Alien: Romulus director Fede Alvarez has talked about the influence of 2014 videogame Alien: Isolation on his upcoming movie.
A truly frightening survival horror game, Alien: Isolation, developed by Creative Assembly and released in 2014, is also one of the best Alien games ever made. It sounds as though Alien: Romulus director, Fede Alvarez is also a fan, with the filmmaker recently revealing on the Total Film podcast that the game was a direct inspiration for his upcoming entry in the film saga.
Set 15 years after Alien, Isolation introduced Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen, hunting through a space station called the Sevastapol. Hunting for her mother, Amanda instead encounters a familiar monster. Framed in a limiting first-person perspective, players were forced to run and hide from the fearsome creature, with the ingenious twist being that its appearances weren’t pre-scripted – it could turn up anywhere and at almost any time. Some foolhardy masochists even played the game in VR, for which they should be roundly saluted.
It turns out that Alien: Isolation left a lasting impact on Alvarez. Speaking on the podcast, the filmmaker said, “Alien: Isolation was kind of what made me see that Alien could truly be terrifying and done well [today]. I played a few years after it came out. Don’t Breathe was coming out. Or was I waiting for Don’t Breathe to come out, and I was playing the game.”
Alvarez has also revealed that he’s placed a little easter egg in the film for fans of the game, but we won’t spoil that here. He did add though, that playing Isolation is what made him enthusiastic about making an Alien film of his own: “That’s why, at the time, I was like, ‘f—, if I could do anything, I would love to do Alien and scare the audience again with that creature and those environments’. I was playing, and realising how terrifying Alien could be if you take it back to that tone.”
And now that film is almost here. Excitement is high and ahead of the film’s release in the UK on Friday. Alvarez has talked about the making of Alien: Romulus in our own exclusive interview, and there’s more on the movie in the new Film Stories magazine, which you can purchase now.
