See The Terrifying Facehugger That Weta Workshop Made For Alien Romulus And Never Sleep Again

The Alien franchise has some of the most iconic creature designs in all of film. From the Facehugger to the fully-formed Xenomorphs themselves, the monsters have gone through from being practical, to CGI, and now back to partially practical.

For Alien: Covenant, Odd Studios, and CreatureNFX provided the film’s makeup and animatronic creature effects, respectively. There were even actors wearing creature suits with animatronic heads used to portray the aliens on set, with CGI aliens used for elaborate shots. In the upcoming Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez brought on Lord of the Rings creature shop Weta Workshop for some fun practical effects magic.

On Twitter, Álvarez posted a quick video of a remote control Facehugger zooming around the set last summer.

Álvarez is pulling double duty as director and co-writer with Evil Dead collaborator Rodo Sayagues. The events of the film take place between Alien and Aliens, as there are 57 years between the two. It stars Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu, with some of the technical crew from Aliens returning.

The film was originally scheduled to be released on Hulu, like the Predator prequel Prey, but was switched to a theatrical release right before filming began.

Alien: Romulus is scheduled to land in theaters on August 16, 2024.