Alien: Romulus Makes the Xenomorph Life Cycle Even Scarier with New Step and Metaphor

This post contains massive Alien: Romulus spoilers.

“I’m not going to go after the women in the audience. I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs.”

So declared Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon in the 2002 documentary The Alien Saga, and no one can say he failed. The most famous moment in Alien involved Kane (John Hurt) giving violent birth after a facehugger forced itself inside him. Although later contributors would leave aside the male focus, pregnancy metaphors continued to drive Alien‘s sequels and prequels. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) finds a surrogate daughter in Aliens, gives birth to a xenomorph in Alien 3, and destroys her offspring in Alien Resurrection. When Alien director Ridley Scott returned to the franchise with Prometheus, he included an abortion scene in which Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) tries to expel the creature inside her.

Given the nastiness that they brought to Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe, director Fede Alvarez and his co-writer Rodo Sayagues don’t shy away from upsetting imagery either. In fact, they increase it by adding a new step to the xenomorph lifespan in Alien: Romulus, which underscores the gross pregnancy metaphors…

The Xenomorph Life Cycle

The Alien franchise has always benefited from the ghastly designs that Swiss artist H.R. Giger made for the first film. His combination of the organic and mechanical unnerved viewers, especially given the sexual nature of the figures. The xenomorph has several phallic qualities, from its long head to its retractable jaw that penetrates its victims. The facehugger looks vaginal underneath its hand-like exterior, alongside an invading tube.

Those disturbing elements come to the fore throughout the xenomorph lifecycle, which was established in the first two films. The xenomorph begins life as an egg laid by the queen (at least according to Aliens, albeit like the first film Romulus suggests that a queen might not be always necessary). The egg then gestates into a facehugger. The facehugger finds a host and inserts its proboscis inside them, turning the host into an incubator. Once the facehugger’s job has completed, it dies and falls off, letting the xenomorph prepare for its next phase.

The third phase of the lifeform is called a chestburster, appropriately enough because it bursts from the chest of its host, killing them in the process. A xenomorph is vulnerable in its chestburster stage and tends to escape to prepare for its final phase. Ever since Alien, we’ve assumed that the chestburster simply grows into a full-fledged xenomorph, molting its skin along the way.

But in Alien: Romulus, we see another stage between chestburster and full xenomorph. While searching their ship Corbelan for the chestburster that killed his girlfriend Navarro (Aileen Wu), Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and his cousin Kay (Isabela Merced) find a giant pod. In the fine tradition of Giger’s designs for the first Alien, the pod appears vaginal, which only gets worse when Bjorn slams a shock rod inside of it with the hope of killing the creature inside.

The plan doesn’t work and acid blood puts an end to Bjorn, forcing Kay to run for her life. However, the thing that sticks with viewers is the lingering pregnancy and assault imagery. A vaginal cocoon or egg that can defend itself against violent penetration by secreting life-taking fluid on its attacker.

A Terrible Rebirth

Pregnancy also plays into the climax of Alien: Romulus, as Kay gives birth to something caught between a xenomorph, human, and an Engineer from Prometheus. This occurs after she injects herself with the black goo from the prequel (or at least Weyland-Yutani’s best approximation of it).

With that ending, Romulus calls back to the themes of the prequels, which deal with humans (well, Peter Weyland, anyway) meeting their maker only to find that our makers hate us. Kay gives birth to something like her maker an Engineer, who immediately kills her mother. But instead of the more etherial approach that Scott took in Prometheus, the pregnancy imagery that Álvarez adopts in Romulus makes those themes corporeal again. As it does, it makes them also gross, reminding viewers that we all come into this world bloody, screaming, and covered in slime.