There was a time when nothing in cinema was more frightening than a xenomorph. HR Giger’s nightmarish biomechanical hellspawn, dripping with fluids and Freudian discharge, was the gruesome, undisputed apex predator of movie monsters. It burst from your chest; it dissolved your face with acid; it splintered your ribcage like a piñata filled with blood and screams. It was unstoppable, unknowable, the kind of thing you’d expect to find at the bottom of your dishwasher after leaving it closed for 36 centuries.
The early films, 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens, rarely steered too far away from the sense that these infernal creatures were the worst thing you could possibly encounter in the universe. Later on, in Ridley Scott’s ultimately rather pointless prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the godlike Engineers and David the Android grasped the mantle of cosmic bogeyman with their inexplicably versatile vats of black goo – a substance that could apparently do everything from melt your DNA to grout your bathroom tiles. But this always felt like a temporary sleight of hand, the narrative equivalent of distracting the audience with a smoke bomb while the real villain sneaks in via the ventilation shafts.
The fascinating thing about Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth (other than the fact it has completely ditched any alignment with those more recent films) is that it appears to have decided pretty early on that there’s a new boss villain in town, one that’s not quite so icky but infinitely more chilling: mankind.
Hawley’s show takes place in a world in which Earth itself – not the cosmos – has become the haunted house. Corporations don’t just run the economy, they own biology, technology, even consciousness. Pre-teen human minds are uploaded into artificial bodies called hybrids, augmented humans known as cyborgs jostle with androids (or “synths”) for freakish dominance of the food chain, cities are essentially company towns the size of continents, and democracy has gone the way of floppy disks. Thought LV-426 was a pant-wettingly apocalyptic space rock filled with boredom and death-spores? Wait until you see the motherland! For long-term fans of Alien, there’s always been a sense that space was the place where nobody could ever hear you scream – but it turns out that was probably because the shrieking, soul-flaying noise from Earth’s ghastly 22nd-century boardrooms was drowning everything else out.
