Fede Álvarez is a horror auteur who specialises in gnarly, edge-of-your-seat set-pieces, the kind that torture their characters but with a sense of mischief. After bursting onto the scene in 2013 with a remake of Evil Dead, he’s now bursting out of the chest of the Alien franchise with the seventh entry in the series, Alien: Romulus, a sci-fi slasher that’s full of call-backs but ultimately demonstrates that it’s from the auteur behind Don’t Breathe, one of the most underrated thrillers of the past decade. Is this actually Don’t Breathe in space?
“It’s been said that directors just make the same movie over and over, and all they do in their career is refine the same movie,” says Álvarez in London, two days before Alien: Romulus hits cinemas. “Here, there’s definitely a lot of Don’t Breathe in it, particularly as it’s a story of young people trying to escape their reality, and there’s a monster in the way of their dream. And there’s a heist!” The 46-year-old Uruguayan filmmaker considers it some more. “It’s definitely Don’t Breathe in space.”
Everyone has their own Alien rankings. It usually involves Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien and James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens at the top, then the rest in an unsorted order. For me, Alien: Romulus easily slots into the top three: the first act echoes the painterly, poetic imagery of Scott’s slow-burn slasher; the second act segues into gung-ho, shoot-‘em-up action redolent of Cameron’s bombastic follow-up; then the anarchic third act is Álvarez pushing the body-horror and sci-fi conventions to their limits, ensuring that viewers exit cinemas with a passionate response, whether positive or negative.
“I always try to tell the story with a camera,” Álvarez explains. “Hitchcock believed that cinema peaked in the silent era, when everything was told with a camera, and then dialogue came to ruin everything. That’s why Don’t Breathe has barely any lines. It was an exercise to tell a story with a camera. Romulus is no different. The last half hour of the movie has, like, three lines. That’s what makes it so intense.”
Cowritten by Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, the pair who penned Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe, Alien: Romulus is set in 2142, 20 years after the events of Alien and 37 before Aliens. This means you don’t really need to rewatch the prequels, the spinoffs, or the sequels. After all, the film’s protagonists are also oblivious to what awaits when they board an abandoned spaceship in the hope of escaping a mining colony. Rain (Cailee Spaeny), essentially the film’s Ripley, wishes to start a new life with her adopted brother, Andy (David Jonsson), a synthetic programmed to protect his sister.
Before face-huggers and xenomorphs take out the ensemble one by one, Alien: Romulus delights in 360-degree filmmaking that celebrates the practical sets, the rusty equipment that’s both futuristic and lived-in, and an eerie, foreboding soundscape that ramps up the anxiety. Like Don’t Breathe, it toys with who audiences wish to live or die. “A xenomorph is a lifeform that wants to reproduce and survive,” says Álvarez. “Even the characters representing the company [Weyland-Yutani] – I could argue all day that what they’re doing is actually right and good. I never write villains in my movies.”
Perhaps it’s fitting for Alien: Romulus, a film largely about AI, that it has an unannounced character who appears to have been produced by AI. Was that the case? “You have to ask the people that created it what technology they used,” says Álvarez. “But it was a mix. We had a real animatronic that moved, talked, and interacted with the actors. When it came to the lip sync, it needed some CG. But some shots in the movie are literally an animatronic.” Álvarez takes out his phone, logs into his personal Dropbox, and shows me photos of concept art, a head cast, and a moving puppet. “It was quite an endeavour. We had to hire an actor to do the voice.”
But was it done with AI? “I’m sure it might have something based on the first movie – the eyes and stuff like that. But, look, AI and CG, it’s all the same. People like to draw a line, and be like, ‘Is it AI?’ It’s the same. It’s computers. It’s different languages. You create a CG face. AI is a tool that takes photos of the CG, and rearranges it. It’s computer-generated graphics. You can call it whatever you want. It’s technically no different.”
Álvarez, in fact, started out in sci-fi horror. In 2009, he uploaded a four-minute short, Panic Attack!, which he directed, cowrote with Sayagues, and produced for $300 by creating the effects on his computer. Within a few days, it went viral, and he was flown from Uruguay to LA for the meetings that led to him directing Evil Dead. It was only in retrospect that Álvarez learned how Panic Attack! spread online. “I went to my YouTube account and saw the clicks were coming from this blog by this artist I had never heard of at the time, Kanye West,” Álvarez says. “Kanye West is the one who really made it viral overnight. One day, if I meet him, I’ll say thank you.”
“This generation, I think, sees sex with even more taboos than before. The creature is so effective for a generation that seems to be easily offended by a lot of things” – Fede Álvarez
In Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe, which both starred Jane Levy, Álvarez demonstrated a knack for capturing petrified expressions from his actors, almost as if they were under genuine duress. In interviews for Don’t Breathe, Álvarez revealed he would regularly lie to his cast: they might, for instance, expect someone to jump out from the left, but instead a figure would leap from the right, meaning that the screams captured on camera were often authentic. Levy didn’t return for Don’t Breathe 2, and, on Twitter, wrote, “i would not want to do don’t breathe 2.. but not because i am too committed of an actor lol” and “maybe we should be asking why these films are made in such a way that their directors are averse to having committed actors participate?”
While Levy’s tweets were in 2021, Álvarez tells me they’re now on positive terms. “I’m good friends with Jane. She was like, ‘You’ve got to make sure the actors are cool with that.’ That’s what I do these days. I tell them early on, ‘Are you cool with me giving you false cues to get a performance?’ Some actors go, ‘No. I can act it.’ Others are like, ‘Sounds fun. Let’s do it.’” As for Spaeny, who combines the emotional intensity of Priscilla with the kinetic know-how of Civil War, Álvarez believes it’s down to her facial expressions. “With Jane, it was the same. You point the camera at their eyes, and you know the life they lived. It saves you a lot of dialogue.”
Likewise, Alien: Romulus benefits from H.R. Giger’s original designs for Alien that flood the frame with psychosexual imagery, not to mention the metaphor of face-huggers inserting themselves into their victims. “I remember when I was the age [of the characters], pregnancy was the worst thing that could happen to you,” says Álvarez. “And if you’re a girl, it’s even more so.” The director believes it suits the young cast. “This generation, I think, sees sex with even more taboos than before. The creature is so effective for a generation that seems to be easily offended by a lot of things.”
In fact, Álvarez hopes that Giger’s imagery will play on viewers’ minds after the credits roll. “Giger was accused of being a pornographer when he started,” he says. “If you look at his books, it’s all penises and vaginas. His art transcends that. It should be tickling your brain when you watch the horror, and not understanding why it’s so fascinating to see.” He adds, “Alien wouldn’t be Alien without his art, and the xenomorph comes out of his vision. If you see that it has a penis for a head, that’s not you – that’s what it is.”
Alien: Romulus is out in cinemas today (16 August)
