Leave it to James Cameron to bring an unparalleled level of ambition to any of his projects. Ridley Scott’s Alien was a major hit and ushered forth an iconic movie monster, and Cameron wanted to take that further in the sequel. Audiences had already seen the eggs, the parasitic facehugger, the baby burst forth from its host, and the adult version of that alien- an H.R. Giger-designed specimen of horror and lethal hunting prowess. Cameron honed in on the hundreds of eggs Kane (John Hurt) stumbled onto when exploring the derelict ship on LV-426, pondering the question of what could’ve laid those eggs and the concept of the Alien Queen, and the xenomorph hierarchal hive, was born. Fresh off the special effects-laden The Terminator, Cameron had a lot of ideas about approaching this sequel’s aliens, making for one of the toughest jobs of Stan Winston’s impressive career.
Cameron had a design in mind already for the Queen, bringing renderings to Winston for preliminary planning, which featured a massive 4-armed body and a crown-like head. Having worked with Winston on The Terminator, he wanted to move past the stop-motion animation and shoot the Alien Queen live and full- size, using live actors as much as possible. Not an easy task considering the monstrous size of the puppet they’d need to construct. Winston and Cameron went back and forth on design sketches until they decided on the final design.
Winston tasked artist Shane Mahan (Godzilla: King of the Monsters, The Shape of Water) with sculpting the massive Queen’s head, and John Rosengrant (Jurassic World, Avengers: Infinity War) sculpted the Queen’s body. Once sculpted, molded, cast in polyfoam, and painted, the massive 14-foot tall puppet was supported by rigs. The approach to puppeteering her was to hang the Queen from an overhead crane and put two stuntmen inside the torso to operate the puppet’s four arms. Because of the sheer size of the puppet, hydraulics were implemented for the rest of the Queen’s movements. It was up to special effects supervisor John Richardson (Starship Troopers, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and 2) to determine how to support the puppet on stage. The Alien Queen puppet required up to eight operators at once, working together to make her movement fluid and believable.
There was more creative freedom in the Alien Queen because this was her introduction into this franchise; she didn’t exist in Ridley Scott’s film. When it came to her warriors, audiences were already familiar with the Xenomorph at every life stage. It meant the design was already in place prior. It was something Winston wasn’t as thrilled about, as he was less enthused about the Xenomorph in the first film being a man in a suit. So, he and his team focused on their movements, making them seem less human and more, well, alien. They crafted roughly 15 suits and 10 articulated puppets, and employed various tactics to make their movement distract from the man-in-suit concept. Winston and crew even updated the tiny chestburster, giving the design subtle new little details- like tiny arms- and made it more animated.
Winston and his team delivered some of the decade’s best special effects work in Aliens, with pressures of time and the weight of Cameron’s epic ambition. And while Winston was also working as second unit director, no less. Aliens is a tour de force of fantastic creature work, and boasted no shortage of talent of special effects artists that would continue to deliver memorable special effects work in the years to come; names like Mahan, Rosengrant, Tom Woodruff Jr., Stephen Norrington, and so many more. The Alien Queen’s impressive size and scale serves as a perfect metaphor for the gigantic talent behind the film.
With horror industry heavy hitters already in place from the 1970s, the 1980s built upon that with the rise of brilliant minds in makeup and effects artists, as well as advances in technology. Artists like Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Alec Gillis, Tom Woodruff Jr., Tom Savini, Stan Winston, and countless other artists that delivered groundbreaking, mind-blowing practical effects that ushered in the pre-CGI Golden Age of Cinema. Which meant a glorious glut of creatures in horror. More than just a technical marvel, the creatures on display in ‘80s horror meant tangible texture that still holds up decades later. Grotesque slimy skin to brutal transformation sequences, there wasn’t anything the artists couldn’t create. It Came From the ‘80s is a series that will pay homage to the monstrous, deadly, and often slimy creatures that made the ‘80s such a fantastic decade in horror.
