I have a confession to make. While there are few things I find as devilishly delightful as a good scary movie, I am also a coward.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that makes watching horror movies an odd experience for me. I love the ecstasy of a good scare but dread the necessary agony of mounting tension and thrills.
For me, taking a trip to watch something like Longlegs, MaXXXine, or even sci-fi movies like A Quiet Place: Day One is a bit like solving the Lament Configuration; I know I’m about to torture myself, but at the back of my mind, I want the pleasure of that pain.
So imagine my horror (and furtive delight) when I had to go to the Alien: Romulus premiere alone. I was right to be scared. Romulus might be a cover version of other (better) Alien movies, but there’s a nasty and weird embryo at the film’s dark heart that bursts out after the first hour and quickly matures into something tremendously exciting.
In space, no one can hear you scream…
However, it wasn’t the Xenomorph that left an impression on me (I don’t think they’ve been scary since James Cameron revealed their secret weakness to bullets). It was a far more unsettling creature that squelched on-screen during Romulus’s final moments and inspired that evening’s nightmares.
[Warning containment breach: unidentified spoilers are loose in this article]
The Offspring, an unholy fusion of Engineer, Xenomorph, and human, is one of the most unsettling monsters I’ve ever seen on the silver screen. This albino abomination looks like the end result of a one-night stand between the Slender Man and a Xenomorph after things got wild at the annual movie monster gathering.
It’s genuinely hideous, and whenever it was onscreen, I was repulsed. I’ve not seen a creature quite as effective since Pennywise (we can argue about the quality of the IT movies, but I won’t hear a word against Bill Skargsgard’s iconic clown), and it triggered me in a way I really wasn’t expecting.
It’s a healthy baby… thing!
A lot of that uneasiness came not from the creature’s uncanny appearance – although if you were to place it in the Uncanny Valley, it would be around the same depth as the Marianas Trench – but from what this creature represented, that so horrified me.
Like the titular aliens, the Offspring plays into our fears around sexual violence and childbirth. Unlike the Xenomorph, though, which makes the metaphorically monstrous into something more abstract and… alien (for lack of a better word), the Offspring looks far more human… or what a human might look like if Hieronymus Bosch took a crack at it.
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It’s a haunting reminder that real-life violence isn’t perpetrated by fanged creatures with acidic blood but by people who look like you and me. And while some will argue deconstructing Scott’s original metaphor isn’t as clever as I think, I found it tremendously effective.
Perhaps it played into my anxiety around parenthood – the Offspring tears itself out of a woman’s womb like some sci-fi version of the antichrist – but the way the creature sought out its mother so soon after being born and its need to feed on her gave me what a doctor would call the heebie-jeebies.
The idea of taking something that’s arguably so pure – the act of feeding one’s child – and making it into something literally dripping in the potential for violence and playing up the discomfort some people feel about maternal intimacy was a masterstroke. While we don’t see the Offspring literally breastfeed (I sensed the firm hand of a cautious editor in the climactic moments of the Romulus ending), it’s clear that’s what director Fede Alvarez was going for.
A cautionary tale
More than that, the Offspring represents fears about the future of our species. Prometheus fans will remember Weyland started this entire endeavor because he feared humanity’s ultimate fate (and for his own life) in the face of a dangerous galaxy. It’s a valid concern and one that’s very apt considering the interesting period of human history we’re living through.
The creation of the Offspring, then, represents how our attempts to try and fight the future may be our own undoing. It’s a bastardization of Weyland’s dream of immortality. The Offspring may be the ultimate survivor, a perfect organism, as we’re constantly reminded, yet it was born in blood to the sound of screams.
The Offspring exists to do nothing but kill and survive. That’s not humanity; it’s our bestial dark urges made flesh. No, humanity is the bond that keeps our heroes going back for each other; it’s the ability to sacrifice oneself for the hope of a better tomorrow, the dream that one day we’ll see the sun together. The Offspring has none of that; it’s simply monstrous.
Ultimately, the Offspring serves as a reminder that true horror doesn’t come from the stars or weird alien egg sacks but from within us, lurking just beneath the rib cage. So, as I left the theater, trembling ever so slightly, the image of this terrible newborn burned into my brain. I knew I’d be leaving the bedroom light on that night, a mundane beacon to Alien: Romulus’s terrible delights.
If you’ve grown bored of me admiring this particular abomination, I don’t blame you. Why not take a break from the gooiest franchise by checking out our lists of the best superhero movies and best action movies (oh, wait, no, the Xenomorphs are on that one… oops).
