Editorials
[‘Aliens’ 30th Anniversary] 30 Fun Facts You May Not Have Known About ‘Aliens’!
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of James Cameron’s Aliens. To celebrate what is arguably the greatest sequel in horror movie history, we thought we’d let you in on some interesting facts!* Some you may already know, some you may not. Hell, you may know all of them! Either way, there are worse ways to spend 10 minutes than reading these fun facts.
*Full disclosure: All of these facts were taken from the Trivia section of Aliens‘s IMDb page. Lest you think I’m trying to take credit for discovering these facts. please know that is not the case.
1. Like most films, the movie wasn’t shot in sequence. But for added realism, James Cameron filmed the scene where we first meet the Colonial Marines last. This was so that the camaraderie of the Marines was realistic because the actors had spent months filming together.
This is just the first instance in which Cameron showed his love for authenticity in the film. There are plenty more to come.
2. The spear gun Ripley used at the end of Alien is briefly visible in the opening scenes – still stuck at the bottom of the escape pod door where it jammed 57 years earlier.
3. In both the standard and special edition versions, the fifteen minute countdown at the end of the film is indeed fifteen minutes.
This is something that always bothers me in movies, but it’s good to know Cameron was such a perfectionist that he wanted this countdown to be as realistic as possible.
4. Sigourney Weaver’s Best Actress Academy Award nomination for this movie was the first ever for an actress in a role in an action movie.
Sadly, it wasn’t the first Best Actress nomination for a horror movie (that would be Ellen Burstyn for her performance in The Exorcist). Weaver lost to Marlee Matlin for her performance in Children of a Lesser God, but it’s still a nice accomplishment.
5. The alien screams are Baboon shrieks altered in post.
6. To bring the alien queen to life would take anything between 14 and 16 operators.
7. The portrait of Ripley’s daughter (in the Director’s Cut of the film) is of Elizabeth Inglis, Sigourney Weaver’s real-life mother.
8. Budget constraints meant that they could only afford to have six hypersleep capsules for the scenes set aboard the Sulaco. Clever placement of mirrors and camera angles made it look like there were 12. Each hypersleep chamber cost over $4,300 to build.
9. Aliens was never shown to test audiences because editing was not completed until the week before its theatrical release.
Sometimes movies not screened for critics actually turn out to be pretty good and sometimes they don’t. Aliens is a prime example of the former.
10. Composer James Horner and director James Cameron did not get along during post-production, as Horner felt that Cameron did not give him enough time to properly construct an original score (he was given six weeks but they were still editing for the first three of those six weeks). On the bright side, Horner earned his first Academy Award nomination for the score. He and Cameron would not work again until Titanic.
11. The word “fuck” is used 25 times in the film, 18 of them are spoken by Hudson.
Thank you, Bill Paxton. Thank you for everything you do in Aliens.
12. The full-size queen puppet was actually too big to fit into the elevator. For the shot where she is seen there, her tail was removed, and yet the back of the elevator still had to be opened to accommodate the prop; smoke effects, dark lighting, and a black curtain at the back obscure this.
13. James Cameron faced a big problem trying to win the confidence and respect of the British crew, many of whom had worked on Alien and were fiercely loyal to Ridley Scott. In order to try and convince them he had the talent and skills for the job he arranged a screening of The Terminator for the crew on the set, to demonstrate his abilities. However, most of the crew ignored the invite and didn’t bother to turn up.
14. Most of the shots where it appears that the aliens are crawling quickly through tunnels or air ducts were filmed using a vertical shaft with the camera at the bottom and the alien actor lowered headfirst on a cable.
15. Hudson says the word “man” a total of 35 times. Although according to this video, he says it 44 times. Who is correct?
16. “Sulaco” (the name of the ship in Aliens) is the name of the town in Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo. Many of you may recognize that name as the name of the ship in the original Alien.
17. A lightweight dummy model of Newt (Carrie Henn) was constructed for Sigourney Weaver to carry around during the scenes just before the Queen chase.
18. A complicated effect shot (the Marines entering the Alien nest) had already been filmed just before James Remar was replaced by Michael Biehn. A re-shoot would be too expensive, so the Corporal Hicks seen with his back towards camera is still played by James Remar.
19. In the original Alien, one of the options considered was making the creature translucent. Since this wasn’t done in the earlier movie, for continuity it couldn’t be used for the creatures in this film, although it survives in one small way: the queen’s teeth are translucent.
20. Bishop states that he can’t harm a human. This is why he places his hand on top of Hudson’s during the knife trick.
21. The crew was openly hostile to both James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, whom they openly mocked by claiming she wasn’t the real producer and only got the credit because she was married to Cameron.
22. Sigourney Weaver threatened to not do any more Alien movies after seeing the movie’s final cut, so as a compromise, the 1987 Special Edition was released on LaserDisc.
Truthfully, I can’t find any record of this anywhere else online, but if it’s true it’s a pretty smart move on Weaver’s part. The Special Edition (which runs 17 minutes longer than the Theatrical Cut) is the superior version of the film.
23. When Burke and Ripley are discussing her psych evaluation results, a People magazine can be seen on a table.
24. James Cameron has a cameo in the film in the form of a voice over in the opening scene featuring the deep salvage team. His line reads: “Bio readouts are in the green, looks like she’s alive!” Interestingly enough, he also provided the voice for the Alien Queen herself.
25. In an interview with Moviefone Sigourney Weaver said that each time one of the actors was to “die” she would give them a bouquet of flowers before filming began. When it was time for Paul Reiser to be killed she gave him a handful of dead blossoms.
26. At the very end of the credits the sound of an Alien egg can be heard opening.
27. At the film’s premiere, Paul Reiser’s sister physically struck him because his character, Burke, was so contemptible.
28. James Cameron was not impressed by the way that Ray Lovejoy was editing the film, and was seriously considering firing him and having the film re-edited from scratch byMark Goldblatt, Cameron’s editor on The Terminator, and Peter Boita, who had already been brought on-board to edit the more dialogue driven scenes. Upon hearing that his job was in danger, Lovejoy grabbed all the footage from the film’s final battle, locked himself in an editing suite over the weekend, and presented the fully edited version of the battle to Cameron the following week. Cameron was sufficiently impressed to let Lovejoy stay on-board and supervise what was intended to be the final edit.
29. One of the alien eggs used in the film is now exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.
30. Having hired James Cameron to write the screenplay, 20th Century Fox then did the unthinkable when he left the production to direct The Terminator: they agreed to wait for Cameron to become available again and finish the screenplay. Cameron had only completed about 90 pages at that stage, but the studio had loved what he had written so far.
Go home tonight and watch Aliens to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of the greatest films ever made. I know I will!
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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