Originally conceived as a sci-fi thriller with philosophical undertones, Species emerged as one of 1995’s weirdest monster movies.
The early 90s digital effects revolution birthed many monsters. Sam Neill and Laura Dern were menaced by velociraptors in the ground-breaking Jurassic Park in 1993. Tom Sizemore and Penelope Ann Miller were chased around a museum by a rhino-like behemoth in The Relic (1996). Samuel L Jackson was rudely interrupted mid-monologue by an intellectual shark in Deep Blue Sea (1999).
Few monster movies were as eclectically cast or as zany as 1995’s Species. Somehow, director Roger Donaldson managed to convince such acting greats as Ben Kingsley, Forest Whitaker and Alfred Molina to appear as members of a specialist team on the trail of a randy human-alien hybrid monster (Natasha Henstridge) seducing assorted men in Los Angeles.
It’s all delightful B-movie hokum, even if the film’s classier elements ā the quality cast, the design of Alien legend HR Giger ā feels rather lost among the outlandish gore, leering nudity, and scenes of wild over-acting like this:
Years earlier, though, one of the 1990s’ most over-the-top (and sleazy) monster movies began life as a somewhat more thoughtful screenplay. In 1987, writer Dennis Feldman sat and read an essay by Arthur C Clarke, in which the sci-fi author argued that interstellar travel was little more than a fantasy. If an alien species were to contact us across the void of space, Clarke wrote, it wouldn’t via a ship, but rather through communication.
“I realised, after thinking about it for a while,” Feldman later told Starlog magazine, “that there could be speed-of-light communications and we could receive instructions from across the void to build something that would talk to us… and as I thought about it, this wouldn’t be a robot; it would be wetware. It would also want to use our DNA to make sure it could live in our environment.”
At the time, Feldman had broken through in the film business thanks to his script, The Rose Of Tibet ā what he later described as a Raymond Chandler-inspired noir thriller with “supernatural elements.” Purchased by Paramount Pictures for $330,000, it was at one stage going to star Mel Gibson in the lead. Then Eddie Murphy got involved, and the thriller morphed into an entirely different comedy called The Golden Child. The resulting film was critically panned, but thanks to Murphy’s star value, was still a hit.

Suggested product
Film Stories issue 53 gift bundle: Magazine + Nic Cage scratch poster + Nic Cage coasters!
£30.00

“It was a nightmare,” Feldman later said of the production.
Nevertheless, The Golden Child gave Feldman a career-boosting screen credit, and he began working on his debut as a writer-director in 1987 ā the little-seen sci-fi comedy, Real Men. It was around this time that he also began working on what he initially called The Message.
In it, an alien transmission is picked up by radio telescopes, and researchers discover it’s a set of instructions. One is the formula for creating a limitless supply of cheap energy; the other explains how to splice alien and human DNA. After some initial experiments, the government shuts the program down ā only for one of its scientists to go off and continue the research on his own.
“He was a kind of bathtub geneticist,” Feldman said of his initial story. The result of that experiment was a genetically-engineered yet human looking female, which rapidly matures into a grown-up and then escapes. Sometime later, some DNA samples are discovered at a murder scene, and are studied by a biologist who happened to have worked on that earlier research project shut down by the government. The biologist then becomes “convinced that the thing had been created after all, and was out there killing people.”
Partnering up with a detective, the biologist then spent the remainder of the story tracking down the human-alien creature, called Sil. It was, Feldman said, “pretty cop-procedural”.
As initially written, Species would have therefore been a somewhat more low-key sci-fi thriller. The monster itself would have been rather different from the one seen in the 1995 movie. While the creature played by Natasha Henstridge also evolved and mutated, the lifeform Feldman dreamed up was closer to the one in John Carpenter’s The Thing ā capable of taking on the guise of various animals from which humans had evolved.
“She could access all the defenses of the entire animal kingdom that we evolved through,” Feldman told Starlog in 1995, “including ones that had never developed, plus ones we don’t know about that have become extinct. So she was a composite, a constantly transforming being.”
These transformations would have reached their zenith in a final confrontation in a burning house, in which the detective and biologist fought Sil as she morphed “not only into many different types of Earth animals, but taking on several bodies at once.”
This late sequence would, according to Starlog, have seen “Sil chopping herself into many parts, each of which has a mind of its own ā and each of which is deadly and can reproduce.”
A report published by Cinefantastique around the same time described another moment in the same scene which “required Sil’s face to crawl off her head, slide down her shoulder and mix with an arm.”
Besides the grotesque imagery, Feldman said he wanted his script to explore philosophical ideas about evolution and human biology. “I realised that the engine of biology is reproduction,” he later explained. “I started to examine what we’re all doing here. Certainly, as a species, what we’re doing is reproducing, thriving and battling with other species ā and ourselves. We’re in a constant invasion here, in reality… This entire story is a way to look at what humans are as animals, and what human animals do.”
Written on spec, Feldman’s script initially generated little interest until producer Frank Mancuso Jr (perhaps best known at the time for his work on the Friday The 13th franchise) read it and managed to get the project set up at MGM. It was then that the script attracted the interest of director Roger Donaldson ā then known for the hit thriller No Way Out (1987) and Tom Cruise star vehicle Cocktail (1988). Donaldson hadn’t directed a sci-fi film before, but he loved the genre, and had previously asked his agent to find a project in that arena. When the Species script landed on Donaldsonās desk, it soon caught his eye.
“There was a particular quality to [the Species script] that interested me,” Donaldson told Cinefantastique in 1995. “It’s also a terrific thriller, with plenty of good scares, lots of tension and unpredictable twists and turns as the story unfolds.”
Feldman had himself reworked the script by this stage, having changed the cop and biologist pairing to a team of government specialists due to what he called “credibility issues.”
Then Donaldson hired other writers ā including Larry Gross ā to make further drafts; it was reported at the time that eight different versions were written over the course of 18 months. Eventually, Feldman was brought back in and much of that earlier work was thrown out. All the same, the Species script gradually changed over time.
Some elements, such as Sil chopping herself up into multiple, smaller entities, were dropped because they were considered too technically difficult to achieve. (Indeed, the back-and-forth over the design of Sil, and the production’s overall approach to visual effects, could fill an entire feature by itself; it’s sufficient to say that HR Giger was unimpressed with the results, and his displeasure appeared in magazine articles and books for sometime afterwards.)
Other changes were made at the insistence of Donaldson and Mancuso, who both had their own ideas of what Species should be; that MGM was also willing to stump up a fairly sizable budget of $35m also led to the script increasing in scope. What was initially written as a final confrontation in a burning house, for example, was for the finished film expanded into a gigantic subterranean cavern and Michael Madsen wielding a grenade launcher.
Released in July 1995, Species was a decent-sized hit in comparison to its budget, and while reviews were middling, it offered enough sensational gore (and widely-publicised disrobement, courtesy of newcomer Natasha Henstridge) that it found an audience ā such that an array of low-budget sequels emerged in the 12 years afterwards. All the same, Feldman was unabashed about how Species, despite its plot points coming close to what he’d originally devised, being more of a creature feature than a sci-fi film.
“I really wish we had more of the concepts, more of the science,” Feldman told Starlog. “But Roger has always said he’s making a thriller with a monster, and Frank [Mancuso jr] has always said he’s making a monster movie. I’ve always said we’re making a movie about the biological imperative, particularly the female, and the demographics of predation.”
Elsewhere in the same interview, Feldman lamented, “I worked on it very hard, and it answered a lot of my personal questions and pieces of personal philosophy ā more so in the script than in the finished movie, I’m afraid.”
Perhaps, one day, a filmmaker will come along and look again at Feldman’s ideas in a remake. One of Species’ more thought-provoking elements, buried somewhat among all the mayhem, is Sil’s greater purpose. Was she sent by an alien civilisation that conquers planets remotely? Is she, in short, a kind of bio-weapon, intent on destroying human life and replacing it with her own? Sil herself never knows herself; she simply follows her biological programming and tries to breed in order to ensure the survival of her own kind.
In a further twist, Feldman’s imagination may have inadvertently spawned another monster. Mid-90s Puerto Rico saw a growing number of reports of a strange, lizard-like creature that was said to be predating on livestock. The creature was later nicknamed the Chupacabra ā or ‘goat-sucker’.
As sightings spread to the United States, investigator Benjamin Radford, in his book Tracking The Chupacabra, put forward the theory that the creature was inspired by Sil in Species. A woman who’d reported one of the earliest sightings, Radford said, ābelieved that the creatures and events she saw in Species were happening in reality in Puerto Rico at the time.”
What began as a sci-fi thriller inspired by Arthur C Clarke instead became one of the 1990s’ most bizarre monster movies ā and in turn birthed its own blood-drinking urban legend. It’s proof that some ideas really do take on a life of their own.
āThank you for visiting! If youād like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.