One of the new Alien variants would be the Engineer-Alien the creature that presumably erupted from the chest of the Space Jockey in Alien.Īlien insects: Again, just as they did on Alien, Ridley and the creative team turned to the brutal insect world for inspiration. So Ridley and I were looking for ways to make the Xenomorphs new.” And maybe even a rapid process of evolution, still ongoing, in these Alien laboratories where these Xenomorphs were developed. We imagined that there might be eight different variations on the Xenomorphs – eight different kinds of Alien eggs you might stumble across, eight kinds of slightly different Xenomorph creatures that could hatch from them. “And so he was always pushing for some way in which that Alien biology could have evolved,” he continued. In every film you’ll see that the design of the Alien shifts -the shape of the carapace, the shape of the body- and some of that is to do with new technology available to realise the monsters, but a lot of is just a director’s desire to do something new.” You can see an interesting balance, even looking at the movies in the Alien franchise, between homage and evolution. And even as we were working, we were constantly toying with the closeness of the monsters in the film to the original Xenomorph. “I wrote five different drafts of the script,” explained Spaihts, “working with Ridley very closely over about nine months. But in the wreckage of Vickers’ escape pod the Engineer suddenly shudders to life – his chest cleaves open and a new life-form emerges: a spindly-limbed creature known as the Deacon, or, as the early script by Jon Spaihts call him, the Ultramorph.

“There is nothing here but death,” Shaw narrates.

In the closing moments of Prometheus Shaw and David, having struck an uneasy alliance, dart for the Engineer homeworld and leave LV-223 behind them.

What does a xenomorph look like