What happens when an unstoppable Xenomorph meets an immovable Ellen Ripley?
Surrealism and sexuality meets feminism.
These might not be the first themes that come to mind when thinking about the Alien franchise, but they’re there, pulsing beneath the surface like the walls of an infested hive. At its core, this sci-fi horror classic is a fusion of deeply relevant themes. From the unsettling, biomechanical creature design of the Xenomorph to the franchise’s groundbreaking female protagonist, Ellen Ripley, the Alien franchise remains a cultural touchstone more than four decades after its debut, providing a timeless tale that’s as primally provocative as it is endlessly referential.
And at the heart of its story is the creature designed by Swiss surrealist painter H.R. Giger. His concepts of the Xenomorph—a towering, biomechanical nightmare with skeletal features, a distinctly phallic-shaped head, and a life cycle marked by violent bodily invasion and a forced impregnation, regardless of gender.
It is a creature engineered to unsettle its audience embodying fears of violation, not just in its carnal act of interspecial rape and impregnation, but also, in its esoteric surrealist designs meant to make our understanding of the human anatomy uncomfortable. The creature is one of the most enduring monsters in the history of cinema.
H.R. Giger, The Necronomicon, and the Birth of Alien
To understand the Xenomorph, one only has to look at the works of H.R. Giger. A brilliantly troubled artist, Giger had spent his entire career transforming psychological fear into physical art, embodying fears regarding the psychosexual trauma of birth. The artist didn’t just create lewd images—he summoned nightmares. His art style, often referred to as biomechanical, combined human flesh with the automation of the machine in ways that were highly disturbing.
Perhaps Giger’s most influential work is his art book, Necronomicon, named after the infamous tome of forbidden knowledge from H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos. This compendium of nightmarish illustrations was handed to Ridley Scott during the pre-production phase of Alien, and it would leave a lasting impact on the film’s visual direction.
The imagery within Necronomicon is deeply disturbing, as grotesque as it is mesmerizing. Among its pages are depictions of satanic figures like Baphomet and a host of biomechanical monstrosities. Most significant among them is the painting Necronom IV, which became the direct prototype for the Xenomorph. With its elongated, phallic-shaped head and sinewy skeletal structure, the creature in Necronom IV encapsulates the eerie, erotic terror that would define the alien menace on screen. The concept of which was a fusion of flesh meets machine.
What made the Xenomorph truly different wasn’t that it was some distant extraterrestrial entity representing an external “other.” Unlike the typical sci-fi threats of the era—distant UFOs or alien invaders—the Xenomorph embodied internal terror through its invasive life cycle, not just of the human body, but in its sense of security on what’s to be a death voyage.
The tagline said it best: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” The real fear wasn’t the vastness of space, but the false sense of safety aboard the ship— the nightmare growing inside.
Now, it must be noted that this haunting style of art caught the attention of Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (widely considered a savant of modern science fiction), who had worked with Giger on the unrealized Dune movie project for famed comics creator and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky.
O’Bannon saw Giger’s vision as the key to making Alien unlike any science fiction film before it by taking a unique spin on it. Together with the legendary SFX production team, they thought, what if a creature could attack you not just with claws or teeth, but by reversing the reproductive process? What if the fear came from inside your own body?
And thus, Alien was born.
From Jodorowski’s Dune Came Alien: As Comics, Cinema, and Surrealism Collided
There’s a wonderful documentary called Jodorowsky’s Dune that explores how the failure of that film’s production helped give birth to modern science fiction. Strange, but true—many of the creative minds who walked away from that unmade project went on to shape the sci-fi genre in every way, shape, and form, as we know it today.
Now Alien began as a short story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett in the 1970s, just a few years after Star Trek debuted and on the heels of the space race–fueled science fiction boom of the 1960s. What’s often overlooked is how much Alien owes visually to comic books, because while working on Dune, O’Bannon himself collaborated with the legendary French comic book artist Jean Giraud, a.k.a. the great Moebius.
During the film’s production downtime, Moebius and O’Bannon created a short comic called The Long Tomorrow, a gritty, noir-infused future featuring dense urban landscapes. The Long Tomorrow became a visual blueprint and an influential work of science fiction, running in the magazine Métal Hurlant in France, before later being published in the popular magazine Heavy Metal in the U.S.
Now, Moebius’ legacy didn’t stop there. His run on Marvel’s Silver Surfer remains iconic, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jack Kirby’s legendary work, both of which were also works, you guessed it, based in worlds of science fiction. Meanwhile, H.R. Giger’s surrealist, biomechanical nightmares brought about a unique horror element to Alien, which ironically, was also influenced by the writings of O’Bannon for their respective project.
Together, this artistic cross-pollination between Giger’s unsettling surrealism, Moebius’ visionary futurism, and O’Bannon’s writing on both Alien and The Long Tomorrow created a world that was both mechanical and organic, yet also in many ways, utterly terrifying yet strangely intimate. That fusion of horror, futurism, and surrealism?
THAT gave Alien its unforgettable identity.
Here’s where it gets weird. The part that history forgets is that ALL OF THIS combined would go on to influence an author in the ’80s known as William Gibson, creator of the book, Neuromancer, and seen as the spiritual father of, yes, the entire Cyberpunk genre!
Gibson has cited both Moebius and Alien as key to Neuromancer’s inspirations. And while not directly connected, Giger’s Necronomicon and Gibson’s Neuromancer point to a shared lineage with themes of techno-horror, corporate dystopia, and existential dread.
Gibson would later be asked to write the script for Alien 3. Though the project was ultimately shelved, it would later be referenced in the larger franchise lore with a Dark Horse comic book adaptation, and even an Audible original drama with the Aliens original cast members Lance Henriksen and Michael Biehn. More recently, Gibson’s script was even referenced in Marvel Comics’ Alien: Black, White & Blood, in the short story “Utopia” by Collin Kelley and Jackson Lanzing, which featured Gibson’s original concept: The Union of Progressive People.
In the end, the origins of Alien—and arguably the entire Cyberpunk subgenre—can be traced not just to a monster and a nightmare, but to an unfinished film, a surrealist’s sketchbook, and a comic drawn all in the shadow of a failed dream called Jodorowsky’s Dune…
The greatest sci-fi film never made.
Sexuality and Fertility as Explored in the Xenomorph
Now, the Xenomorph isn’t just a monster—it’s a metaphor. One for an unnatural pregnancy, and with it, queer rights along with a fear of the future of science. Why it matters is that, around this period, political discourse surrounded fertility with the invention of IVF in the late 1970s.
Weird as it sounds, the idea of test tube babies and the debate of nature versus science were issues at the pulse of the heart of the film during its release. How it’s utilized in the Xenomorph is that every part of its life cycle is a violation of human life.
From the facehugger’s throat insemination to the chestburster’s gruesome birth, the Xenomorph is a monster that hijacks the human body, turning people into incubation hosts as vessels for their babies, as living, breathing eggs. The very nature of its biology is an allegory for sexual assault, directed in particular at that era to men as a means to buck the horror trend.
Now, Giger’s designs amplify that metaphor. The adult Xenomorph is sleek, black, and wet-looking—yet wholly inhuman. Its head is phallic. Its inner jaw penetrates. On the opposite side of the sexual spectrum, the face hugger has a very obvious vulva motif, as too were the original design of the alien eggs in the original movie. The eggs featured in Alien had to be redone in terms of design plus given a second fold, as requests were asked to mix things up as Giger’s original was so obviously a replica of a human vagina. One that, poetically, was created in a flesh factory room meant to represent a pregnant womb.
Now, this must be stressed: There’s nothing accidental about these creative choices. They were designed to make the audience squirm—and think. The Xenomorph’s horror is one of familiarly unfamiliar biology, stripping humans of the choice of agency, turning the act of creation into bodily destruction for the sake of a monstrous external/alien mother.
It’s no wonder, then, that the film’s counterpoint is a human one found in Ripley.
Ripley vs. the Machine: Feminism and Motherhood at the Heart of Alien
Ellen Ripley, portrayed by the brilliant actress Sigourney Weaver, became one of the most iconic protagonists in horror and science fiction. An untraditional action hero, Ripley was a character who didn’t rely on brute force, but instead, survived through logic, caution, and above all else: compassion for her fellow survivors.
Someone fighting against the monsters aboard, but also against human greed, companies, and androids whose scientific “mission” values profit over life.
In the original Alien, Ripley becomes the “final girl”—a trope that emerged of that era in late ’70s and ’80s horror cinema, where the last woman standing faces the final killer after everyone else is dead. Whereas the Final Girl usually sees a woman grow into her role as a survivalist, this film subverts expectations by making her a proactive, capable figure from the get go; the gender roles thus are flipped: the strong, decisive character is a woman, while the victims, at least in that first movie, are mostly the men.
It’s this take that Ripley is smart and assertive throughout the movie, and is thus fighting against the nature of gender biases of that era. Ripley was the first to want to enforce quarantine protocols, recognizing the danger before anyone else. Time and again, she challenges the systems around her—namely, Weyland-Yutani, a cold embodiment of male-dominated corporate greed. Ripley stands thus as a feminist icon, not because she was the last one standing, but because she refused to back down.
Now, if that weren’t enough, in Aliens, the sequel, that theme deepens and gets explored as Ripley becomes surrogate mother to Newt, the lone child survivor of a Xenomorph attack. Their bond, that mother-daughter dynamic, forms the emotional core of the film, sharply contrasting with the monstrous, mechanical reproduction of the Xenomorph Queen.
Why it’s important is because their final showdown is iconic: Ripley, armed in a mechanical exosuit, shouts the now-legendary line—“Get away from her, you bitch!”—a raw, primal rejection of monstrous motherhood in defense of the human’s iteration of nurture. Even the ship’s AI in the original film was named MUTHUR—a subtle, but powerful, reminder of the story’s ongoing tension between mechanized femininity and lived motherhood.
The Enduring Legacy of Alien and the Xenomorph
Decades after its release, Alien remains a cultural touchstone to our culture, but it’s always been a commentary on psychosexuality and feminist themes. It spawned sequels, prequels, comics, video games, novels, and countless imitations, but more importantly, at its heart, it changed how we think about science fiction, horror, and gender.
The Xenomorph terrifies us because it represents more than just a space monster—it represents our deepest fears about the body, about control, and about what happens when life itself becomes weaponized in hostile violation.
