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The Alien franchise has a lot of scary elements: the uncaring company Weyland-Yutani, androids that look like humans, and, oh yeah, freaking Xenomorphs, based on an unnerving design by Swiss artist H.R. Giger. Underpinning many of these things is a fear of rape and pregnancy, especially inflicted upon men.
Many have written about how the first chestburster scene in Alien represents a man giving horrific birth, after being violated by a facehugger. Ash’s analysis of the facehugger in that movie gave viewers a sense of how the creature worked, including a tube that ran down the victim’s throat. But, at that point, director Ridley Scott apparently figured the audience had been traumatized enough, so he didn’t show the tube going into Kane.
Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez has no such concern. In the latest teaser for the upcoming film, we see not just a swarm of facehuggers descend upon visitors to the Romulus space station but also the mechanics of its funcitons. In icky close-up, Álvarez captures the sight of a tube sliding into a man’s mouth, getting ready to impregnate him.
Another shot captures the tube as it pulls Aileen Wu’s character Navarro. That sets up the big shot at the end of the trailer, which also includes new information about a well-established monster. Navarro senses something wrong inside of her body and uses a device to illuminate her insides. There, we see a chestburster getting ready to live up to its name, adding a new twist on a familiar Alien event.
None of this extreme imagery should be a surprise, given that Alien: Romulus comes from Álvarez, who pushed boundaries and good taste in his Evil Dead remake and in Don’t Breathe. Whether its an electric knife on a human tongue or an unconventional use of a turkey baster, Álvarez excels at making even hardened horror fans squirm.
This excessive approach might be exactly what the Alien franchise needs. While the movies still command respect, especially Alien and Aliens, they don’t scare like they used to. Part of the problem is just the familiarity that’s been built up over the decades since the first films released.
But part of it is also how the franchise itself has treated its signature horror. The irreverent approach of Alien: Resurrection reduced facehuggers and chestbursters as setups for punchlines, not too different from John Hurt’s cameo in Spaceballs. The Alien vs. Predator movies don’t make jokes out of the aliens, but they don’t take them seriously either, practically begging the audience to cheer and high five every time a facehugger or chestburster appears. Prometheus does have an unsettling scene of body horror, one that echoes an abortion, but it moves away from the franchise’s usual monsters, while Alien: Covenant takes Walter’s chilly perspective, thus treating Oram’s (Billy Crudup) impregnation as a science experiment.
If the icky mechanics of facehugging shows up in the trailer, who knows what nastiness Álvarez has in store in the finished movie?
Alien: Romulus rips into theaters on Aug. 16.
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