Sci-fi horror franchise Alien has always played with the ideas of gestation, birth, and death through a lethal extraterrestrial species that invades human bodies. The newest film in the series, Alien: Romulus, takes this theme to new heights.
Pregnancy is a popular trope in horror movies because its physical side effects can often be unsettling, uncomfortable, or even painful. Many of the symptoms can feel straight out of a body horror film. And the idea of pregnancy can be frightening because it involves losing complete control of your body, since babies are essentially parasites that take nutrients from you to grow.
The horror genre often toys with these fears by creating ghastly scenarios in which pregnant women carry some type of evil fetus. It’s a trope that we’ve seen a lot recently (and it’s no coincidence given the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade). In The First Omen, a young American nun-in-training is thrust into a nightmarish labor with convulsions, heavy panting, guttural noises, and a belly that grows rapidly before her eyes. When she awakens in the church, Margaret discovers she has given birth to a fluid-filled sac containing twins, one of whom is the Antichrist. Immaculate features Sydney Sweeney as a novitiate who is secretly impregnated with DNA from the nail of Jesus’ crucifixion. Shot entirely in close-up, her agonizing labor results in the birth of a genetically-modified baby that remains off-screen. Her horrified reaction suggests that it may have twisted mutations, and she crushes it with a rock.
But in the Alien series, it’s not just a human-looking demon baby, but something else entirely: a galactic predator from the darkest corners of space. Who can forget the now-iconic scene from the first Alien, when a perfectly normal lunch was turned upside down by a tiny, sharp-toothed infant xenomorph bursting out of Kane’s chest? It’s one of the few times we see a male character experience the pain of an unwanted pregnancy, which can often have life-or-death consequences.
One of the most terrifying pregnancy scenes from the series is in Prometheus when Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) discovers she’s three months pregnant after sleeping with someone infected by alien bacteria. The embryo causes her excruciating pain, and she must use a MedPod to perform surgery on herself to remove it. Ridley Scott’s in-your-face direction puts you right inside the claustrophobic pod as the sharp tools slice Elizabeth’s stomach open. After ripping her umbilical cord with her bare hands, the machine removes the tentacled creature and staples her stomach closed. All of this happens while the baby facehugger flails and tries to attack her mid-surgery.
The threat of pregnancy is ever-present in the Alien series, but Alien: Romulus unpacks this in the scariest way. In Alien: Romulus, Kay (Isabela Merced), one of the young scavengers from a mining colony, is pregnant. It’s still in the early stages and starts off perfectly normal when she happily announces it to her friend Rain (Cailee Spaeny). But after being tossed around a spacecraft and narrowly escaping a xenomorph, Kay is seriously injured, and injects herself with a substance meant to enhance human DNA by mixing it with the xeno’s before entering a cryopod to heal her wounds. This has disastrous consequences.
When Rain opens Kay’s cryopod, she finds that Kay’s belly has swollen dramatically, resembling nine months of pregnancy rather than just a few weeks, and she is bleeding profusely. After a painful, wailing labor, Kay gives birth to a small, baby-sized cocoon, which Rain tries to dispose of in the cargo bay. But rather than hide the abomination that was transformed by the “Prometheus fire,” director Fede Álvarez directly confronts the audience with a new species that he calls “The Offspring.”
The Offspring is a chilling cross between a human, engineer and xenomorph with a spiky back, long tail, and thin rib cage played by Robert Bobroczkyi, a 7-foot Romanian basketball player. His lanky frame, lurching movements, and hunched posture have an uncanny quality. Despite having a pale, human-like face, the Offspring’s pitch-black eyes are completely devoid of life and filled with bloodlust. He flashes his black teeth when his lips curl into a malevolent smile, showing how much he delights in causing death and destruction.
We’ve seen something similar in Alien: Resurrection, and in Alien 3, Ripley gets impregnated by a facehugger. The entire Alien series isn’t subtle about what happens to someone who is pregnant and doesn’t want to be. Ripley takes her own life by jumping into a furnace, clutching the creature that bursts from her chest before she falls into the fire. Fast forward to Alien: Resurrection, where Ripley has been cloned from blood samples so the military can extract the xenomorph inside her. The Cloned Queen eventually gives birth to the Newborn, a xenomorph-human hybrid. Since it’s all scrambled with Ripley 8’s cloned genetics, The Newborn has flesh-like skin and a face that resembles a human skull with deep, black eye sockets and a mix of square and fanged teeth.
Shortly after his birth and rapid growth into a gigantic abomination, we see the Offspring leaning over Kay. At first, it looks like he might be breastfeeding, resembling the painting of a young child suckling his dead mother earlier in the film. Then we realize The Offspring has killed Kay. While dying in childbirth is a real threat that looms over many horror genre pregnancies, children don’t tend to commit cold-blooded murder of their own mother immediately after birth. Though this also happens in Alien Resurrection (the Newborn instantly kills its mother with a single swipe of its claw), Romulus’ take is even more twisted, as the Offspring slowly and agonizingly kills Kay, in a far more calculated manner—it’s less animalistic and more eerily human.
Alien: Romulus takes the horror movie pregnancy trope and somehow makes it even more disturbing, and it’s lingered with me long after the credits rolled.
Correction: 8/27/2024, 11:17 a.m. ET: A moment from Prometheus was previously stated to have occurred in a different Alien film.