In celebration of Alien Day, Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez shared a behind-the-scenes set video of the series’ Facehuggers in action.
In the nearly 20-second X/Twitter clip, Álvarez showed a practical prop of a facehugger under an RC car scuttling about the floor of the Alien: Romulus set like an overgrown horseshoe crab.
“Playing with my favorite toy on set of Alien Romulus last summer,” Álvarez wrote. “Happy #AlienDay everybody!”
Playing with my favorite toy on set of #AlienRomulus last summer. RC Facehugger created by the amazing team from @wetaworkshop Happy #AlienDay everybody! pic.twitter.com/XKqc5StFtR
— Fede Alvarez (@fedalvar) April 26, 2024
Álvarez also revealed that Alien: Romulus’ facehugger (i.e. the source of his commenters’ nightmares) was created by the New Zealand-based special effects and prop company Wētā Workshop.
In a previous interview with IGN, Álvarez said that facehuggers were the creatures from the Aliens franchise that scared him the most. Naturally, this led to his decision to pit Alien: Romulus’ protagonist (played by Cailee Spaeny) against a herd of them.
“The idea of what would happen if the Facehugger gets you, you’ll wish for the Xenomorph. You’ll wish for a quick death instead of what happens to you if you get caught by one of them,” Álvarez said. “Conceptually, that’s just so terrifying. And though in a way, there’s a lot of things that happened here that although they’re familiar, they never really technically ever happened again since the first movie, or they hint in the others of some version of it. But here we went very purist in a lot of these things.”
Alien: Romulus is a standalone film that follows a young group of space colonists trapped on a remote station infested with xenomorphs. Aside from Spaeny, its cast includes David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu.
Alien: Romulus hits theaters on August 16, 2024.
Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.
