The director of the upcoming Alien: Romulus film has taken some inspiration from 2014’s Alien Isolation video game, including a big hint before scary scenes.
It’s 10 years since Alien Isolation came out on consoles and PC and while it was a flawed experience it recreated the the look and feel of the first film in the series impressively well.
There have been multiple Alien video video games since then – most notably real-time tactics game Aliens: Dark Descent – and VR title Alien: Rogue Incursion is set to launch later this year on VR, plus fans of the horror sci-fi series are getting a new movie on August 16.
The director of the upcoming film, Alien: Romulus, has revealed that he’s taken some inspiration from the game, adding the emergency telephones in certain scenes – as an indication of when something scary is about to happen.
In Alien Isolation you use the telephones to save your progress, which, as with all save points, means that there’s a difficult bit coming up soon and, given the nature of Insolation, inevitably something scary.
‘The movie is set up in a way [that] every time something bad is about to happen, you will see a phone,’ said Álvarez.
‘In the game, every time you knew there’s a phone you’d go, ‘F***, I’m about to go into some bad set piece.’ It’s the same thing here.
‘You’ll see they’re planted strategically throughout the film. When you see the phone, it’s like: brace for impact,’ he says.
Álvarez also says that Alien Isolation made him understand how the series can still be scary nowadays, 45 years after the original film.
‘Alien Isolation was kind of what made me see that Alien could truly be terrifying and done well [today],’ he says.
‘I played it a few years after it came out. Don’t Breathe was coming out. Or was I waiting for Don’t Breathe to come out? And I was playing the game.
‘That’s why, at the time, I was like, ‘F***, if I could do anything, I would love to do Alien and scare the audience again with that creature and those environments.’ I was playing, and realising how terrifying Alien could be if you take it back to that tone.’
Tone and the emergency phone might be the only things inspired by Alien Isolation though, as while both the video game and Alien: Romulus are set between the first and second films there are no direct story connections.
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