The idea of isolation is prevalent through the Alien series. In space, no one can hear you scream, often because there’s nobody left to hear you scream. That theme also extends to the idea of what life awaits for us beyond the stars – besides the odd mention of one of two other species and, of course, the xenomorphs themselves, it has long seemed like humans are mostly alone in the Alien universe. But FX’s Alien: Earth is here to put an ‘S’ on the end of Alien again, not by James Cameron’s method of throwing multiple xenomorphs at us, but by introducing an array of new species to the franchise.

Such new creatures were born from the mind of showrunner and lead writer Noah Hawley, who aimed to evoke plenty of new, grotesque feelings with each one. But while they are all very different from the classic xenomorph, it turns out that they all grew from the same idea: the horror of watching the unknown unfold.

“I think the question is really the discovery process, right?” says Hawley. “Because the xenomorph is not one creature, it’s four. It starts as an egg, and then there’s the iconic facehugger, which if that was [the main] creature would be terrifying and disturbing. And then the idea that it’s laid a different embryo inside of you, and that bursts. So it’s like it’s a cumulative effect. When you finally get to this 10 foot tall monster and it opens its mouth and there’s a second mouth, and you’re like, what the crap is this stuff? It’s like it just gets worse and worse.

“So those are the questions. How does it breed? How do they reproduce? What do they eat? That’s the voyage of discovery I got to go on [when creating the new species]. To say ‘All right, how much worse can we make it in its next iteration?’ Understanding that these creatures don’t have to maintain the form that they originate in, it gives you a lot of leeway.”

Many of the new creatures feel distinctly more “animal” or “insectoid” than the more traditionally monstrous xenomorph. The “ticks”, for instance, are clearly inspired by the ticks of our own planet… it’s just that these ones turn into engorged blood bags as they drain a human of their entire hemoglobin supply. It was from recognisable roots, then, that Hawley developed his little legion of horrors.

“What are the elements of genetic revulsion that we feel about parasites?” Hawley asked himself. “How do these creatures fit thematically into the show? What am I using them for? What might I use them for in the future? And from that, once they were characters in a script, then I was able to sit down with [visual effects team] Weta Workshop and start to design them.”

Hawley notes that the creatures all hail from different worlds, collected by a Weyland-Yutani vessel conducting something of an intergalactic bug hunt. By the events of the show, that ship has crash landed in the domain of Prodigy, a rival corporation, whose staff are discovering these beasties for the first time. Importantly, the different origin points of these aliens meant they were disconnected to the xenomorphs, so the design team could pursue very different aesthetics. Thus far, the Alien universe has thrived on its gothic bio-mechanical visuals, designed back in the 1970s by H.R. Giger, largely due to the fact that the series has exclusively focused on the xenomorphs themselves. But in Alien: Earth, each species has a unique appearance – and there’s not even a hint of ribbed piping in sight.

“In expanding the show past Weyland-Yutani into the Prodigy world, we’ve already expanded the aesthetic of Alien,” says Hawley. He admits that he never even thought of making Giger-esque versions of each new species. They were always meant to be distinctly different beings. “I just tended to think of what their functionality was,” he explains.

Of all of the show’s new creatures, the “eye octopus” is almost certainly destined to become a fan favourite. Little more than a gelatinous eyeball mounted atop a wriggling mass of gory tentacles, this tiny terror is able to insert itself into a vacated eye socket and control its victim like a meat puppet. Such a simple concept is the basis for some of Alien: Earth’s most striking and frightening scenes, which were created by answering several design questions.

“How does it move? How does it get the eyeball out of there? How does it get in there? How do the pupils work?” asks Hawley. “All of it. And so it’s fun to think of it conceptually first.”

Perhaps Alien’s greatest weapon when it comes to frightening us is the fact that the xenomorph’s modus operandi is deeply invasive. The facehuggers forcibly impregnate people, and the fully-grown drones penetrate skulls with their thrusting second jaw. So what phobia does the eye octopus prey upon?

“We have this fear of our bodily autonomy,” explains Hawley. “You talked about the literal reproductive nature of what the facehugger does in a way that feels super invasive to our face. And so I just moved up a hole to the eye.

“[It’s] the idea that this creature of this limited size could remove our eye, which is a horrifying visual and thought, and then plug itself into any animal’s nervous system and take control of them. Now you’ve lost all control of your body. And it is clearly a very intelligent creature. And so once it takes you over, what is its agenda?”

That fear of the unknown is something that Hawley has been able to capitalise on. He notes that, after four films, two prequels, and an interquel, people know what to expect of the xenomorph. They exist to reproduce, and that involves incapacitating people and using them as a host to grow more aliens. With the eye, audiences have no idea what each new stage entails. “It gets into your brain. Why? What does it want to accomplish?”

The brilliance of the eye occasionally threatens to overshadow the actual Alien in Alien: Earth, but ultimately there’s nothing that compares to cinema’s perfect organism. The journey to the small screen has done nothing to change that, even if this version of the xenomorph isn’t quite the one you’ve seen before. Every director has their own vision for this creature, so it’s seen many subtle changes across the years – see the head ridges of Cameron’s “warrior” variants, or David Fincher’s dog-like “runners”. For Alien: Earth, Hawley had a few changes of his own to make, as well as rules to follow.

“I knew that I had to protect the silhouette,” he says. That much is clear from any promotional shot. This was partly achieved by returning to the techniques used by Ridley Scott for the 1979 original: putting a man in a rubber suit. But the moment you use an actor – an individual – changes naturally occur.

“My suit performer was not seven and a half feet tall,” Hawley reveals, an only slightly exaggerated nod to Bolaji Badejo, the incredibly tall Nigerian actor who played the xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s original film. “I had a six-foot-four suit performer, which means my creature was shorter. He had a more muscular body, so a lot of the suit changes based on who the performer is.”

Hawley notes that Fede Álvarez, director of last year’s Alien: Romulus, opted to use animatronics to make his xenomorphs as skinny as possible. Rather than size, Hawley was more interested in locomotion.

“For me, the creature works best when we think of it as more of a quadruped,” he explains. “So you have some shifts – the more that you’re down on all fours, the more the head is back, the shorter the smoke stacks have to be on the back.”

Making the xenomorph work as a quadruped required conducting a deep study of the motions performed by four-legged creatures. “None of us are fast running around on all fours, so you need to help a suit performer on that level,” says Hawley. He also notes that such work is important to ensure the longevity of the creature. “I’m going to be working with these things for many years, I hope,” he adds, suggesting that Alien: Earth has ambitions to be more than a one-and-done limited series.

Xenomorph Types Seen in the Alien Movie Franchise