Ridley Scott breaks down the four stages of the Xenomorph in ‘Alien’
While much of the tension in Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece science fiction horror Alien comes from the darkened corridors of the good ship Nostromo, there would be little impact if it were not for one of the most iconic and truly terrifying antagonistic monsters ever found in a horror film, the legendary titular Xenomorph alien.
Scott once opened up on the different evolutionary stages the Xenomorph had to go through in order to become the terrifying, invincible monster that shook the crew of the Nostromo to their cores. “You’ve got the beast, but then you’re gonna go back to the egg,” he said. “How did the egg become what we call the Facehugger? And then from the Facehugger, you move [back] to the Chest Burster.”
The Face Hugger is what attacks Nostromo engineer Kane when he touches an alien egg when investigating a transmission on a planet’s moon in space. When Kane is taken back to the Nostromo unconscious, the Face Hugger eventually frees itself from Kane’s face and eventually dies. However, at this point, we are introduced to the Chest Burster, which suddenly bursts out of, you guessed it, Kane’s chest, killing him and scuttling off. The Chest Burster, of course, eventually becomes the adult Xenomorph.
Interestingly, Scott wanted a fifth evolutionary stage for the Xenomorph but was not able to complete it. “From the Chest Burster, I wanted an almost intermediary stage of a rather obscure thing that would be seen on internal cameras, like CDC cameras in the corridors seeing this funny thing that’s like a black egg wandering around on feet and then seeing it unfold,” he said. “We never got to do that because the bomb was breathing down my neck.”
“And so we’ve got four evolutions,” he added. However, Scott also noted that Xenomorph designer H.R. Giger could not help to design all of the stages, as he had enough on his plate working on the adult Xenomorph as well as the Face Hugger. It was the Chest Burster that Giger had to abandon, leaving Scott to consult another artist to help get all of the fourth stages ready for production.
Giger couldn’t deal with the Chest Burster,” Scott said. “He got everything else right, and he kept going, ‘I can’t do this; I’ve got too much to do’. So we eventually went to a guy in London called Roger Dickon, and he and I fiddled about with ‘what is this little baby alien going to look like?’”
Discussing the Chest Burster in more detail, Scott explained that he needed the final product to have themes of reproduction, which kept in line with some of the deeper analyses of the film in general. “Like it’s small enough to be contained in the cavity of a man’s chest, as if it were a womb because it must be a birth, it would be a birth on a kitchen table,” he said. “Just simple as that.”
