Excerpts from The Star Beast Featurette

Dan O'Bannon: I went away from Dark Star really wanting to do an alien that looked real. A couple years down the line, I decided to do Dark Star as a horror movie instead of a comedy. And that was the germ of Alien. I knew I wanted to do a scary movie on a space craft and a small number of astronauts. I had this creepy opening, in which astronauts awaken to find that their voyage has been interrupted. They were receiving a signal from this mysterious planetoid in alien language. They go down to investigate, they get stalled down there, their ship breaks down. The threat at the center of the story, whatever this monster or thing or danger was going to be was not clear at this point.

Ronald Shusett: Dan said somehow the monster has to get onboard this ship in a way that will amaze everybody. And so I wake up in the middle of the night, I said Dan I have an idea. The monster screws one of the people. He says what? What are you talking about? He jumps in his face, plants a tube down him, inserts a seed in him, and later it comes bursting out of his stomach. And Dan goes, my God, that's the most amazing thing I've ever heard. And we sat up all night and wrote. And in three weeks, we had 85% of the plot. The structure, we didn't write the screenplay right there of what you saw of Alien.

Ivor Powell: And whether they drew from others, they probably did, like everybody, they drew consciously or sub-consciously from things like Terror From Beyond Space, but they actually . . . the ingredient of this thing, they incubated it into a human being made the whole damn thing stand out.

Various images from The Visualists Featurette