A magazine article from 1979 reveals that an Alien prequel, “telling the tale of the space jockey” was first discussed over 45 years ago.
After a lengthy absence, director Ridley Scott finally returned to the Alien series with Prometheus. A prequel to Scott’s 1979 original, it rather controversially explored the origins of the space jockey – the nickname given to the long-dead, humanoid creature so memorably glimpsed in the first film.
Remarkably, though, the idea of making a prequel is almost as old as Alien itself. When the first film became a major box office success at the end of the 1970s, studio 20th Century Fox immediately made plans for a sequel – what eventually became Aliens, directed by James Cameron and released in 1986.
As an article in a 1979 magazine makes plain, however, a number of concepts and ideas were being batted around at Fox in the months after Alien’s release. Many of those ideas would eventually make it into later Alien films and spin-offs – including this year’s Alien: Earth TV series.
The brief, one-page article states that, even at that early stage, Ridley Scott and his collaborators wouldn’t be involved in an Alien sequel (Scott has subsequently said he was never asked, much to his chagrin). Citing unnamed “creative people” connected with the film, the piece then outlines some of the possible scenarios in contention.
The most eye-catching of these describes “a prequel rather than a sequel,” which would tell “the tale of the space jockey and ending where Alien begins, with the arrival of the Nostromo crew.”
This, in essence, was exactly what Prometheus was: an exploration of what were later re-christened the Engineers – a race of beings and their connection to the deadly xenomorph. One of a planned series of films, Ridley Scott’s prequels would eventually have ended where Alien began, much like that 1979 concept. The muted box office performance of 2017’s Alien: Covenant put paid to that plan, however, and so Scott never got the chance to connect trace the narrative path back to the crashed craft – and its fossilised Engineer – on LV-426.
The other purported sequel ideas were – and we quote:
- The Alien, merely stunned by its close encounter with the shuttle engines, manages to survive outside the craft and reaches civilisation along with Ripley.
- A second expedition to the planetoid is stranded there, and, weathering a storm within the derelict and their own ship, its members deal with a group of Aliens, climaxed by an appearance of the creatures to whose race the space jockey belongs.
- The planetoid of the Alien explodes, sending Alien eggs to earth where – shades of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers – a whole flock of the monsters runs rampant.
It’s worth noting that the second concept, about explorers stranded in a storm and encountering space jockeys, was also something that eventually occurred in Prometheus – albeit on the planetoid LV-223 rather than LV-426, the setting from Alien.
The idea of the xenomorph being stunned and eventually “reaching civilisation” also echoes the events of 2024’s Alien: Romulus; the ‘aliens on terra firma’ concept was later explored in a run of Dark Comics, infamously hinted at in a trailer for Alien 3, and will finally be realised on the screen in Noah Hawley’s forthcoming TV series, Alien: Earth.
None of this is to say that subsequent writers and filmmakers had pilfered from this pool of ideas – it’s almost certain that, when thinking of ways to expand on a hit film, certain scenarios logically presented themselves.
The article appeared in a magazine called Alien: The Officially Authorized Magazine Of The Movie, published in December 1979 – roughly six months after the film appeared in cinemas. It was produced by publisher James Warren, best known for Famous Monsters Of Filmland and, in comic book circles, Vampirella. Warren had previously published Alien: The Illustrated Story earlier that same year, which was evidently successful enough to spawn this second publication filled with facts and rare behind-the-scenes photos.
The magazine’s ‘official’ status also means it has a bit more substance to it than most souvenir publications of its type. It includes interviews with actor Harry Dean Stanton – who’s surprisingly candid about his distaste for sci-fi and the thin nature of his character, Brett, in the original script – and artist HR Giger, designer and co-creator of the xenomorph in its various forms. In his interview, Giger reveals that his collaborators originally wanted the chestburster to have glowing eyes of some sort; the artist dug his heels in, and the loathsome creature remained eyeless.
“I think it’s very frightening to have blind beasts,” Giger said. “At first they wanted eyes with lamps behind them. But I said no, no eyes. They said please, but it didn’t work.”
Read more: Alien | The birth and curious death of HR Giger’s Space Jockey
Elsewhere in the mag, there’s a feature that explores the in-universe backstory of the space jockey. It states that an earlier version of the Alien script imagined that the gigantic creature and the xenomorph were both residents of LV-426, and that the craft it inhabited wasn’t a spaceship, but rather some sort of ground vehicle that picked up the xenomorph eggs elsewhere on the planet and moved them “from one sector to another.” This was later changed in the finished film, with the space jockey being a traveller whose ship – still containing those eggs – crashed into LV-426 on its journey from some other planet.
Interestingly, the same feature also speculates that the space jockey is an advanced race that used its superior technology to terraform other planets. The space jockey in the film had arrived on the planet, according to the writer’s head canon, with the intention of altering “its environment to make it habitable.” It then found the eggs hiding somewhere on the planet, began loading them onto its ship, only to become impregnated by a facehugger. It then managed to set off a ‘stay away’ signal before it was killed by the parasite growing inside it.
Another feature also theorises that the xenomorph uses its tail to communicate with its own species (“That’s why the tail is limp throughout the film: there’s no one to talk to”), and that protuberances on its back are both defensive and designed to sense movement. The question of how intelligent the xenomorph is has long been a subject of much debate among fans of the franchise; is it a simple killing machine, or more calculating? Different filmmakers have teased at the subject in their own films over the past 45 years; it remains to be seen how showrunner Noah Hawley will portray the xenomorph in Alien: Earth.
As for the sequel, Warren Publishing’s magazine states that Ripley was always intended to return, since “actress Sigourney Weaver has proven to be the most popular performer in the film.”
It took years for that sequel to emerge, not least because of a dispute over profits between Fox and production company Brandywine, which took some four years to settle. Director James Cameron, having impressed Fox with his script for The Terminator, eventually began work on Aliens in 1983. His plot saw Ripley return to LV-426, which has since been terraformed – though by humans, and not the space jockey. Another hit, the 1986 sequel ensured the survival of the franchise for years to come – and meant that many of those ideas toyed with in that 1979 magazine would one day be realised. We’ll have to wait and see whether we ever see xenomorphs communicate with one another using their tails. though.
You’ll currently find the Alien souvenir magazine to read online at Archive.org.
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