The last two Alien movies, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, are divisive films, but one thing everyone who saw them can agree on is that they’re not particularly heavy on the horror. Existential dread, yes, which is its own kind of horror, but I mean old school horror, the kind seen in the first Alien movie.
Fede Álvarez is going back to the franchise’s roots.
20th Century Studios has released the first teaser trailer for Alien: Romulus. Set between 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens, the film is about a group of space colonizers who come face to face with “the most terrifying life form in the universe” while scavenging a derelict space station (I’m guessing they didn’t find a Predator). The trailer features almost no dialogue, but there is screaming, blood, and a Xenomorph jump scare. It looks pretty great — and should not be confused with the Alien show coming to FX.
“I knew that I wanted to go back to the roots, to the era of the first film, and so that indicates much of the design right away,” Alvarez (Don’t Breathe) told EW. “This company makes a certain type of hallway, a certain type of monitor, a certain type of engine, and if you live in this universe, you’ll re-encounter a lot of these designs. So production designer Naaman Marshall and I took a lot of care to make sure we were super faithful to the style of the first film. This takes place a few years later, but in the world of Alien, that’s not too much later, really.”
Alien: Romulus, which stars Priscilla breakout Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu, opens in theaters on August 16.
