The art of Alien film series – how a fearful future was crafted

“I am afraid of my visions.” Thus spoke H.R. Giger, the artist whose paintings led to him being engaged by director Ridley Scott to design the xenomorph for the first Alien film in the late 1970s. Giger’s art, showcased in his book Necronomicon IV, and his subsequent work for Alien, sparked a dazzling tradition of dynamic and inventive creature and worldbuilding design across a memorable series of films and wider pop culture. That wave of influence has most recently been reimagined and interpreted again in Alien: Romulus.

Also foundational to the work undertaken for Romulus was the art of Ron Cobb, who had been one of two principal designers on the original Alien film released in 1979. Cobb’s designs, along with those of Chris Foss, were foundational when it came to establishing the Alien aesthetic. Indeed, their contributions went so deep that Cobb also designed fictional corporate insignia for integration with John Mollo’s costume design for the maiden film.

That iconic collection of art left a major mark on concept designer Matt Savage, who went on to work on spaceship designs for Romulus. “As a teenager, I was obsessed with Giger and Ron Cobb’s work,” he recalls. “With Cobb’s art, I always felt like I could see a way to produce that work; it felt achievable. My brain isn’t unplugged from reality like Giger’s is. I still find Ron Cobb completely inspirational – he’s the big one.”

Matt has been able to apply the sensibilities of Cobb’s work to his own efforts for the concept designs within Romulus. “One of my dreams was to work on a spaceship in an Alien movie,” he adds.

Such was the effectiveness of Cobb’s work on the original film that for its 1986 sequel Aliens, writer and director James Cameron brought him back into the design space where he worked on the settings of Hadley’s Hope and the Atmosphere Processor, and on the military design of the dropship and various tech that’s used by the marines.

Cameron wrote the screenplay for Aliens in parallel with his work on the screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II. As such, a military focus is front and centre in both films, with the Vietnam War a dramatic and visual design touchstone for Aliens. The real-world military design influence for Aliens was memorably deployed for dramatic effect and would become hugely influential beyond the movie itself.

Another key design collaborator for Cameron on the film was Syd Mead, whose own dropship design ideas fused the form of an Apache gunship with that of a Phantom jet. In a design flourish as part of the ship’s operation, Mead looked to the structure of a scorpion’s tail for the arrangement of the weapon pod arms.

Mead’s other key contribution to Aliens were his designs for the interior and exterior of the USS Sulaco ship. Mead drafted cross-sections and longitudinal sketches of the Sulaco, working to Cameron’s indication that it should be imbued with the design characteristics of a submarine.

The designs found within Aliens have been underused across the rest of the franchise according to concept artist Andrew Baker, who worked briefly on visual development for Romulus. “There’s so much shape language that James Cameron brought to the design that I feel hasn’t quite been exploited in other parts of the Alien universe,” he says. “I thought there was an opportunity to throw some of that in here [on Romulus].”

In Alien 3 (1992), notably the first feature film from director David Fincher, the design world emphasised an oily, fiery and hellish environment, and a xenomorph that showed it could take on the form of whatever its host creature was. Famously, the film includes an alien dog.

Indeed, before Fincher directed the movie, emerging director Vincent Ward had begun developing the film and his rendition is considered one of the great science fiction films that was never made. Religious imagery and visual ideas abounded in Ward’s eventually abandoned iteration, which would have taken place within a wooden planet inhabited by monks, though many of his ideas still went on to inform the basic structure of Fincher’s final film.

The visual language of the fourth instalment in the series, 1997 release Alien Resurrection, emphasised a Gothic visual tradition combined with an industrial look. Intriguingly, one of the artists who worked on the concept design for the film’s xenomorph newborn was Chris Cunningham, who would go on to direct a series of landmark music promos.

Cunningham’s striking designs for Resurrection didn’t translate in a consistent way to the big screen. His designs imagined a dazzling fusion of human form and xenomorph that was an inventive and refreshed move in a distinct direction as beguilingly hideous as it was mysterious.

Another 15 years on, Ridley Scott returned to the Alien saga to direct Prometheus. He wanted a world that was distinct from what had been seen in his original entry. As such, while the rather definitive form of the Engineer from Alien was revisited, the world in which the space vessels and technology were homed evidence a wealthy and well-funded space exploration project quite in contrast to what was seen in Alien.

For concept designer Matt Savage, looking back to his work on the 2012 film, he recalls how it provided him the opportunity to engage with this aspect of the worldbuilding. “Ridley was very keen at that time to work in a different corner of that Alien universe: more funded, more affluent,” he says.”Before I started, I think they’d made a full-size mock-up of a space suit. However, Ridley deemed it too Alien, too Nostromo [the ship from the original Alien film], so we were definitely pivoting away from that.

“The geeky part of me was yearning to go back, but Ridley was keen to go in a different way. If there was a brief, it would have been to make the space suits engineered and feel custom-made for this expedition. I remember that he wanted nicely milled panels and pieces of engineering; clean and modern.”

For 2017 entry Alien: Covenant, meanwhile, the visual language again assumed a distinct aesthetic. Key to this was the concept and design work produced by the Visualisation team at famed VFX studio MPC. The task undertaken by the unit included designing the alien environment discovered by the Covenant crew, as well as the design of the xenomorph and the neomorph.

As before, the film’s director Scott was committed to bringing a new visual language to the screen for the series, and his brief to designers was that he wanted the xenomorph to appear less natural than it had before in terms of its physiology. As such, its proportions were not human and are instead developed around fascinating design shapes.

Leaping forward to 2024, we saw Alien: Romulus arrive on cinema screens in August. Concept designer Col Price, whose work on Romulus was primarily centred on environments with a brief and successful foray into some creature designs, recalls how his imagination had been sparked by Fede Álvarez’s vision for the film. Col explains: “Fede said that, ’We’re setting it between the first and second films, and we want the aesthetic to be the same.’ It wasn’t going to be the ultra-modernistic stuff from Prometheus and Covenant.” He adds with a smile: “For me and all of the team, we were like, ‘This is heaven.’”

Col makes the point that the franchise’s iconic visuals immediately set an unmistakable tone and place. “Because there have been that many Alien films, that whole design look means that as soon as you see them, you know what they are. They’ve all got a certain feeling,” he says.

It’s that combination of all-out furious imagination fused with a sense of the plausible and believable that makes the Alien world so vivid. To understand the power of its visual language we can revisit the mindset of Ron Cobb about the work that he did on the universe, as well as the wider allure of science fiction and fantasy cinema in all of its forms. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1988, Cobb observed: “I’m very impressed by the act of creation. I like myth making.”

The Alien saga endures as a myth and, as such, looks likely to continue providing artists with a creatively rich opportunity to explore deeply resonant images that dig down into ideas of fear and the unknown.

This content originally appeared in ImagineFX magazine. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Inspired? Read our guides to the best digital art software and best drawing tablets and starting your own art journey.