Alien: Romulus hit cinemas earlier this summer, successfully rebooting the Alien franchise and taking it back to its horror roots. The franchise began as a sci-fi horror with Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, before James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens switched gears into action sci-fi. Subsequent films have bandied back and forth between horror and action, but since Scott’s return to the franchise for the 2012 prequel Prometheus, the direction has moved firmly back into the former camp.
This article contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus. This article uses binary terms to describe cis bodies, but the writer would like to acknowledge that sex and gender are both a much wider spectrum.
Alien: Romulus, produced by Scott and directed by Fede Álvarez (Don’t Breathe (2016)), is pure sci-fi horror. But the Alien franchise isn’t just horror, it’s body horror; reproductive horror, to be exact. And the more the franchise leans into that aspect, trying to find new and innovative ways to display it, the more the gendered implications cannot be ignored.
Set between the Alien and Aliens instalments, Romulus follows a group of young miners who break into an abandoned spacecraft orbiting their planet. They hope to find cryo-pods that will allow them to make the long journey to a better colony. Of course, unbeknownst to them, the abandoned space station is a lab full of creatures they accidentally awaken, and all hell breaks loose.
Romulus is a film that revels in reproductive horror, taking established aspects of the franchise and heightening them. In one scene the famous facehugger is successfully removed from a character’s face with a drawn out shot of its ‘phallus’ sliding out of the character’s mouth (Alien: Covenant (2017)) features a similar removal with no such shot). The yonic look of the production design has been ratcheted up to the point that one alien cocoon can only be described as a ‘giant vagina’. And perhaps most significantly, the nightmarish symbolic ‘births’ of the franchise become literal, with a pregnant woman giving birth to a human-alien hybrid.
The terror of pregnancy and reproduction has always been present in the Alien franchise. The original film’s most iconic sequence comes when the crew of the Nostromo—having successfully removed an alien face hugger from their comrade—settle down for a meal. But they aren’t in the clear. The crew member, Kane (John Hurt), has been impregnated with some kind of embryo and begins convulsing before the iconic chestburster does exactly what its name implies and cements its place in film history. While the pregnancy subtext is not hard to find, it’s notable that this was originally a genderless horror. The original host was a man. The lifecycle of the xenomorphs from facehugger to chestburster loosely resembles that of a violent birth, but this an alien pregnancy. It could happen to anyone.
Since the original film the franchise has dabbled with xenomorph biology. Aliens added a colony-like structure, with a queen bee. Alien 3 added the xenomorph’s shape, varying depending on which species is the host. But the first tie in to human pregnancy appears in the crossover spinoff Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2007) when an alien queen/predator hybrid (stay with me) impregnates a whole maternity ward by hooking onto the women’s faces and forcing a specimen down their throats. This is the first time the chestbursters migrate from the chest to the uterus, exploding out of the women’s pregnant bellies.
Alien/human pregnancy makes its entry to the main franchise alongside Ridley Scott’s return, with 2012’s Prometheus. In this prequel, an ill-fated group of scientists arrive on a planet hoping to find answers to humanity’s creation. Instead, they find a ship that holds snakelike creatures and a mysterious black liquid. We will later learn that the purpose of this ship was to carry biological weapons invented by our creators to wipe humanity out. Protagonist Shaw (Noomi Rapace), who we’re told is infertile, becomes ‘pregnant’ after having sex with her boyfriend who has been infected with the black liquid. Shaw is forced to essentially perform an emergency caesarean on herself in a med pod. The pod removes what can only be described as a squid from her uterus, which quickly grows to become a giant proto facehugger.
The black liquid makes a reappearance in Romulus when scavenger Kay (Isabela Merced), who is already pregnant, injects herself with it, causing her to give birth to a human-alien monster. The birth is bloody and terrifying. It’s a good horror scene, but it also marks the franchise’s first ‘traditional’ birth. The move from chest to uterus is complete. Romulus has gendered its pregnancies. Both hosts in Romulus are female; while the male crew are not spared, they are not subject to ‘pregnancy’. The only female character in the film to escape this fate is Rain (Cailee Spaeny), our designated ‘Ripley’.
This highlights another twist that makes the Alien franchise and its relationship to gender so interesting: its need for a ‘Ripley’, a female action hero to make it to the final act, preferably with a big gun (i.e. Shaw, Woods, Daniels, Rain). But while Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley won the day in Alien, it was the sequel Aliens that really solidified that action hero reputation and left the franchise with an interesting contradiction—a female led franchise that will continue to grow increasingly hostile to female bodies. Aliens itself moved the franchise away from body horror and into action. Violent birth is a part of the Xenomorph life cycle, but Aliens doesn’t linger on it, mainly because it’s more interested in blowing up xenomorphs that have already been born than watching their originations
It feels purposeful that Romulus roots its violent pregnancies in female bodies, clearly playing with the reproductive horror aspect of the franchise, but it has disappointingly little to say about any of this. Neither Navarro nor Kay receives much characterisation before undergoing their torturous pregnancies—particularly disappointing in Navarro’s case, as Aileen Wu displays all the swagger of a potential space trucker in her brief scenes.
At other points, Romulus displays the ability to have a conversation with the franchise’s ongoing themes—the addition of android Andy (David Jonsson) is a nice twist on the franchise’s bad android/good android back and forth. Similarly, expanding the Alien universe by setting Romulus on a mining planet that workers can’t escape due to Weyland Yutari’s monopolisation of cryo chamber technology continues the issue of corporate greed.
Alien has always been a thematically rich franchise, covering everything from capitalism to motherhood and the overconfidence of the American military. It’s bizarre that in 2024 a franchise with the formula of a female action hero fighting genital monsters that want to forcibly impregnate people has nothing to say about sex, gender or reproductive rights. It is worth noting that no Alien movie has ever been written or directed by a woman. If the franchise continues down Romulus’ path of digging into pregnancy horror, specifically rooting that horror in the violation of female bodies, shouldn’t these films have something more to say? Do we need more from this franchise than for one girl with a big gun to make it to the end?
Words by Louise Eve Leigh
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