Noah Hawley’s thrilling new series set in the Alien universe dares to suggest that there might be something worse than a xenomorph …
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here was a time when nothing in cinema was more frightening than a xenomorph. HR Giger’s nightmarish biomechanical hellspawn, dripping with fluids and Freudian discharge, was the gruesome, undisputed apex predator of movie monsters. It burst from your chest; it dissolved your face with acid; it splintered your ribcage like a piñata filled with blood and screams. It was unstoppable, unknowable, the kind of thing you’d expect to find at the bottom of your dishwasher after leaving it closed for 36 centuries.
The early films, 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens, rarely steered too far away from the sense that these infernal creatures were the worst thing you could possibly encounter in the universe. Later on, in Ridley Scott’s ultimately rather pointless prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the godlike Engineers and David the Android grasped the mantle of cosmic bogeyman with their inexplicably versatile vats of black goo – a substance that could apparently do everything from melt your DNA to grout your bathroom tiles. But this always felt like a temporary sleight of hand, the narrative equivalent of distracting the audience with a smoke bomb while the real villain sneaks in via the ventilation shafts.
