Alien: Romulus Director Answers Our Questions About Where It Stands in the Franchise, Facehuggers, and More

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

The extended wait for Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus has felt about as long as Ripley and the team’s cryosleep from the 1979 original. But finally, we’re emerging from our chambers and waking up, because the very first trailer for the upcoming standalone Alien film is finally here with a summer release date on the horizon.

I sat down with Alvarez ahead of the trailer release to talk about maintaining a level of secrecy with the trailer cut, how this new film fits into the Alien canon, and attempting things the franchise hasn’t seen before — oh, and all of those pesky facehuggers he decided to put in the mix, of course.

Alvarez’s upcoming feature takes place between the first two films in the franchise, but yet is its own contained story. And at this point, even with such an action-packed trailer, that story is mysterious. There have been very little official details on the plot of Romulus — but that’s by design, as was the enigmatic trailer cut.

“The less you know, the more exciting it is,” Alvarez told IGN. “The whole exercise on this teaser was to show the minimum amount possible, just to give you a taste and give you an idea and answer a few questions of, ‘How does it look? What era does it play in? Who are the characters? What’s the vibe?’ But more importantly, ‘what are the feelings I’m going to get out of this movie? What am I going to feel when I go watch it?’ Because that’s what we all go [to] watch a comedy or [a romance] or horror, it’s that we need our fix of whatever that emotion is.”

‘What’s just beyond that door’

Needless to say, the horror vibes are absolutely percolating through the minute-long sneak peek footage, which is really the first we’re seeing from Alvarez’s version of the Alien world. He gushed that he wants to “give you intrigue and give you a bit of a jolt — a bit of adrenaline shock” with this film. Luckily for audiences, the man behind the 2013 Evil Dead reboot and Don’t Breathe knows a thing or two about that. But Alvarez also appreciates an appetite for dread, a feeling the Romulus trailer is utterly drenched in. “What’s [just] beyond that door is always the most fascinating thing for me,” the filmmaker explained.

Us Alien fans know a little bit about what’s just beyond the door in this franchise: facehuggers and Xenomorphs. This new trailer shows an, ahem, scary amount of them infiltrating a ship — a scenario we know well — and it’s no surprise that Alvarez decided to ratchet the tension up to eleven with nothing short of an infestation.

“The idea of what would happen if the Facehugger gets you, you’ll wish for the Xenomorph.”

“I think we all have our favorite creatures in these movies. Facehuggers have always been the ones that scare me the most. 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,” Alvarez explained his impulse for putting his protagonists against a group of facehuggers and, eventually, Xenomorphs.

“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.” Considering we’ve never had to deal with a pack of facehuggers, it does in fact seem like this film will cover some uncharted territory.

The way this movie works

Alvarez considers Alien: Romulus to be an equal opportunity film for fans and newbies alike, no matter how familiar you are with the terrors of the other kind. “The way this movie works is if you haven’t seen any of them, you’ll have a blast. And if you haven’t seen any of them, I’m actually jealous of you because you go, ‘Wow. Wow.’ Man, you’re in for a ride. Because a lot of ideas that will feel like we just created them on here, they were created by masters of this genre in the past, and I’m lucky enough to be able to do it again,” he told IGN.

“So if you haven’t, fantastic,” he continued. “But if you have, I’ve been saying you’ll be that person in the theater that won’t shut up, just talking to the person next to you going like, ‘This is from that movie and that’s from this, and [they said] this because of that reason.’ And you’ll pick up on a billion things that connect with the other movies story-wise, technology-wise and character-wise.”

The thing about this new addition to the franchise is that it is, ultimately, a standalone story. That said, Alvarez also assured that it fits in as tightly as a drum. “We went to crazy extents to make sure that things were in canon and we were not contradicting or messing, I would say, any of them,” the filmmaker proudly confirmed. “It’s just something very special when you love certain movies and then a movie comes in and makes nods to them and you feel you’re the only person in the theater who must be getting this reference. That’s what it feels like. It’s really tailor-made for you. That’s my goal for the true fans out there, that they will have the experience they’ve been waiting for.”

Doing it the Fede way

The horror aficionado says he’s extremely proud of what we’ll see this summer – and there’s plenty of his style in it. “This is not the era of Hollywood or even the studio of the era of Alien 3, where [David] Fincher is fighting everybody to get his way,” the director gushed. “I made this movie as independently as I made Don’t Breathe, really with a white page and the ability and the freedom given to me to write what we wanted. Not only that, but to have the chance to sit down with Ridley [Scott] as my producer and Cameron as a mentor, just to sit down with him and chat about the movie and after they’ve seen the movie. [But] it is very me, believe me. The good and the bad. It’s really me. If you like my movies, you’ll get it.”

OK, OK, one final question, because I know what you’re thinking — it’s a Fede Alvarez movie, so can we expect some serious blood and guts? “Don’t worry about that,” Alvarez teased. “I got you.” Phew. Just checking.

Alien: Romulus will arrive in theatres on August 16, 2024.

Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.