How to Write Alien

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Make a movie with your film school buddy John Carpenter called Dark Star that uses a spray-painted beach ball as an alien. Inspire yourself to write a movie with a realistic looking alien.

2 – The Genre. Horror. The last movie you made was a spoof comedy, so just to change it up to make this one scary. Use artwork from H.R. Giger as inspiration for the alien and the sets.

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? You are stuck on a spaceship with a hungry alien. But how does the alien get on board the ship? Once you figure that out, the rest of this realistic alien movie will fill itself in. How about non-consensual-face-impregnation? Sorry for using that word, but that’s what happens. Now we can put a lot of sexual imagery in because a man gets impregnated after an unfortunate encounter with an alien face rapist. I mean face hugger. I mean non-consensual-face-impregnator. 

4 – The Fun Stuff. “I didn’t steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody.” – Dan O’Bannon. Go ahead and take ideas from old films, like The Thing From Another World (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), Planet of the Vampires (1965), Junkyard (1953), and Strange Relations (1960), among others. You can even pitch this as “Jaws in space”. You can tell your actors some of what’s going to happen in the chest bursting scene, but you’ll get a real reaction if they don’t know how much blood will be thrown on them during filming. Super fun.

5 – The Device. The alien has to be scary. Let’s give it acid for blood, so if you spill its acid-blood, it may burn through the walls of your spaceship and also kill you. Good defense mechanism. Let’s also give it double jaws, a mouth within a mouth. Like we said, this is Jaws in space, so it needs more jaws than that shark. Two Jaws. And of course the only way it can reproduce is by face hugging a trespassing human, growing inside that human, and then bursting out of the chest killing that human. Let’s make alien childbirth disgusting and scary to men.

6 – The Ripley. Write a badass survivor named Ripley. Make him smart. Make him always correct, so if you listened at all to Ripley’s advice there would be no movie. Make him a her. Wait what? Ripley is a lady now? Ew. Who made that decision? Oh, the director. You may write Ripley as a man in the original script but some guy named Ridley Scott will change the gender as a way to give this perfect character a flaw. Being a woman is the only thing wrong with Ripley. Being Sigourney Weaver is everything right with Ripley.   

7 – The Jokes. Kill the funniest characters off first, please. The crew is made up of working class types, so of course they have senses of humor. It gets less funny the more people are killed off, though. It’s only respectful. Also, put a cat in to ease some of the tension. People like cats. 

8 – The Title. While Star Beast sounds pretty scary, you use the word alien in the script a lot, and alien is both a noun and an adjective. Alien. Yeah. It will make for great opening credits. Also, even though the tagline “in space no one can hear you scream” looks great on a poster, this movie is made way after the silent era so we actually do need to hear all of the screaming.

9 – The Ending. Blow the alien out of the damned airlock, but only after Ripley blows up the huge spaceship Nostromo and takes off on the small escape ship.  Make sure the cat survives. Save the Cat, as Blake Snyder recommends in his screenwriting book. 

10 – The Heart. Alien is a movie about men being scared of getting pregnant by a realistic looking alien. It’s terrifying. And of course, the only human that survives is a woman. That’s big for 1979. 

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write Alien. Dan O’Bannon did from a story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shussett. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill add the character of Ash as an android.