Xenomorph
The xenomorph is a fictional endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species that serves as the main antagonist of the Alien and Alien vs. Predator franchises, and a minor antagonist in Predator: Concrete Jungle.
The species made its debut in the film Alien and reappeared in the sequels Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, and Alien: Romulus. The species returns in the prequel series, first with a predecessor in Prometheus and a further evolved form in Alien: Covenant, and the 2019 short films Alien: Containment, Specimen, Night Shift, Ore, Harvest, and Alone. It also featured in the crossover films Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, with the skull and tail of one of the creatures respectively appearing briefly in Predator 2, Predator: Concrete Jungle, Predators, and The Predator, as a protagonist in the video game Aliens vs. Predator. It also returned in the FX television series Alien: Earth. In addition, the xenomorph appears in various literature and video game spin-offs from the franchises.
The xenomorph's design is credited to Swiss surrealist and artist H. R. Giger, originating in a lithograph titled Necronom IV and refined for the series's first film, Alien. The practical effects for the xenomorph's head were designed and constructed by Italian special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi. Species design and life cycle have been extensively augmented, sometimes inconsistently, throughout each film.
Unlike many other extraterrestrial races in film and television science fiction, the xenomorphs are not sapient they lack a technological civilization of any kind, and are instead primal, predatory creatures with no higher goal than the preservation and propagation of their own species by any means necessary, up to and including the elimination of other lifeforms that may pose a threat to their existence. Like wasps or termites, xenomorphs are eusocial, with a single fertile [|queen] breeding a caste of warriors, workers, or other specialist strains. The xenomorphs' biological life cycle involves traumatic implantation of endoparasitoid larvae inside living hosts; these "chestburster" larvae erupt from the host's body after a short incubation period, mature into adulthood within hours, and seek out more hosts for implantation.
Concept and creation
The script for the 1979 film Alien was initially drafted by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. Dan O'Bannon drafted an opening in which the crew of a mining ship is sent to investigate a mysterious message on an alien planet. He eventually settled on the threat being an alien creature; however, he could not conceive of an interesting way for it to get onto the ship. Inspired after waking from a dream, Shusett said, "I have an idea: the monster screws one of them", planting its egg in his body, and then bursting out of his chest. Both realized the idea had never been done before, and it subsequently became the core of the film. "This is a movie about alien interspecies rape", O'Bannon said in the documentary Alien Evolution. "That's scary because it hits all of our buttons." O'Bannon felt that the symbolism of "homosexual oral rape" was an effective means of discomforting male viewers.The title of the film was decided late in the script's development. O'Bannon had quickly dropped the film's original title, Star Beast, but could not think of a name to replace it. "I was running through titles, and they all stank", O'Bannon said in an interview, "when suddenly, that word alien just came out of the typewriter at me. Alien. It's a noun and it's an adjective." The word alien subsequently became the title of the film and, by extension, the name of the creature itself.
Prior to writing the script to Alien, O'Bannon had been working in France for Chilean cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky's planned adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel Dune. Also hired for the project was Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger. Giger showed O'Bannon his nightmarish, monochromatic artwork, which left O'Bannon deeply disturbed. "I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work," he remembered later. The Dune film collapsed, but O'Bannon would remember Giger when Alien was greenlit, and suggested to director Ridley Scott that he be brought on to design the Alien, saying that if he were to design a monster, it would be truly original.
File:Carlo Rambaldi al Giffoni Film Festival 2010 - cropped.jpg|thumb|upright|left|Carlo Rambaldi, the creator of the mechanical head-effects for the creature, was most famous for designing the title character of the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
After O'Bannon handed him a copy of Giger's book Necronomicon, Scott immediately saw the potential for Giger's designs, and chose Necronom IV, a print Giger completed in 1976, as the basis for the Alien's design, citing its beauty and strong sexual overtones. That the creature could just as easily have been male or female was also a strong factor in the decision to use it. "It could just as easily fuck you before it killed you," said line producer Ivor Powell, " made it all the more disconcerting." 20th Century Fox was initially wary of allowing Giger onto the project, saying that his works would be too disturbing for audiences, but eventually relented. Giger initially offered to completely design the Alien from scratch, but Scott mandated that he base his work on Necronom IV, saying that to start over from the beginning would be too time-consuming. Giger initially signed on to design the adult, egg, and chestburster forms, but ultimately also designed the alien planetoid LV-426 and the "space jockey" alien vessel.
Giger conceived the Alien as being vaguely human but a human in full armor, protected from all outside forces. He mandated that the creature have no eyes because he felt that it made them much more frightening if one could not tell they were looking at them. Giger also gave the Alien's mouth a second inner set of pharyngeal jaws located at the tip of a long, tongue-like proboscis which could extend rapidly for use as a weapon. His design for the creature was heavily influenced by an aesthetic he had created and termed biomechanical, a fusion of the organic and the mechanical. His mock-up of the Alien was created using parts from an old Rolls-Royce car, rib bones and the vertebrae from a snake, molded with plasticine. The Alien's animatronic head, which contained 900 moving parts, was designed and constructed by special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi. Giger and Rambaldi together would win the 1980 Academy Award for Visual Effects for their design of the Alien.
Scott decided on the man-in-suit approach for creating the creature onscreen. Initially, circus performers were tried, then multiple actors together in the same costume, but neither proved scary. Deciding that the creature would be scarier the closer it appeared to a human, Scott decided that a single, very tall, very thin man would be used. Scott was inspired by a photograph of Leni Riefenstahl standing next to a Nuba man. The casting director found, rail-thin graphic designer Bolaji Badejo in a London pub. Badejo went to tai chi and mime classes to learn how to slow down his movements.
Giger's design for the Alien evoked many contradictory sexual images. As critic Ximena Gallardo notes, the creature's combination of sexually evocative physical and behavioral characteristics creates "a nightmare vision of sex and death. It subdues and opens the male body to make it pregnant, and then explodes it in birth. In its adult form, the alien strikes its victims with a rigid phallic tongue that breaks through skin and bone. More than a phallus, however, the retractable tongue has its own set of snapping, metallic teeth that connects it to the castrating vagina dentata."
Name
This creature has no specific name; it was called an alien and an organism in the first film. It has also been referred to as a creature, a serpent, a beast, a dragon, a monster, a nasty, or simply, a thing. The term xenomorph was first used by the character Lieutenant Gorman in Aliens to refer to extraterrestrial life in general. The term was erroneously assumed by some fans to refer specifically to this creature, and the word was used by the producers of some merchandise.The species' binomial names are given in Latin as either Internecivus raptus in the Alien Quadrilogy DVD or Lingua foeda acheronsis in some comic books. The main Alien from Alien vs. Predator is listed in the credits as "Grid", after a grid-like wound received during the film from a Predator's razor net. Alien: Covenant actually credits the Alien as "Xenomorph", while also listing a different variety of the creature as the "Neomorph". In The Weyland-Yutani Report, the Alien encountered by the Nostromo was specifically referred to as "Xenomorph XX121", and this name is spoken out loud by the android Rook in Alien: Romulus.
Characteristics
At its core, the xenomorph is a hostile parasitic pathogen whose mutable mechanisms are signaled by perturbances to its chemistry. It evolves to assume biological and physiological traits of its host, thereby enabling it to adapt to its environment. As the film series has progressed, the creature's design has been modified in many ways, including differing numbers of fingers and limb joints and variations in the design of the Alien's head.Appearance
When standing upright, the Aliens are bipedal in form, though, depending on their host species, they will adopt either a hunched stance or remain fully erect when walking, sprinting, or in hotter environments. Their overall stance and general behavior seem to result from the mixture of the respective DNA of the embryo and its host. They have a skeletal, biomechanical appearance and are usually colored in muted shades of black, gray, blue or bronze. Their body heat matches the ambient temperature of the environment in which they are found, so they do not radiate heat, making them indistinguishable from their surroundings through thermal imaging. In most of the films, adult Aliens are capable of running and crawling along ceilings, walls, and other hard surfaces. They have great physical strength, having been shown to be capable of breaking through welded steel doors over time.Aliens have segmented, blade-tipped tails. The sharp tip was initially a small, scorpion-like barb, but from Aliens onwards the blade design increased in size and changed in appearance to more closely resemble a slashing weapon. From Alien Resurrection onwards, the tails have a flat ridge of spines at the base of the blade. This was introduced to help them swim convincingly, and was left intact in the subsequent crossovers. The original shooting script for Aliens and the novelization both featured a scene in which Lieutenant Gorman is "stung" by the barb tail and rendered unconscious; in the final cut of the movie, Gorman is knocked out by falling crates. As a weapon, the strength of the tail is very effective, having been shown to be strong enough to impale and lift a Predator with seemingly little effort.
The aliens have elongated, cylindrical skulls. In the novelization of Alien, the character Ash speculates that the xenomorphs "see" by way of electrical impulse, similar to some fish's Ampullae of Lorenzini. This method is illustrated in the original Aliens Versus Predator PC game and reused for the Predalien 8 years later. The Alien's inner set of jaws on its tongue is powerful enough to smash through bone and metal. How the creatures see is uncertain; in Alien 3, a spherical lens was used to illustrate the Alien's point of view, so, when the film was projected anamorphically, the image exhibited severe distortion. In the novelization of the movie Alien, the creature is held mesmerized by a spinning green light for several minutes.
In Aliens, the adult creatures have a more textured head rather than a smooth carapace. In the commentary for Aliens, it was speculated that this was part of the maturation of the creatures, as they had been alive far longer than the original Alien, although James Cameron stated that he simply left the carapace off because he liked them better that way. The smooth design of the carapace would be used again in Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, although made narrower with a longer muzzle and more prominent chin. This design would be kept in Alien versus Predator, and abandoned in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem in favor of the ribbed design.
Throughout their appearances, human-spawned Aliens have been shown to have different numbers of fingers. In Alien, the creature has webbed, six-fingered hands. In Aliens, the number of fingers is reduced to three, with two "paired" and a single, opposable thumb. The fingers are also shown to be much longer and more skeletal. In Alien Resurrection, the number of digits is increased to four, with two long middle fingers and a pair of thumbs. This design is kept in the Alien vs. Predator films, though the hands were made bulkier in order to make the Aliens seem more formidable against the Predators.
Aliens have been alternatively portrayed as both plantigrade and digitigrade organisms, usually relative to their hosts. Human-spawned Aliens were usually portrayed as having humanoid hind limbs, while in Alien 3 the featured Alien sported double-jointed legs due to its quadrupedal host. This characteristic would be continued in Alien Resurrection for the human-spawned Aliens. Tom Woodruff, who had previously played the "dog-alien" in Alien 3, described the human-spawned Aliens in Resurrection as feeling more like a dog than the previous creature, despite having been born from human hosts. The human-spawned Alien warriors would revert to a plantigrade posture in Alien vs. Predator.