Fede Álvarez Keeps Xenomorph Kills Intense in ‘Alien: Romulus’

In 2013, when Fede Álvarez reimagined the undead world first developed by Sam Raimi in 1981’s Evil Dead, he may have kept the title and some of the plot points, but he certainly made it his own – especially with the amount of blood used. The director is known for cranking the graphics up to an 11 in the majority of his projects, and even when they don’t include heaps of gore, they’re still overflowing with horror. That’s why we’re giddy with anticipation for the August 16 arrival of Alien: Romulus, the latest installment in the nearly 50-year-old franchise. In Álvarez we trust, and we absolutely know that this one will return the film series to its former glory with uneasy moments, a plot that builds and builds, and boatloads of horror.

Another thing we now know, thanks to a chat between Álvarez and Collider’s editor-in-chief Steve Weintraub during a Studio interview at SDCC, is that the director will go where no other Alien filmmaker has gone before – into the deadly kills of the feared Xenomorph. When you look back on the movies that came before Romulus, you’ll realize that audiences have rarely seen the alien actually doing its thing – its thing being brutally slaying members of the doomed crew. Promising this time will be a little bit different and explaining how he came to his decision to show some of the crazy kills, Álvarez told Weintraub,

“Like Quentin [Tarantino] said once, ‘I will reject your hypothesis.’ [Laughs] Because if you think about the first movie, most of the kills happen off-camera. You don’t see them. You don’t see a lot of death. They cut right away, but you know how they will go down. But Alien is so interesting; you rarely see the Xenomorph actually murdering someone. You see the inner mouth coming out — boom. Headshot, right? But then you don’t really see it. You just really figure out a way to escape it. I can think of a few, but usually the creature gets to you, and they cut away, gets to you, and cut away. People don’t know. Do they eat you? How did they kill them? And that’s what’s great about it is that you really don’t know, and you rarely see it.”

Noting that in other horror movies, audiences are typically given the very up close details of every kill scene, the director continued,

“There are other monsters that you know exactly the way they kill. The Xenomorph is really tricky. I mean, I know it will do the inner mouth in your skull thing, that’s for sure. But then there are other ways, and it’s always better in your head. So, everybody has a different idea of what it is. All that said, I guess after so many movies, it got to a point that we probably have to show what the alien does to you [laughs], and we’re probably doing it in this movie. Without spoiling it, we actually got there, and we show a few times what the Xenomorph does to people when it actually gets to you, and you keep rolling, and you keep showing it.”

See the Xenomorph’s bloodlust like you never have before when Alien: Romulus roars into cinemas on August 16.

Source: Collider