by James Cameron’s Aliens is full of staggering shots that simultaneously terrify audiences to their core, yet also make them think, ‘I wonder how they did that!’ One shot in particular, though, stands out above all others.
In a movie filled to breaking point with incredible action, horrifying creature effects, and enough gun-toting testosterone to fuel a spaceship for several light-years, the nerve-jangling Medical Lab sequence is one for the ages. It sees a sleeping Ellen Ripley and her surrogate daughter-figure, Newt, awoken from slumber to find they’ve been locked inside the room. That mightn’t be so bad, except for one problem: Weyland-Yutani corporate stooge Carter Burke has freed two spindly-legged Facehuggers in the room with them, and they’re soon running, jumping, and leaping at their prey with alarming speed and ferocity.
While conceiving Aliens, Cameron’s creative North Star was simple: how could he push what Ridley Scott had done on Alien further, at every given opportunity? Ultimately, he accomplished this by changing the genre track from horror to action, turning Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley into a stand-in mother/badass action hero, and ensuring the audience got more of everything, including an army of Xenomorphs, an alien queen, and more Facehuggers. Oh, and these Facehuggers were mobile.
In Alien, the Facehugger is a bee losing its sting; once it leaps from the egg to attach to John Hurt’s face for its stomach-churning business, it drops off and dies. Aside from the tail slowly coiling around Hurt’s throat, it didn’t move a whole lot, and Cameron’s issue was that “In the first film, the Facehugger…appears simply as an inert form”.
He wanted them to have “the physical capability, should it miss on that first leap, to run around on its eight legs and leap again” to match the pace of his vision for Aliens. To create two beasties capable of scuttling around the floor with speed and dexterity, in full view of the camera, he turned to the late special effects legend Stan Winston, and creature effects/makeup design maestros Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. Ultimately, Winston’s studio made six of the disgusting little critters, each of which performed a different task.
“We had two hero Facehuggers that had complete mobility of the fingers,” Winston revealed in the excellent making-of documentary, Superior Firepower. “They could crawl and reach. Complete action, but operated literally by six or seven puppeteers, just to get all those fingers doing everything they had to do.”
Without doubt, the scene’s greatest shot comes when the audience sees the previously stoic parasite run across the floor toward Ripley, before it leaps up onto a fallen table leg to propel itself at her face. This shot was achieved through a brilliant mix of puppeteering, performance, and reverse photography, and it holds up to this day every bit as well as anything in the recent Alien: Romulus movie or the FX show Alien: Earth.
“Probably the most complex of the pieces was the running Facehugger,” Gillis recalled, “and the mechanism for that was built by Rick Lazzarini”. His creation was a wonderful mix of state-of-the-art special effects work and lo-fi thinking. “It was like a pull toy,” he recalled with a faint smile, “where there were a couple of pulleys that a cable would run through inside the body, and another cable that, as you pulled the creature along, would make the legs go.” So, there you go, the skin-crawling disaster creature was actually something any toddler would get a kick out of playing with; you really shouldn’t meet your nightmare heroes.
To achieve the shot showing the sprightly Facehugger going through the motions to finally leap straight at the camera, it had to be deconstructed into three sections. The running section was achieved by the pull toy, which was then replaced by “a floppy stunt Facehugger” on the table leg, which was quickly yanked backwards. But when the footage was played in reverse, it gave the opposite effect, making it seem it had leapt forward. Finally, a third Facehugger was placed on the table leg and pulled toward the camera. When all three elements were cut together, it looked fucking seamless.
In Gillis’s opinion, Cameron was cut from a different cloth because he began his career as a model maker, art director, and special effects artist, and so such in-camera tricks didn’t faze him like it would many of his peers, lacking his breadth of experience. “Cameron dives in and says, ‘We can make this work, and here’s how’,” Gillis remembered fondly, before recounting a funny anecdote that is 100% pure, take-no-prisoners Cameron.
In the sequence, the sprinkler system in the Medical Lab is activated, meaning it is raining the whole time. When a few people pointed out to Cameron that audiences may notice the reverse photography shot because the rain will be travelling upwards, instead of cascading down, he wasn’t amused. He insisted that no audience would ever notice this because all they’d see is the incredible effect of the Facehuggers, and the texture of water hitting the floor.
“He was absolutely right,” chuckled Gillis. “He doesn’t often have a lot of patience for limited vision thinkers who come up and wag their finger at him, so we stopped doing that!”
