The xenomorphs (also known as a XX121 xenomorph, Internecivus raptus, or simply the Alien or the creature)Alien: The Weyland-Yutani ReportAlien: Sea of Sorrows are a fictional endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species and the titular main antagonists of both the Alien and Alien vs. Predator franchises from 20th Century Studios.
The species made its debut in the film Alien (1979) and reappeared in the sequels Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), Alien Resurrection (1997), and Alien: Romulus (2024). The species returns in the prequel series, first with a predecessor in Prometheus (2012) and a further evolved form in Alien: Covenant (2017), and the 2019 short films Alien: Containment, Specimen, Night Shift, Ore, Harvest, and Alone. It also featured in the crossover films Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), with the skull and tail of one of the creatures respectively appearing briefly in Predator 2 (1990), Predator: Concrete Jungle (2005), Predators (2010), and The Predator (2018), as a protagonist (named 6) in the video game Aliens vs. Predator (2010). It also returned in the FX television series Alien: Earth (2025–present). 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 (such as the Daleks and Cybermen in Doctor Who, or the Klingons and Borg in Star Trek), 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.Star Beast, the Alien Quadrilogy boxset "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.
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, "[which] 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 (lit. "alien form" from the Greek xeno-, which translates as either "other" or "strange", and -morph, which denotes shape) 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 (meant as "murderous thief") in the Alien Quadrilogy DVD or Lingua foeda acheronsis (meant as "foul tongue from Acheron") in some comic books.The comic book Aliens versus Predator versus The Terminator includes the binomial name Linguafoeda acheronsis. 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
Ridley Scott stated in the DVD commentary for Alien (and the accompanying 2001 DVD documentary Alien Evolution) that the concept behind the origin of the xenomorphs is that nothing so deadly could have evolved naturally, but was instead designed through genetic engineering by some other ancient race as a biological weapon. He described the crashed Derelict encountered by the Nostromo as essentially a "bomber" that would carry payloads of xenomorph eggs and drop them onto targeted planets. This concept was present since work on the first film, though Scott went on to refine and expand on it over thirty years later in the prequel Prometheus – which established that not only were the xenomorphs created by the "Engineers" (the race of the "Space Jockey" the Nostromo crew found), but specifically formed using a hostile mutagenic pathogen (the "black goo" termed "Chemical A0-3959X.91").
The second core concept was that in order to keep the monster horrifying and unpredictable, it would metamorphosize through several radically different life stages – one of which involved a larval stage gestating inside of a human host before fatally bursting out.
Another concept present since Scott's production on the original film is that xenomorphs have flexible genetic material which is designed to adapt to whatever environment they are in, by incorporating some genetic information from their host that is native to that environment. The xenomorph on the Nostromo has a bipedal humanoid stature because its larval form gestated inside of a human, resulting in what Scott described as "the man-version of Alien". Subsequent spinoffs demonstrated variations on this concept: a xenomorph gestated inside of a quadruped like a dog or ox results in a quadrupedal, panther-like xenomorph (Alien 3), and one gestated inside of a Predator/Yautja will become a powerfully built "Predalien" with mandibles (Alien vs. Predator).
Appearance