To lead the next installment in the “Alien” franchise, Cailee Spaeny actually looked to other classic horror films to maintain a sense of terror on set.
Breakout “Priscilla” actress Spaeny told SFX magazine that while she did her best to convey being horrified during scenes for “Alien: Romulus,” she sometimes had to call in reinforcements to inspire fear.
“You do sort of run out of ideas. You’re like, ‘I don’t know how to be horrified again today in an interesting way. I’ve got, like, three facial expressions and you’ve seen all of them about 100 times now!’” Spaeny said. “Honestly, when you shoot a movie like this for months, and you’re doing so many horror beats, you do run out of ways to be horrified! The whole time I was making the movie, the second I got home I either had a sci-fi or a horror film playing in the background the whole time. Usually horror.”
Those films included “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” which itself inspired Ridley Scott’s original 1979 “Alien,” plus “The Blair Witch Project” — which just celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2024 — and “Near Dark,” among others.
“Alien: Romulus” is set 20 years after the events of the 1979 original film starring Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, one of the space colonizers facing off with a murderous alien while scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station. “Romulus” shot in Budapest in mid-2023.
“Romulus” is the seventh film in the “Alien” franchise and ninth overall if you include the two “Alien vs. Predator” crossover sci-fi action movies. “Alien” director Ridley Scott produces “Romulus” from writer/director Fede Álvarez, who co-wrote the script with Rodo Sayagues. The “Alien” franchise characters were created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett.
Director Álvarez previously told Variety that “Romulus” will not be “upsetting the canon” of the larger “Alien” franchise. The filmmaker revealed that “Aliens” director James Cameron helped on a “script level” with the new story, and that both Cameron and Scott saw final cuts of the feature.
And like Spaeny said, “Romulus” emphasizes the horror.
“I really wanted to go back to the sheer horror of the first film, and to take those elements of thriller that ‘Aliens’ has, and ‘Alien 3’ has as well,” Álvarez told Variety. “We went to crazy extents to keep it pure to the filmmaking techniques of the first movie. But if anybody’s worried, ‘Is it going to be too retro?’ Don’t worry, 2023 will pour through every window. There’s no way to stop the modernity of filmmaking. And from that combination of the best of the classics and the best of today, then you have something new.”
