Kalyn Corrigan
(This article contains spoilers for the new Alien film.)
There’s a moment midway through Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus when two unlucky passengers witness the cocoon birth of a fully grown Xenomorph. Its bony claws tear a path out of a wasp-like nest on a derelict spaceship wall, its elongated translucent skull following suit. “It may be a new life cycle that Fede has created for this story,” Shane Mahan tells me about one of his favorite effects from the film. “And if it ever happened in the other films, behind the scenes, we never saw it happen — but this was our moment to kind of recreate the mystery and the energy of John Hurt looking into the egg from the first film. That’s how we approached it. Like, this is a new element.”
Mahan, an Academy Award-nominated special effects makeup artist and the co-founder of Legacy Effects, is no stranger to the popular Alien horror/sci-fi franchise. After forming a special bond with Stan Winston, John Rosengrant and Tom Woodruff while working on James Cameron’s 1984 game changer The Terminator, Mahan secured an invite to join the gang again in England for the director’s combat sequel to Ridley Scott’s terrifying space odyssey, Aliens. “It was one of those situations where you almost don’t believe that you’re able to do it,” Mahan remembers. “It was that grand and that spectacular.”
Cameron knew that he needed to keep Swiss artist H.R. Giger’s unique extraterrestrial Xenomorph designs for his entry, but he also wanted to up the ante by adding his own unique spin on the creature, so he dreamed up the “Alien Queen” — a gargantuan superbug cross between a black widow spider and a dinosaur with a termite queen’s ovipositor, the filmmaker was most concerned with the Queen’s face. Cameron assigned the best sculptor he knew to tackle the job, and Mahan spent the next eight weeks bringing the iconic character to life.
Flash forward to present day where director Álvarez, the visionary behind Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe, is up next to take a stab at the legendary franchise with his entry Alien: Romulus. Álvarez has always been an advocate for including as many in-camera practical effects as possible in his movies, and his addition to the otherworldly franchise is no exception. Like Cameron before him, when it came time to crew up for his big production, Álvarez sought perfection. Mahan was immediately brought on board, marking his big return to the Alien series, only this time around, he’s running the show under his newly anointed banner of Legacy Effects. “To get the phone call from Fede to do this film, it reinvigorated my faith in what we do and the passion for what we do,” recalls Mahan. “And we just poured our guts into it.”
Featuring Priscilla and Civil War star Cailee Spaeny as Rain, a short and spry modern ideation on Sigourney Weaver’s powerful depiction of Ellen Ripley, Alien: Romulus tells the story of a group of rebellious teenagers trying to survive late-stage capitalism long enough to one day see the sun. The story is set in 2142, sandwiched between the events of Alien and Aliens, when corporations like Weyland-Yutani trap the youth in a never-ending plight of exploited labor, working off debt in the very same poisonous mines that claimed their parents. Naturally, when the opportunity arises to scavenge an abandoned space station floating just overhead and use the cryopods inside to travel to a farming colony, Rain and her pals seize the moment, unaware that a tightly contained ship full of monsters lies in wait for their arrival.
“I think it’s a brilliant mid story between the two films,” says Mahan. “In this story, it takes the idea from the first film — that they were looking for the alien to create a weapon. It’s all about what the evil company wants. The people are expendable. So, finding the alien in the beginning of this film, it looks as though they’ve extracted the essence of it. Álvarez constructed the space station as if it were a manufacturing plant. This was a factory where they had figured out how to mass-produce these creatures. So, those pre-packaged Facehuggers were working, and certainly extending the life cycle and making it very fast to create the Warriors. And then the black fluid, which is a nod to the Prometheus film, was in development, which creates the Offspring.”
Romulus was a massive undertaking, with hundreds of artists working across several shops in unison to help bring Álvarez’s vision to the big screen. WETA brought the Facehuggers. Filmefex Studios in Budapest provided most of the human components, like taking lifecasts of the actors, building fake human bodies and creating prosthetics for the facial damage inflicted by the monsters. Alec Gillis, a dear friend of Mahan’s who worked with him back on Aliens and now runs his own Studio Gillis, got back in the mix to work on the Chestbursters. Even Mad God writer, producer and director Phil Tippett showed off some of his famous stop-motion animation. “There’s a rat in a cage that gets squashed, and then it’s injected and it regenerates,” explains Mahan, “It looks like time-lapse photography, but that’s a stop-motion animated rat that Phil did, and he did a marvelous job.”
Legacy Effects was technically responsible for the Xenomorphs, the Cocoon, the Rook Animatronic and the Offspring, but having Mahan on board secured another key component in making a successful entry in the Alien series: experience. “You keep a mental log book of things that worked and things that you wished you could have improved upon just because of the technology or the materials at the time,” relays Mahan. “ So much has happened since 1986 in terms of translucent, flexible materials.”
Based on Giger’s designs for Alien, the Xenomorph costume was originally intended to be transparent. However, effects artists in 1978 were dealing with extremely limited resources, especially compared with what’s available today, and a proper see-through silicone rubber material that wouldn’t tear with movement simply didn’t exist back then. Giger and director Scott settled for a darker, stiffer mask latex instead, and had suit performer Bolaji Badejo stick to the shadows to better hide his rigidity. In Aliens, Cameron battled this problem by opting out of a full Xenomorph suit, and instead having his performers wear leotards with pieces of the suit attached to them, allowing for more mobility. In Romulus, not only did Mahan know how to capitalize upon Giger’s original idea, but also knew ahead of time, based on working with Cameron on the sequel, how to build the suit better and faster.
“The fact that we sculpt in a computer, and rapidly prototype and print full-scale sections of bodies, as opposed to sculpting entirely by clay and making molds, we can engineer the mechanisms first and then skin them with the digital sculpts afterwards,” states Mahan. “I mean you don’t have to retrofit the mechanisms into the art. We can work around it and bypass a problem. There are so many things that we can do, on a shorter production timeline, using the technology that’s available to streamline the process. People don’t realize just how much we use digital work on our side of things to create physical effects. We don’t do CGI shots, but we’re using an awful lot of digital technology to create the creatures. There’s still a great deal of hand sculpting, absolutely, for prosthetic makeups and certain things that you need to have actual clay-to-surface construction, but the advancements are tremendous. Also, with telemetry-driven animatronics and very strong servos and computer systems that run those things, everything is really quite spectacular today.”
For the most part, the new Xenomorph suits are large 3D-printed pieces that are all interconnected and assembled like a giant model kit. Once sculpted in the computer by key artists Scott Patton and Darnell Isom, the pieces are then grown to scale, put together and finished off in hard surface modeling. From there, the pieces are remolded, cast in lightweight urethane plastic, then assembled and painted by Ryan Pintar and Parker Hensley. Shots of the alien in the film are an amalgamation of an actor in a suit, a Bunraku puppet (a Japanese style of puppeteering using rods that move the ligaments of the puppet like a shadow), and an eight-foot-tall animatronic.
“On this one, we cast very lightweight, urethane castings to keep the weight of the animatronic down,” spells out Mahan. “It was very thin. It’s got kind of an exoskeleton feel to it, and it could shell over the mechanics very easily. It paints very easily. It just has a great sort of carapace, insect-like registration to the eye when you see it. The whole thing’s conducive to the feeling of a chrysalis insect, a beetle’s shell. That was the action suit for Trevor Newlin, the suit actor. The sub-base is foam rubber, so it has a lot of detail to it, but it’s got the ability to compress and move. And then it had sections over it that were made of the same material as the animatronic, so it had a matching consistency of the chest and the arms and the head. When you intercut the two together, they feel like the same creature.”
Both Mahan and Álvarez were consistent in their efforts to strike a balance between paying homage to the very first Alien film while also using what came before as a launching pad to break ground on new territory. “We really wanted to pay tribute to Giger’s paintings and his artwork. We also wanted the Xenomorph to feel like an offspring of the Queen, even though in the context of the chronological order of the films, this falls between Alien and Aliens. You haven’t technically seen the Queen yet, but if you look at the two together, there’s a familiar trait of the Queen in our Xenomorph, in the very narrow torso. The tails have always had a bony structure to them, but that’s also another artifact of the Queen. The tail is very Queen-like.”
The result is the “Scorcher Xenomorph,” a revamped design made special for Romulus. “Fede had a lot of ideas about the skin surface,” Mahan reminisces. “He wanted it to be very rough and sharp. His description was that ‘even if you ran your hand along it or if it bumped up against you, it would cut your skin,’ so there’s a lot of ridges and sharp points to it, and the overall feeling is just very dangerous. We also wanted to have translucent panels in the legs and arms that light could come through because there are moments in the film when light can shine through, so that the audience can sense that there’s not a person in a suit. You can’t sense that.”
Of course, there are many moments in Romulus when creature actor Newlin is in a suit. The animatronic is very heavy, roughly 200 pounds, and it can’t leap around on wires or crawl up walls. That’s where matching the suit to the animatronic comes in handy. Spliced together, the audience is none the wiser.
“We wanted this film to feel organically new, but to also feel familiar,” says Mahan about the look of their updated Scorcher Xenomorphs. “I think when people think of the original film, the classic thing is the traditional long head that was created, and certainly the silver teeth.” Álvarez, along with Mahan and the entire crew at Legacy Effects, felt that it was very important to be part of that again. “And the subliminal skull, which had been gone for a while from the Xenos from some of the films. We wanted to bring some of those elements back but play with the surface texture so it wasn’t just shiny and smooth. We didn’t want it to just feel like electrical tubing housing and mechanical parts. The biomechanical part was sort of reduced to just purely bio at this point.”
One of the biggest surprises in Romulus is the third act unveiling of a brand new alien offspring. After a pregnant character injects herself with the extraterrestrial substance derived from the creatures by the corporation, she gives birth to an abomination: a human-Xenomorph hybrid. “It had to feel childlike,” Mahan says, recounting Álvarez’s direction. “It had to have a newborn teenager feel. He wanted it to have acne, and he wanted it to have a feeling of what an awkward teenager would be like, and sort of a baby’s brain. It was all these interesting things because it grows from baby to adult in about fifteen minutes of screen time. Very fast and very, very frightening.” Together, Savannah Suderman, Glenn Hanz and Andy Bergholtz led the charge in sculpting thirteen individual prosthetic pieces that were all later applied to actor Robert Bobroczkyi’s body during shooting. “We wanted to have as much of his real skin showing through as possible,” clarifies Mahan, “And once he’s painted, he was supposed to have shades of the Prometheus engineers.” Legacy also sculpted a tongue for reference, providing a reference for the last-minute CGI addition of a tail sprouting out in real time, which gives the creature a final eerie touch.
The Rook Animatronic is a stellar example of how the marriage between practical and visual effects can create a successful illusion for the audience. Originally written as a random synthetic woman science officer, Legacy Effects simply would have just done a half-body torso makeup on a non-specific actress, and she would have acted like a torn-apart robot. As it were, Álvarez conjured up the idea of making the android look like the same model as Ash from the first Alien. As Mahan discloses, “It’s not Ash, but it’s the same model,” like a mass produced synthetic version of the same character. In Romulus, the android steers the teens astray, as completing his mission for the corporation is still hardwired as his top priority. Mahan and his crew loved the idea of bringing the notorious synthetic back to reprise such a devious role, but once the excitement died down, they realized that they faced a great challenge: not only has the actor who originally played Ash, Ian Holm, sadly passed on, but also, any remaining molds of his head from the original movie are currently nowhere to be found.
What started out as one of the greatest obstacles on the project surprisingly provided the space to create one of Mahan’s proudest achievements in the movie. Although the age would be about fifty years off, the gang managed to track down a mold of Holm’s head from far on the other side of the world.
“The headcast that we got from our colleagues in New Zealand, from one of the Hobbit films, I think he was 77 years old in it,” laughs Mahan, “But it did give us the proportions of where his ears were in relation to his nose, and his chin and his forehead. It gave us the proportions of where everything was, and doing some further research, we found his body type was very close to our partner here, Lindsay Macgowan‘s. So, we lifecasted Lindsay in a sitting position, and then (Andy Bergholtz) did a portrait sculpture in clay from photographs using the basis of the life cast that we were given. I think we even did a clay pour of that lifecast, carved down, and did the best we could from photos and measurements. We scanned that, put that into the computer and the design team (led by Scott Patton) digitally did another pass at it to get it even cleaner. Then, we added digital enhancements to help make it come alive. I think ultimately in the end, it’s rather remarkable. It’s a very satisfying thing to resurrect an actor from 1979, the way he looked in 1979, and have him be in this movie.”
Nobody knows how to highlight a practical effect better than the artist who rendered it into existence. Amidst the chaos of a scrambled shooting schedule, a shop guy might glom on to a brief but crucial shot of an impressive effect that deserves a little more screen time than the overworked filmmaker might notice at that exact moment — but will be grateful to have in the can later on. “You’re not trying to step on the toes of the director, but you’re also saying, like, this angle is really great because it shows off the translucency of this piece,” says Mahan about speaking up on set. “They might not be thinking that for the moment, and then they’re like, oh yeah, that’s actually great.”
When asked to name a moment where such an instance occurred, Mahan refers to the close-up of the elongated Xenomorph fingers piercing through the embryonic sac during the Cocoon effect: “In the [Xenomorph] birthing sequence, there’s a hand that the fingers kind of bend backwards and unfold on themselves. That was an important moment for that sequence because it’s like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon, where it doesn’t really have joints or bones, but it’s something interesting to look at, and it helps tell the story of how it is emerging or coming alive.” Adds Mahan, “And we certainly had to get the attack heads, where the tongue is going and attacking into the head of a character. Just getting that timing to make sure that we get that shot correct. It’s a gruesome shot, but it’s an iconic element of the Alien franchise. Someone’s going to get the secondary mouth shot through the eye.”
Although Mahan is quick to point out that “it’s dangerous to live in the past,” the boy who spent countless hours sculpting the head of the Alien Queen in the ‘80s still lingers inside of the man who’s usually too busy these days running a company to get his hands dirty.
“The sad truth of the matter is that there’s just not enough devotional time,” laments Mahan. ”It takes time to sculpt well, properly. It takes hours and hours, sometimes weeks, and that’s from morning to night uninterrupted. And that just doesn’t happen, because the phone rings every five minutes, and you have another meeting to go to, and you’ve got budgets to produce and you’ve got to fly someplace, but it just doesn’t happen and that’s okay. But I do harken back to those days where it was just a nice cool room where I could listen to David Bowie’s Low album and just sculpt for 10 hours and have a wonderful day.”
Most of Mahan’s time nowadays is spent art directing, managing the time, scheduling deliveries and overseeing other artists. Still, Mahan made it a point to push some mud around on this project. “I always try to find at least one thing to do by hand,” the effects master grins. “And the thing that I wanted to do on this one was the dead alien in the ceiling. It’s the alien that was harpooned from the first film, shot out of the Nostromo. It’s kind of festooned up into the ceiling over where Rook was found. I just wanted to do the head of that one. It just seems such a great way to fulfill that fifteen-year-old boy’s dream. It’s unbelievable to me that I could follow through with that, and maybe create the dead version of that alien that blasted out at the end of the original movie.”
In the best way possible, Mahan and Álvarez demonstrate how the films that stand the test of time (and the ones that score big at the box office, with Romulus already raking in nearly $300 million worldwide on a $80 million budget) are the ones that are steeped in the love of the making of the craft. Of course, a touch of acid blood doesn’t hurt, either.