, but it did break out, and started absorbing other things before becoming a blob monster in Westminster Abbey. In the movie, they electrocuted it on a construction scaffold, but in Nigel Kneale’s teleplay Quatermass appealed it its better nature and it self-destructed (No, really. Well, actually, he figured it still contained the personalities of the three astronauts it had absorbed, and that’s what he appealed to.)
Kneale’s second Quatermass TV serial (and the movie based on it – Quatermass 2 in the UK, Enemy from Space in the US) also has a blob monster, but it wasn’t really confined – it was being cultured by the invading alien hive mind. But it did break free and rampage a bit before succumbing to our lethal oxygen-rich atmosphere.
No, judging by the name, I would expect Professor Quakermass to by a member of the Society of Friends. Or maybe some weird Roman Catholic/Society of Friends combined sect.
Speaking fast-growing aliens with no visible means of feeding, the original Alien has nothing on the starfish-like breeding thing (the “adult trilobite”, as the production team called it) in Prometheus that had been extracted from Elizabeth Shaw’s body by the autodoc, and was sealed in to grow until released by the Engineer alien, at which point it overpowers him like a super-Facehugger. What the hell was it eating in that sealed room?
