Hulu’s Alien: Earth series has emerged as one of the most refreshing and inventive entries in the long-running sci-fi series. While xenomorphs clashing with synthetics is familiar territory, the real scene-stealer (aside from Timothy Olyphant) is The Eye—a parasitic, tentacled nightmare that has slithered straight into viewers’ psyches. And creator Noah Hawley apparently knows it: He says the creepy little critter as one of the most messed-up creatures the franchise has unleashed in years.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Hawley revealed the inspiration behind the latest unsettling feat from The Eye in episode four, where the little guy crawls into a sheep’s head and proceeds to give the crew of children in adult synthetic bodies a disapproving side-eye as they try to suss out how The Eye functions.
“It’s one of the more disturbing things you’ll watch all year, I think,” Hawley told THR. “Every 5 percent improvement in visual effects made that sequence a 100 percent ‘worse’ in terms of its effectiveness—and by ‘worse,’ I mean better. I told director Ugla Hauksdóttir in London, ‘For me, the fact that you got the live sheep to back away from the camera [in seeming fear of The Eye], that made the whole sequence right. Because if that had been a CG sheep, there’s something about sheep—being like—us going ‘uh-huh!’ and backing away from camera really sold the gag.”
Hawley went on to reveal that The Eye was initially designed to have legs instead of tentacles until someone in the visual effects department suggested that giving the creature suckers would be both creepier and more advantageous to The Eye, allowing it to shoot its suckers out and haul itself across a room when stalking its prey. It’s a mobility feat that Hawley told THR differentiated it from the “nope” factor of the crawling Facehuggers in James Cameron’s Aliens:
“To me, there’s a relentlessness to this that is similar to the face hugger,” Hawley said. “Certainly in James Cameron’s movie [Aliens] where Ripley [Sigourney Weaver] and Newt [Rebecca Jorden] are trying to get away from these things, and they just keep coming, and they’re fast, and they’re scrambling, and they’re spider like a crab. [The suckers] was a really great upgrade for the original conceit where before, it just had to run as fast as it could at you. Now it can fly. And here in Austin, we have the Palmetto bugs fly. A giant roach that flies is always worse than a giant roach that doesn’t. So the fact that it can propel itself, that it can stick to you, and you’re basically trying to fight it off, and it has all these arms and it’s relentlessly trying to get in.”
According to THR, Cameron hasn’t weighed in on Alien: Earth, but Hawley has been in communication with Alien director Ridley Scott. As THR notes, despite Alien: Earth drawing heavily from both films, Cameron has referred to the franchise as “trampled ground at this point” in the wake of director Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus. Granted, Cameron was perhaps referring more to the difficulties of writing sci-fi today than he was disparaging the continuation of the series and its new crop of sequels. Still, Hawley doesn’t have hard feelings toward Cameron.
“I did not have any contact with James Cameron,” Hawley said. “Not because I didn’t want to, but I don’t know where James Cameron is or what he’s doing. And there’s certainly no obligation for him to talk to me about a movie he made 40 years ago.”
New episodes of Alien: Earth release every Tuesday on Hulu.
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