Alien, a “monstrous spring devil”

I wouldn’t have come here if Kane, theexecutive officer space freighter Nostromo had, one day in 2022 (one hundred years, already), touched the egg in which I had been vegetating for decades. Poor Kane, how could he have imagined that these luminescent organisms which had mysteriously developed between the walls of an ancient shipwreck, stranded on a dark moon of a no less dark star system, harbored within them the germ of absolute horror?

Barely touched, the egg turned into a “monstrous spring devil”, to use the words of the Swiss artist Hans Ruedi Giger, who drew with precision the successive stages of my reproductive cycle. A larva with prehensile fingers covered Kane’s face, causing him to immediately lose consciousness. Despite the objections of Lieutenant Ripley, who resented having a foreign body come aboard the NostromoKane’s comrades got us on board, him and me.

We must understand Ripley: when the teammates of the unfortunate executive officer tried to tear me away from his face, they hurt me, noticing that my blood was extraordinarily corrosive and attacking the metal walls of the vessel – “molecular acid”, said one of them. But, when the tentacles fell and Kane came to his senses, the majority of the teammates of the Nostromo, “space truckers”as Ridley Scott called us, who filmed all this, let us on board.

Giger had drawn me before anyone even thought of filming me

An aperitif with the crew of the Nostromo seemed the perfect opportunity to get to know each other better, after these tumultuous beginnings. But for Ripley and her comrades to find me, I had to see the light of day. Everyone now knows the path I took. Once at the table, Kane, who seemed to have recovered, was seized with hiccups, then spasms. Beneath his T-shirt there was an unnatural commotion, until I tore through all the layers of fabric, organic and textile, and appeared on the table as a nimble, squealing larva that is shelled without asking for his rest.

These images of the last meal of the seven space truckers have remained engraved on the retinas. In 1979, when Alien, the filmed biography of an endoparasitoid xenomorph (that’s how cinematic cryptozoologists have classified me), hit theaters – early this summer in the US, three months later in Europe – , the fate of Kane (a role that particularly suited the crumpled physique of its interpreter, John Hurt) struck imaginations. Four decades later, the emergence of the creature at the end of its gestation inside a human body continues to haunt nightmares. We recently saw a young contemporary astronaut, in the series For All Mankindreplay the scene in comedy mode, to exorcise the fears of his companions.

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