Alien’s Xenomorph evolved into the perfect sci-fi villain over all the movies

By the time the Xenomorph officially shows up in Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien, the audience has already watched it evolve from foreboding egg to suffocating face-hugger to a tiny, pale critter that’s ripped its way out of John Hurt’s bloody torso. This last scene is destined to be on Scariest Horror Movie Moments until the end. It cements many big, conceptual terror movie fears. Alien famous — the terror of the unknown, the danger lurking both outside and within us, and the anxiety around intercourse, pregnancy, and forced birth.

After such a successful first half, it seems that audiences will be disappointed when the fully-grown alien appears at the last part of the movie. Scott builds so much tension around these little nightmares and traumas that it’s a shame to have to boil them down into the purely external threat of a stuntman in a costume.

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A lot of science fiction and horror have suffered from the reveal of the monster. Cinematic history in both these genres is littered with clonky creatures outfits that just chuck every bit of atmosphere from a movie. Scott and H.R. Scott conceptualized the Xenomorph. Giger is a special effects technician Carlo Rambaldi. Through all the Alien franchise’s sequels and multimedia mutations, the Xenomorph has remained singularly potent. Both its design and the grisly introduction of it have made them infinitely adaptable and primed for horror.

Roger Ebert maintained that a chunk of the original power of the Xenomorph lay in the fact that “we never know quite what it looks like or what it can do.” Alien is a far cry from previous sci-fi films, ones that often revealed extraterrestrials that looked humanoid primarily so they could be played by a man in a suit (something Scott took pains to hide by hiring Nigerian performer Bolaji Badejo — a 6-foot-10, unusually thin and long-legged actor — to play the alien). Even after the creature’s evolution ends and it starts following people around in the spooky spaceship as an adult, the Xenomorph is still mysterious due to some of its eerie features: its multiple jaws; horned spine; webbed fingers; bony appendages and muscular tail.

Image: 20th Century Fox

The Xenomorph can’t be reduced to a simple outline, which perhaps makes it the inverse of Michael Myers from the previous year’s Halloween. That was another film praised for providing a haunting lead villain who’s too alien for empathy. Michael is the embodiment of bare-bones visual simplicity, thanks to his simple white mask and dark overcoat. The Xenomorph on the other hand, is all about complicated detail. These details are seen in tiny glimpses, making it difficult to grasp all at once. Between its chitinous, insectile surface and its multitude of forms, it’s a biology lesson viewers are left to work through on their own after watching the movie.

Even as the design became iconographic and was repackaged into a series brand, the creature’s basic shape remained macabre and curious. How can something that has acid blood, nestled jaws and a body as long as its head live make sense? It sleeps. Is it hungry? Is it capable of eating that food? Alien It offers little information and does not allow viewers to become familiar with it. By the time Sigourney Weaver manages to send it hurtling through space, we still don’t know much about it, other than the hints of its merciless nature offered by a deceitful android. The Xenomorph hatches from a Xenomorph, latches on to it, grows and then kills.

The creature’s simple biological rules make it a great opportunity to do all kinds of extrapolation or reinterpretation. Heralded as one of the greatest sequels of all time, James Cameron’s Aliens This multiplies the number of monsters, but doesn’t lose what makes the one that was so terrifying. Cameron builds to Ripley’s showdown with the Alien Queen, a tremendous monster that doubles down on the dread of child-rearing from the initial film.

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Part of this quality is due to Cameron’s skill at advancing ideas in adventure sequels without stripping them of their efficacy. (Who else could’ve handled the transition from the murderous T-800 in The TerminatorThe reprogrammed, cyborg good-willer Terminator 2: Judgment day?) Much credit must also be given to the Xenomorph Xenomorph. Even at a size bordering kaiju, and with a royal Crest that defines the matriarchal position in its most literal sense of the word, it feels intimate and unknown.

This creature is constantly evolving and revealing new forms. Alien 3, Alien ResurrectionIn the Alien vs. The Predator series. They’re all similar applications — in 3In this video, you can see what happens when a Xenomorph attaches to a dog and imitates it. We are in ResurrectionIn this image, we can see a hybrid between Xenomorphs and humans. You can find it here. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, we get the “Predalien,” the clumsily named blend between Xenomorph and Predator. While the results may be mixed, the template of the Xenomorph – a monster that transcends reason – remains the same. Ebert’s idea of not knowing what to expect plays out throughout the franchise. The franchise’s intrinsic mystery and its foundation in disquieting evolutionary allows it to grow through any new stories. The way it changes from film to film is part of a natural process — or at least as natural as Hollywood’s constant demand for sequels allows.

Scott came back to the series after the release of the prequel Prometheus, turning what could’ve been a simple origin story into a pseudo-biblical sci-fi epic, his subtext about evolution and biological creation transitioned to outright text. To remove a squidlike beast from her pregnant body, the main character has to perform an impromptu abortion. However, that monster eventually overtook a proto-human to become an Xenomorph-like adolescent. This last scene shows us the final resolution. We are able to bask in the familiar appearance of the creature. Prometheus has. It’s an acknowledgement that Scott achieved perfection in his first round, and that the most satisfying conclusion is letting the film get back to Alien basics.

Getty Images Photo of Sunset Boulevard/Corbis

The animalistic beasts in Scott’s follow-up, Covenant AlienGet even closer to the appearance of the original creature. The series effectively made the Xenomorph the sci-fi ideal. Nearly 40 years later, the series was still in production. AlienCinematic, in-universe and cinematic progress all led back to that iconic Xenomorph. Special effects have changed significantly — the model work, puppetry, and stuntman hidden behind the too-long limbs and VelociraptorCGI has replaced the Xenomorph’s evocative articulation. Multimedia, including comic books and video games have added depth to the Alien legendology.

But the core allure of the creature from 1979’s Alien remains. It’s an unfeeling, ruthless predator, and whatever knowledge it does have is hidden behind a visage that’s totally removed from mankind. Over time, filmmakers have portrayed it as fitting into humanity’s past, present, and future, letting it adapt and conquer across many time periods. It translates equally into action-movie-ready shoot-’em-ups and explorations of birth and death. The first movie dubs it the “perfect organism,” and the franchise never really contradicts that claim. Ridley Scott was and Don’t Breathe director Fede Alvarez are planning new entries in the series, but that’s no surprise. To quote Yaphet Kotto in Alien, when you have a sci-fi monster like that, “you don’t dare kill it.”