This summer’s Alien: Earth TV series serves up more than one kind monster – something we’ve seen before in the long-running Alien franchise…
NB: The following contains a spoiler for Alien: Romulus.
“It’s like a zoo but the animals got out” says one (almost certainly doomed) character in the trailer for Noah Hawley’s forthcoming TV series, Alien: Earth. It’s a line uttered from within the darkened remains of the Maginot – a crashed Weyland-Yutani vessel that not only carries specimens of the acid-blooded xenomorph, but also four separate species of alien.
The new promo, which debuted on the 5th June, showcased one of these: called T Ocellos, it’s a small, jellyfish-like critter said to be capable of burrowing into its victim’s eyeball socket and dislodging the gristly orb within; it has a fondness for “overriding the neuro-transmissions throughout the body,” which implies that this Lovecraftian horror is also able to take control of its victims’ limbs. Shudder. Goodness knows what the other monsters prowling the ship are like.
This is far from the first time that storytellers and artists working inside the Alien universe have taken a look around and thought, “You know, we could do with something more than the classic Giger monster.”
The creature introduced in the classic 1979 film may have at least four forms – five if you include the rather suggestive chrysalis seen in 2024’s Alien: Romulus – but as the franchise has expanded, so too has the range of monster designs. Most obviously, James Cameron introduced the hulking great Queen in 1986’s Aliens, while David Fincher and his team brought in the quadrupedal, ceiling-running ‘Dragon’ in 1992’s Alien 3.
The menagerie really broadened, however, in Konami’s thoroughly delightful Aliens arcade machine released in 1990. Based on the imagery and events of James Cameron’s film, it took all sorts of artistic liberties that would have left internet forums ablaze with fury had it been released only five years later. Facehuggers are lime green; adult xenos are a lurid pink, while Ellen Ripley’s dyed her hair blonde for the occasion.
Some of its additional monsters are quite cool, though. Those adult xenos now burst forth from gelatinous cocoons (anticipating Alien: Romulus by over 30 years). The first level’s area boss is a massive, scuttling, froglike thing with a chestburster’s head. Blow that head off, and it’ll start lobbing massive blobs of plasma at you.
Given that Konami’s Aliens coin-op was designed to grab attention and swallow coins, it’s understandable that its makers realised that shooting only one or two types of creature might grow a bit samey after a while. Determined to stave off any chance of boredom, Konami therefore let its imaginations run away with it, conjuring up winged severed heads; blue, humanoid zombies that lob grenades and fire WWII machine guns; and distant xenomorph cousins born without legs. These all appear in stage three. The same level’s capped off by a huge, armoured xeno capable of rolling itself up into a ball and rolling around the screen, like an angry Samus Aran.
The bestiary swarming around the screen in Aliens: the coin-op is so huge that even Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1997) and its assorted mutations looked meagre by comparison. Although, now that we think about it, Jeunet’s bright pink Newborn – a hybrid of Ripley and Queen DNA – wouldn’t have looked too out of place in Konami’s game and its magenta alien soldiers.
Ten years later, Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem introduced a hybrid of its own, the Predalien, though the film was so woefully underlit that nobody could see it. That film’s reception was also so hostile that both the Alien and Predator franchises went dormant for several years. When Ridley Scott decided he had unfinished business with Alien in 2012, the resulting Prometheus appeared to do its level best to avoid featuring the classic ‘Big Chap’ that Scott brought to the screen in 1979.
Read more: Alien | A Prometheus-like prequel concept was first floated in 1979
Instead, Prometheus offered up an orifice-attacking space snake (or ‘Hammerpede’), a race of buff, bald Engineers, decanters of DNA-bending goo, and an octopus that grows inside Noomi Rapace. It ended with one final cameo from the Deacon: the result of a coupling between the Rapace octopus and an Engineer, it was the closest the film got to a ‘traditional’ xenomorph. It’s probably on the planet LV-223 somewhere, wandering around and asking itself where the film crew went.
Perhaps at the behest of a nervous studio, 2017’s Alien: Covenant finally brought a creature closer to the original Alien back, but even here, Ridley Scott couldn’t resist throwing in assorted backbursters, neomorphs (pale, skinny, sometimes runs on all fours, sometimes stands up and watches ladies bathe) and fungi that emit deadly spores.
Taking over the franchise last year, director Fede Alvarez was reverent to Scott and Cameron’s first two movies when he made Alien: Romulus, but he also threw another hybrid into the mix: a pale, eerily grinning humanoid that’s part basketball player, part Dora the Explorer.
The common factor among most of these variant designs, at least for this writer, is that they’re seldom as outright frightening as the one dreamed up by Swiss artist HR Giger and his collaborators in the 1970s. The genius of Alien’s title creature is how plausible and thought-through it feels in the nightmarish context of the film; its parasitic life cycle, durability and aggression create the illusion of a creature that really could exist somewhere out there in the cold depths of space.
Many of the critters described here, by contrast, are often cool designs but little else; this is especially true of the Alien prequels, where the black goo seems to generate monsters almost at random. By the time of Prometheus, any feeling that the xenomorph might be an organism that has perfected itself over millions of years had been lost – something Noah Hawley has poked fault with in recent years.
Then again, the star of Alien has itself been rather over-exposed during the course of the franchise’s long history. Back in the world of videogames, the hugely disappointing Aliens: Colonial Marines (2012) introduced a handful of its own twists on the classic design, including breeds capable of spitting acid across long distances, and a bullet-proof model that charges at its victims like an angry bull. Some iffy programming errors often made these encounters more titter-inducing than terrifying, however, with the game’s release accompanied by numerous ‘alien jazz hands’ memes on social media.
It’s telling, perhaps, that the scariest game among the dozens made since the early 1980s takes things right back to basics. Alien: Isolation (2014) pitted the player against one deadly, seemingly indestructible xenomorph which was capable of popping up at any time. It was a legendarily stressful survival horror experience, heightened further by one extra threat: the Working Joe. These expressionless, zombie-like androids were almost as unnerving and difficult to combat as the Big Chap itself – proving that additions to the Alien universe don’t have to have teeth or tentacles to be scary.
Alien: Earth, meanwhile, introduces a bunch of creatures entirely unrelated to the xenomorph or Space Jockey (as retrofitted by later sequels, the histories and DNA of the xenomorph, Engineers and Space Jockey are all bound up together). In a way, showrunner Noah Hawley may have taken a similar approach to Konami’s designers some 35 years ago: he has an entire series to fill and an easily-distracted audience to entice, and so he’s filled his ship with “different life forms from the darkest corners of the universe.”
Previous teasers have shown greasy containers in which all kinds of slithering, crawling things lurk. The latest trailer shows some unfamiliar-looking eggs. Another recent teaser hints at a monster that lives inside a human lung. Will the monsters inside be as frightening and genuinely iconic as Giger’s monster? If we go by the franchise’s prior record, possibly not. But at least one of them will grab plenty of eyeballs.
Alien: Earth streams on Disney+ from the 13th August in the UK.
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