Alien: Earth Boss Teases the Show’s New Alien Species Designed to ‘Get Into Your Nightmares’

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In space, you don’t just have xenomorphs to worry about anymore.

FX’s new series Alien: Earth —premiering Tuesday, Aug. 12 —brings the Alien film franchise to the small screen with a fresh story about a research vessel full of alien specimens that crash-lands on Earth. Yes, the infamous xenomorph from the Alien movies is onboard… but so are a number of new alien species developed for the TV show, including a creepy-crawly centipede that crawls inside your body like the ear bugs from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and a jellyfish-like creature that sucks out your eyeball and takes over your body. Scared yet?

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“One of the things that you can never reproduce in an audience that has seen an Alien movie is the feeling you had the first time you saw the life cycle of this creature in that first film,” showrunner Noah Hawley told a group of reporters at a recent press screening. “It’s just unreproducible. You know that it’s an egg, and it’s face huggers, it’s chest bursters, all that. So that’s where the idea for other creatures came from.”

Alien Earth Timothy Olyphant

He wants Alien: Earth viewers to feel the same dread that moviegoers felt seeing the xenomorph for the first time: “I want you to have that feeling, because that feeling is integral to the Alien experience. But I can’t do it with these creatures. So let’s introduce new creatures where you don’t know how they reproduce or what they eat, so that you can have that ‘I’m out’ feeling multiple times a week.”

When it came time to dream up the new creatures, Hawley says, “some of it is just, ‘What’s the worst thing I could think of?’ And the fun of it is not just: What’s the design of the creature? And who do they kill? And what do they eat? But also, then you have the opportunity of, ‘Well, how do they reproduce?’ And that’s going to be gross.”

The new aliens are specimens in a space lab, Hawley explains: “They’re in a zoo, basically, but they don’t stay in the zoo.” And every aspect of the creatures’ design “all goes to the ‘get into your nightmares’ part of it. Mostly, my hope is that people who watch the show will never do anything comfortably again. Like, “Should I eat that? I should probably pick that piece of bread up. Look at what’s under it.'”

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