ISSUE #40: Bugs on Film, Alien Edition

Aliens are bugs.

There’s a new Alien movie in theaters for the first time since 2017, and to celebrate the occasion I have been marathoning Alien movies all week. I had already seen most of them, except for Alien: Resurrection (need someone to explain to me why everyone hates this one??) and the AVPs (sounds dumb, can’t wait), and they’ve all been very fun to revisit. It got me thinking a lot about creature design, arguably the single most important aspect of this whole franchise, and everything that went into making the titular alien (sometimes referred to as the xenomorph) so gross and scary and disturbing. Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the alien is most definitely a bug. I will explain.