Alien’s First Facehugger Design Was Originally Bigger And Grosser

In the Alien_Theory TikTok video, H.R. Giger noted that Dan O’Bannon eventually asked him to scale down the size of the Facehugger xenomorph. At that point, the artist arrived at the look of the alien that fans would eventually see in Ridley Scott’s movie, which was a lot less graphic than his original concept art.

To begin with, Giger used the creature’s tentacles as finger-like mechanisms, so it grasps the victim’s head. «I think something with human hands is always very scary. So, I had fingers — the long fingers — as the most important part of the Facehugger,» the artist said. «Then I had its part, the little sexual, like, the tube that this beast has to put in the mouth.»

Of course, James Cameron, the king of sequels, took over the director’s reigns from Ridley Scott for his 1986 «Alien» follow-up, «Aliens.» Yet while «Aliens» mainly concentrated on much larger versions of the xenomorphs, the Facehugger was back and twice as terrifying than it was in the original film.