Noah Hawley’s long-gestating Alien: Earth series is mere days away from premiering on FX and Hulu. The trailers we’ve gotten hint at the show’s surreally dark undertones, and have also given us glimpses of not only our beloved Xenomorph, but also some new alien specimens aboard the space vessel that crash landed on Earth, two years before Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley faces the Xenomorphs on the Nostromo.
The Xenomorphs are integral to the Alien franchise, so it’s no surprise we’ll see them in Alien: Earth as well. Hawley explained in a press conference that Reactor attended, however, that the Xenomorphs’ pervasiveness in pop culture takes away the horrific surprise that people watching Alien for the first time back in 1979 felt. Hawley wanted to bring that unknowability back.
“If my job is to render the emotional experience of watching Alien into a new delivery system, which is this television show, then one of the critical feelings is the discovery of the life cycle of the Xenomorphs,” he said. “I mean, [the Xenomorph] is really four monsters in one, and each step is worse than the last, right?”
The challenge, Hawley said, is that, after seven movies, we all know what’s coming next with the Xenomorphs. The surprise, the sense of discovery, is gone. But adding entirely new alien species into the mix helps brings back that tension: “If I introduce new creatures and you don’t know how they reproduce or what they eat, then you feel that dread every time they’re on screen, or they’re not visible but you know they’re out there [and] you’re not sure what’s going to happen next.”
Those new species include what I call the eyeball monster: An alien that will surely make your skin crawl when you see it on screen (or, as Hawley emphasized above, when you think it’s just off-screen and about to do some damage).
When creating the creatures, Hawley said that the process was “function over form,” with the driving question being what role the alien needs to play in the story. Beyond that, Hawley said he “just tried to gross myself out as much as possible.”
Having seen the first few episodes, I can confirm that he’s succeeded on that front.
The first two episodes of Alien: Earth premiere Tuesday, August 12, on Hulu and FX. Subsequent episodes drop weekly until the season finale on September 16, 2025.
