June the 12th, 1987 saw the first introduction to the cinematic screen of one of the most memorable and well known Movie Monsters to date — El Diablo Cazador de Hombres: the Predator. Since then, the species of Intergalactic Hunters has appeared in a total of 5 films, with the most recent chapter, Predators, released in 2010. Divided in 6 parts spanning through all of them (including the original Steve Johnson Monster), the Predator Metamorphosis Essay analyzes the process which brought each of the incarnations of the character to life.

Please note that each part has not yet been finished. With the release of each article, the links below will be updated.

Prologue: Hunter

Part 1: Predator [COMING SOON]

Part 2: Predator 2 [COMING SOON]

Part 3: Alien Vs. Predator [COMING SOON]

Part 4: Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem [COMING SOON]

Part 5: Predators [COMING SOON]

Last Updated: 08/03/2013

Peter Benchley’s Creature is a miniseries based on Peter Benchley’s White Shark — published in 1994. The novel was subsequently re-released with the same title as a tie-in with the film. The producer of the film, Richard Lewis, was adamant about the title change. He explained to Fangoria: “I hated the title White Shark. I just felt it was misleading — it isn’t a shark, it’s an amphibious creature. So I respectfully disagreed with Peter’s publisher when I optioned the material and they wanted to sell it as White Shark. I think Peter Benchley’s Creature is a more accurate description of what it is.”

The immediately precedent adaptation of a Benchley novel — The Beast, always made for the television market — was critically panned, but the producer felt that in this case there was more potential for a good film. He was also intrigued by the idea of a hybrid monster that would not be dangerous just in water — but could continue stalking its victims on land. Lewis explained: “my wife grew up in Australia, and she said that the first time she heard a shark horn on the beach, she grabbed her bag and ran up the beach and across the parking lot, until she realized, ‘wait a minute, this thing can’t come out of the water!’ That stuck in my head. And Peter Benchley came up with a tag line for this, having done Jaws. You know, with Jaws 2 it was ‘just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…’. This is ‘now… you’re not safe anywhere.’ The concept of an amphibious creature that comes out of the water onto land and is capable of being bipedal is pretty scary.”

In the novel, the humanoid Shark monster, which also included Dolphin DNA in it, was brought to life by an insane nazist scientist. This and some other aspects of the creature’s origin and story were modified. Lewis commented on the changes and ideas of the film: “the core story’s the same, but what I really tried to thread through it was a more credible underpinning to science. I was a biology major at Berkeley, so — a little knowledge is a dangerous thing — but I certainly called people that I knew in various departments there to talk about how early genetic engineering would work. Could you take varied species and cross-fertilize them, so to speak? And actually more interesting was an expression that was pounded into me in my biology classes, which is ‘Ontogony recapitulates biologony’. A lot of big words, but what it means simply is that during the embryonic growth in mammals, the organism goes through every stage of evolution of that organism in the nine-month birthing process. So what I was positing is, what if you actually took a human and stopped the process at a certain point? If, at the development of three months in the embryo, you burned out some genetic material so the brain wouldn’t progress the same [way], but the organism is allowed to continue growing to term?”

Lewis refers to an actual biological hypothesis, labeled as the Recapitulation theory. Following this line of thought, in the development process from embryo to fully formed individual, an animal would go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of its more or less remote ancestors. As of today, the recapitulation theory is not anymore considered potentially correct — although there effectively is a period in the development process of an embryo where it its morphology is influenced by its phylogenetic position. Lewis continues: “That is something that wasn’t in Peter’s book, but I thought it was a fascinating concept. It’s a fun area to play with: do we really have gills? Do we really have a tail? Do we really have fins? It’s a half-step fantasy, but it’s really not more of a half-step than Jurassic Park. So that was the science I wanted to imbue into the story that I don’t think Peter had the opportunity to develop. I discussed it with him before we went forward, and he said, ‘wow, that’s a lot better than what I have!’ He’s a fairly self-effacing guy.”

Veteran Monster Makers Stan Winston Studios was hired to bring the Shark-oid creature to life. Winston had precedently collaborated with the producers with the production of A Gnome named Gnorm — which he directed. He was also an enthusiast of Peter Benchley’s work; he himself even considered directing at one point, according to Lewis: “he was circling around directing this at one point,” he said, “and then he was a little bit intimidated: it’s a fairly big undertaking, and he’s got his deal at DreamWorks. But he said, ‘Richard, if you’re gonna do an amphibious movie, I have to do it.’ And I said, ‘oh, I can’t afford you; I can’t afford the scope of a T.Rex.’ And he said, ‘well, we’ll work it out.’ And he was true to his word, because his team loves to do this, they didn’t want someone to come and do a really shitty job of it.” Lewis also felt for the special effects team, due to the budget and time restraints they were going to challenge: “I think this was hard for him and his guys,” he continued, “because we do movies — certainly the big-scope movies — in around 100 days, and this was a 50-day schedule, so everybody had to tighten up a little bit.”

Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery designed the Creature, with total freedom over its actual appearence — obviously under input from the director Stuart Gillard and producer Richard Lewis. The final design displays quite humanoid traits, such as the shoulders. Winston Studios did not want to bring to the screen a simple design. The special effects artist said: “what you don’t want to end up with is a ‘guppy man,’ — you don’t want it to be a fish with legs. So to come up with a design that balances out and looks right — that obviously has elements of shark and elements of humanity in it — is a difficult concept to attack. But we did so with fervor, and Crash did a beautiful job of conceptualizing the character.”

Lewis also commented on the design: “it’s not a shark that’s walking on land. it really has very little to do with a shark. We wanted to try to fool the audience into thinking it could be in the beginning, but then it becomes quite clear that it isn’t. it’s bipedal, but it’s primordial, and Stan doesn’t pull any punches.” Gillard added: “You know, when you hear the premise about a shark that walks on land, you go, ‘whoa, man, what’s this gonna look like?’ And that’s why I didn’t come aboard until I knew Stan Winston was involved. Given the history I have with the production company, I knew we’d have quality going in, but with the creature being the star, I really wanted to make sure that it was scary and not laughable, and I knew that with Stan we’d have something good.”

Once the final design was actually selected, the full-size sculpture of the Creature was undertaken by Nick Marra and William Basso. The hands were sculpted by Rob Ramsdell, who was also responsible for the final paint scheme of the Monster’s skin. The Creature was then fabricated by a crew headed by Beth Hathaway. Richard Landon and Jon Dawe, among others, were instead in charge for the mechanical features of the animatronic head. Brian Steele performed inside the Monster suit, in what was one of his first roles as a suit performer (the first being The Relic a year before).

On set, Crash McCreery aids Brian Steele as the Monster.

The head of the Creature was puppeteered both via radio-control servomechanisms and the performer’s actual head. Quite obviously, the mechanisms had to be waterproof — for filming sequences where the Monster would rise from the waters of the ocean. Its dorsal fin was cable-operated and actually ‘collapsible’, meaning it could go into ‘idle’ position when not in use — much like a frill. Rough leg extensions were used for the few shots where the Creature is seen fully.

The swimming stage of the Creature, still devoid of arms and legs, was obtained from the mould of the land Creature sculpture — which was appropriately reassembled. On the side of the ‘underwater’ Creature, growing arms on the underside are already visible, as well as bulges on the side suggesting legs. The arms would in fact grow in the area under the pectoral fins, which are still visible in the land stage of the Monster. The animatronic featured rough mechanisms for the scenes featuring this underwater stage.

The ‘underwater’ creature. Notice the growing arms resting on the underside of the Monster, and bulges from which the legs will sprout out.

For the Creature’s gruesome demise, a combination of computer generated imagery applied on the suit and practical guts and fluids were used.

For more images of Peter Benchley’s Creature, visit the Monster Gallery.

“As the flashlight beam hits it, MBWUN roars and looks up. Now we see it clearly for the first time. The monster is MASSIVE, putrid, rank. Slit reptilian green eyes are rimmed in red. A ridge of stiff black hair rises on the creature’s buffalo-like humped back. The withers are muscled and covered with plates. A forked TONGUE licks out as purple lips draw back exposing razor sharp teeth. The claws raise up to fend off the light.” This is how the reveal of the Kothoga plays out in Amy Holden Jones’ The Relic script draft, written in 1995. Since the beginning, the description of the Mbwun for the film adaptation of The Relic was vague — and did not follow closely the design described in the novel. The creature originally retained its original name, which means ‘He who walks on all fours’. It was later renamed to ‘Kothoga’ (for reasons currently unknown), which in the novel is the name of the tribe that worships Mbwun. The original Monster, as conceived by the authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, could be described shortly as a chimaera: a hybrid of a primate and a reptile, with “extreme posterior-anterior dimorphism”, and its skin covered in pelt and fur, as well as scales and ostheoderms. Its key characteristics were the three fingered hands with “tripiramidal claws”, and its glowing red eyes that pierced the darkness of the Museum alleys — encased in a ‘flattened’, somehow primate-esque head. The creature, due to its nocturnal nature, had poor eyesight and relied on its advanced sense of smell to hunt; it was also described as having a heavy breathing sound, which was compared to a ‘horse with cold’. This aspect was one of the few to be maintained in the film adaptation.

“Pendergast hesitated a moment before answering. ‘I’ve got a better view of it this time. It’s big, it’s massive. Wait, it’s turning this way… Good Lord it’s a horrible sight, its flattened face, small red eyes, thin fur on the upper body. Just like the figurine.’”
-Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, The Relic

Stan Winston Studios brought the hypothalamus-consuming beast of the film adaptation of The Relic to life. The special effects house was hired even before director Peter Hyams was attached to the project; due to that reason, the design process began simply from taking the basic concept from the novel of an amalgam of different animal species, without specifically adhering to the original description. The design evolved on its own with considerable artistic freedom, save for its size. Stan Winston told Cinefex: “we knew that the creature would be a genetic mixup – part human, part mammal, part reptile. So there was a certain design freedom there. But there was no freedom in regards to the character’s size. It was important storywise that he be enormous – at least seven feet tall, with an equally large body mass. He had to be that big in order to rip people’s heads off and eat their brains – which I thought was a wonderful character element. A character that ripped heads off and ate brains was definitely something I want to be a part of developing.”

Early Kothoga concept art by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery.

The Kothoga was designed by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery.  In its initial incarnations, the artist wanted to infuse the creature with both feline and human aspects. He commented: “we knew Kothoga should be fierce and ruthless, but also a very intelligent creature. I used a lion as the foundation of Kothoga’s design because I believe lions to be more than just voracious eating machines. A lion is a bright, cunning animal, as opposed to, say, a great white shark.” Other details were taken from reference images of horses and alligators. The feline outline was kept for the final design, but many other aspects were progressively discarded once Hyams was attached to the project. By the time he arrived, several different conceptual ideas were ready on paper. The initial designs were striving for a more elegant outline, but Hyams wanted another kind of appearence for the character; ultimately, he decided that the Kothoga should be a creature of absolutely horrific and unpleasant appearence. He said: “Every choice they presented was terrific and seductive – but some of them were almost too beautiful. If you’re stuck in a room with a tiger, you’re going to be scared because chances are you’re going to die; but you won’t be able to help but notice that the tiger is beautiful. He may be lethal, but he’s also gorgeous. I told Stan and Crash that Kothoga couldn’t be like that. I thought Kothoga should be so horrible to look at that if you were stuck in a room with him, at some point you would think, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, just kill me and get it over with.”

Applying this fundamental concept, McCreery designed the Kothoga’s head after what he personally found among the most frightening and horrifying animals — spiders. He told Cinefex: “to me, spiders are the most repulsive creatures in the world. So I took the basic shape of a spider and used that for the outline of Kothoga’s head. The big spider abdomen is the upper half of his head; the spider legs are the mandibles that come out of his jaws; and, like a spider, Kothoga’s eyes have no pupils. The spider shape of the head is subliminal — but when an image reminds you of something that really repels you, you can’t help but be affected by that image in some way, regardless of whether you’re aware of it or not.”

Kothoga head concept by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery. The final design added a more prominent mane on the dorsal side of the neck. Notice the subtle Spider silhouette ‘encased’ in the head.

The final Kothoga design was over 15 feet long, for 6 feet of height. Its mouth was fitted with 40 teeth of varying sizes, from the smallest ones to the skull-piercing fangs, and a long, forked tongue. A mane ran down the creature’s dorsal region of the torso and lumbar section — the only remaining part of the more prominent fur covering of the original Mbwun. Its scales and ostheoderms, as well as its overall bodily color scheme, were based on alligators and crocodiles — whereas the head presented warmer mammalian tones. In the midst of production, the eyes were also given pupils. “I remember the director, Peter Hyams, was discussing the look of the eyes,” said Jason Barnett, part of the crew. “I cringed when he grabbed a Sharpie marker and began drawing pupils onto the animatronic head. Stan just rolled with it.” The sharpie marks were later removed by the crewmembers, and the eyes were appropriately repainted.

To justify the creature’s ability to climb on walls, the Kothoga was also gifted with enormous claws; McCreery said: “the story demanded that Kothoga climb a wall in the museum. At first, everyone was thinking suction cups on the feet, but I didn’t think that would look very cool.” McCreery and effects supervisor Christopher Swift gave the creature what they labeled as ‘inverted Raptor toes’, sickle-shaped claws on the external toes of the feet. Ironically enough, in the final film the Kothoga would climb the wall by simply pressing its feet on it — suggesting gecko-like footpads. In the film — following the novel — Hemidactylus turcicus (the mediterranean House Gecko) is found among the DNA sources of the plant virus. In addition to that, however, animals such as a Tiger and a Stag Beetle are also shown. As usual for Winston Studios, the most important aspect of bringing the creature to the screen was to make it a believable and realistic creature. Winston said: “it was part of our job to take all of these obscure elements and put them together so that they made sense. We had to take all the diverse details of hair, skin, claws and mandibles — details that each had a life and character of its own — and bring them together so that it all looked natural. A creature should always look as if the Man Upstairs had something to do with it, and Kothoga has that quality. He doesn’t look like a mutation.”

Concept art of the final creature in sideview, by Crash McCreery.

A relatively restricted pre-production and production time prevented Winston Studios from building a fully mechanized animatronic or puppet rig. Ultimately, the special effects artists chose to bring the Kothoga to the screen as a performer inside a suit. Winston said: “not only did Kothoga have to make a lot of extreme moves – he also had to act. Because of that and our rather short preproduction schedule — under five months, which is not much for a creature like this — we decided to go with a man-in-a-suit design. That way, the movement of the creature could be motivated by an actor, while only the articulation of the head and face would have to be created through robotics.”

A fundamental issue that became apparent, almost immediately, when the crew started engineering the structure of the suit, was that the Kothoga was not designed to accomodate a suit performer inside of it — both for its proportions and its sheer size. In fact, Peter Hyams found it imperative to have an “advanced” design that would not even resemble a man in a suit. A body cast of performer Vincent Hammond was used as the base for the full-scale sculpture. A particularly complex cast, as it had to be done whilst Hammond was fitted with the leg and arm extensions; his head was cast separately. The fiberglass cast was then sectioned and used as the under structure of the sculptures of the Kothoga’s various body parts, which were re-assembled and given final details. Time costraints forced the sculptors to use water-based clay, as opposed to oil-based clay; this proved to be an issue, because the water-based clay “always has to be covered and kept wet,” Swift said. “Otherwise it dries, cracks and, unlike oil-based clays, shrinks.” Wire was applied to the fiberglass molds in order for the clay to adhere more consistently. The Kothoga, in all of its body parts, was sculpted by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery, Christopher Swift, Jackie Gonzales and David Monzingo.

The Kothoga in early stages of sculpting.

Once the sculpture was finished, it was de-assembled again and moulded in foam latex, to create the Monster’s scaly hide. Yak hair was punched onto the back portion, as well as the head and mandible parts. Fangs and mandibles were casted separately in rigid foam, and then skinned in polyurethane resin. A total of 3 Kothoga suits — nicknamed ‘Bob’ on set — were built: 2 hero suits, as well as a stunt suit. The latter was used in certain shots of the underwater sequences and for when the Kothoga is set on fire in the climax of the film. Both arms and legs featured mechanical extensions, engineered by mechanical designer Kirk Skodis. The Kothoga’s massive head and neck, with full motion of all its components, included animatronic mechanisms devised by mechanical designers Rich Haugen and Al Sousa. The abdomen could inflate and deflate through a bladder system to simulate breathing. Haugen scanned McCreery’s final drawing of the creature into a CAD system, and reduced the scan to a simple outline; from there, three-quarters of an inch were calculated as the thickness of the suit skin, and the position of the actor’s head in relation to the creature’s body was estabilished — a foot below the Kothoga’s withers. This outline was used as the template for the mechanical understructure of the suit.

The Kothoga’s head — before the mandible teeth and mane are attached.

Particular focus was given to the motion of the head and neck of the Kothoga. Haugen commented on the process, saying that “Kothoga had a massive neck, like a buffalo — so I knew that he wouldn’t be whipping his head around with great speed. However, he did have to be able to look behind himself and to raise his head up to stare down at his victims, the way a bear does when it’s up on its hind legs.” Haugen designed the mechanical structure of this section of the creature, which featured servo-powered mechanisms that enabled a wide array of movements. Haugen continues: “the trickiest part of the mechanical design was getting the neck to move all the way up or all the way down without its mechanisms hitting the actor in the head.” In order to make the structure lighter for the performer to support, it was built in aluminium — restricting the weight to 45 pounds. Three puppeteers operated the head, and two maneuvered the tail, which was manually driven by wire pulls. The arm extensions were cable-driven; two puppeteers were needed to control the movement of the Kothoga’s fingers.

All three suits were wire-rigged in order to portray the feline leaps of the Kothoga. Due to the mostly quadrupedal position of the creature — and consequently, of the suit performer — a standard ‘flying’ harness could not be used. A solution was found, however, as explained by Swift: “ultimately, we came up with a system that was based on a flight jacket. It incorporated a customized set of pants that were connected to a harness with straps. A metal plate mounted to the back of the jacket held an interlocking bolt system for securing the actor to the suit.” The Kothoga was performed by Hammond and known creature actor Brian Steele, in what was his first performance as a creature actor. John Alexander, an animal behaviorist, was hired as a consultant for the Kothoga’s movements;  the actors spent a total of 3 months learning how to perform with the arm and leg extensions, as well as creating a beast-like vibe in their movements. The suit was extremely complex to wear and perform in. In order for the actor to fit inside, the suit was first hung in semi-horizontal position; the actor would have to climb inside, through the abdomen area, and get set into position. The suit would then be lowered on the actor’s back, until the plate on the jacket and the plate inside the suit were effectively aligned. A hatch in the back of the suit would then be opened, with crewmembers aiding the performer in sliding the suit bolt into the jacket lock. Arms and legs were finally attached to the structure. Due to the heavy shooting schedules, the actors were needed to stay inside the suits for many hours; fans were installed inside, and fresh air was constantly piped inside the structure via a third lung, “kind of like the setup of a diving suit,” Haugen said. Swift commented in The Winston Effect the sheer complexity of achieving the suit: “It was very difficult to make this wonderful design Crash had come up with work as a real character. It was very hard to configure a human being into a suit that in no way accomodated sticking a human being inside of it.”

The Kothoga’s hide in the process of painting.

Once on set, the Kothoga expectedly proved to be complex to shoot, and particularly difficult for the suit performers. Swift said in The Winston Effect: “it was really difficult for the performers. They were in a bad position, putting all their weight on arm extensions and leg extensions, which was very uncomfortable. To deal with it, Vincent would start reciting from The Prophet when he was in there — which sounded pretty funny coming from this horrible monster!”. The experience was rather difficult for the actors, due to the fact the Kothoga, as a design, was detached from a human shape, save for its vaguely humanoid shoulders — which in turn were far wider than any human’s. “I felt bad when the guys came back from the set talking about how miserable it was to work with this character,” McCreery admitted in The Winston Effect, “I had tried to give Peter Hyams something very different; but, ultimately, I designed something without considering the actor inside it. It was a real lesson in how careful I had to be when I was executing a design. If you’re telling people to follow a drawing, that drawing had better be right, and it had better work mechanically and practically. I learned a lot on The Relic — I just wish I’d learned it without people suffering!”

Certain scenes thought to be difficult were ultimately easier to shoot than those thought to be relatively simple. Winston explained to Cinefex: “things you think are going to be easy often end up being very difficult, and things you think are going to be impossible often turn out to be easy. In The Relic, there was a shot near the climax of the picture in which Kothoga has Penelope Ann Miller pinned up against a dumbwaiter — a fairly simple performance moment that only involved the head. But because of all the metal work around that part of the set, we had a horrible time with radio interference, and that created problems for the radio-control head. So this seemingly simple performance became difficult. On the other hand, shots I thought would be nearly impossible we got on the first take.” For certain scenes, components of the hero suits — such as the head, or the right arm — were used singlehandledly.

“There was a moment during shooting when Kothoga was supposed to walk past an enormous museum display with zebras and lions on it. The creature was just standing there by the diorama, waiting to perform; and, to me, he looked as if he belonged there as much as any other animal.”
-Stan Winston, Cinefex #69

Hyams generally preferred working with the practical Kothoga on set; he said: “from a directing point of view, it is always preferable to work live, with something right there on the set. In order to get to know Kothoga, I had to have him there on the set. I could physically walk around him, get right up next to him, stroke him, stare at him, change the light on him — the way I would with anything else I was shooting.” Despite this fact, Hyams knew from the very beginning that the Kothoga suit would be unable to perform certain agile movements from the script — including the already-mentioned sequence where the creature climbs a wall, and scenes where the Monster runs rampant. Due to that reason, VIFX from Los Angeles — a team of 40 artists headed by Greg McMurry — was hired to create the film’s 20 shots featuring a digital counterpart for the Kothoga. Digital effects supervisor John DesJardin started searching for a software system that would allow the team to appropriately render and animate the digital Kothoga. Ultimately, the team devised a pipeline system, that used different softwares for the various components of the digital shots. DesJardin said to Cinefex: “we would animate skeletons in Softimage, create skin deformation — such as the wiggle and jiggle of flesh and muscles — in Alias/Wavefront, and render in RenderMan, with Prisms doing the interface between all of the separate packages. It seemed nightmarish at first, but we were able to develop the glue to stick it all together, and we ended up with a very efficient production channel.” This system still required certain modifications, in order for the information to be successfully transferred from one program to the other. For example, a specific program was created to ‘translate’ the data created in Softimage for Alias. With this expedient, “if the bones of an arm were animated in Softimage, Alias would reinterpret how the bones moved — and then correctly interpret how the muscle movement of the arm should look. That was a satisfactory result, since at this point in the process it was only necessary to see the skin surface deforming.”

With the pipeline system finished, the visual effects team was ready to work on the model itself. Many of the early animation tests used a raw model the visual effects artists affectionately called ‘Kothoga Michelins’, due to their resemblance to the Michelin mascot. The final digital Kothoga was obtained by scanning a physical model, in turn based on mould portions of the practical sculpture — provided by Swift. The arrangement was initially confusing, as explained by VIFX model shop supervisor Scott Schneider: “we’d get something in for a few days, then have to send it back. I got all of Kothoga’s anatomy in bits and pieces — portions of legs, separate claws, fangs — so I spent a lot of time scratching my head, trying to figure out what was supposed to go with what.” The VIFX model was cast in self-skinning polyfoam, a ‘tougher’ material that eased the digitizing process. The scanned model proved to be too complex to load, and ultimately had to be “derezzed”, and as such lose a lot of its surface detail. Much like a practical skin, the seams between the digital model pieces had to be hidden. After that, deformation was applied to the model to recreate the bulging of the Kothoga’s muscular system. The skin detail was created in PowerAnimator using reference photographs of the practical suits, with the color scheme matched using 3D paint packages such as Amazon.

The creature was animated using the suit performance as its basic reference. VIFX was also influenced by footage of tigers and lions for the Kothoga’s agile and powerful movements. “I wanted Kothoga to move like a combination between a big cat, a lizard and a spider,” said modeler Eric Jennings, “I especially wanted him to have the crouching, prowling motion of a big cat. The problem became how to attach Kothoga’s tail to that sort of motion so it would look right. We just had to go with whatever seemed appropriate, shot to shot. As we experimented digitally, we found that if Kothoga moved too quickly, he tended to look small — it miniaturized him. So a lot of the digital movements were slow and calculating.”

The Kothoga’s powerful tail in action.

Certain scenes required only a digital extension — like the Kothoga’s forked tongue in the scene where it licks Margo. One of the most difficult scenes to animate was the one featuring the Kothoga when it chases a police officer, grabs him by the shoulders and violently rips his head off. This scene was animated by Bill Dietrich. The actor playing the officer was placed on a greenscreen, with the same sequence filmed on the set. A digital cop was ‘switched’ with the actor at the right moment, with a smooth transition, enabling the digital Kothoga to grab his head and brutally rip it off. In another, the Kothoga climbed up stairs, where “the camera shot the creature through the staircase from behind,” said compositing supervisor Cheryl Budgett. “When the animation was put in, it covered up the stairs. We had to work really carefully on those mattes to keep in details such as his claws hanging over the edge of the stairs. It was a very blurry scene, which made our job even harder.”

The most complex scene to animate, however, was the one that featured the Kothoga chasing Margo, effortlessly bursting through doors and walls in the process. A real motion-control cart — painted in orange to ease its replacement with the CGI creature — was used to burst through the walls. “We built an iron replica of the creature,” McMurry said, “and painted it day-glo orange. We positioned black lights around the set, and then pulled the heavy replica through the offices using a computer-controlled cable linked to the camera. In postproduction, we could then cut a hole wherever we saw orange and animate our computer-generated Kothoga in those areas.” Given the cart’s movement was controlled by the computer, the visual effects artists knew at what speed the creature had to move. The final shot also included more computer generated debris, such as scattered pieces of glass and wood.

The Kothoga, right before its fiery death (but seemingly not caring for its body going on fire).

As a last minute addition, Peter Hyams decided that the monster’s death should be more spectacular — and that the audience had to believe such a menacing creature like the Kothoga really died. In the novel, the Mbwun was killed with a bullet shot in the eye (the creature’s skull was too thick to damage); in the tradition of Jaws, the death was rescripted for the film, as being caused by an enormous explosion — which completely annihilates the Kothoga, blowing him apart. The specific explosion shot was obtained with a combination of practical and digital effects; an effort by Schneider and special effects supervisor Gary Elmendorf. A wax cast of the creature’s head and torso was made, and fitted with primacord. The practical explosion was filmed, and then digitally composited and enhanced with fire elements in post-production. The practical effects team quickly sculpted and moulded (in latex) the remains of the creature, which included a shredded ribcage, charred guts and a broken mandible.

For more images of the Kothoga, visit the Monster Gallery.

Special thanks to Emiliano Ranzani for providing the early Kothoga concept.

Main Article: Kothoga

After the foundation of Stan Winston Productions in 1997, the company’s first project was a group of straight-to-video films for HBO, which developed completely original concepts based on the titles of certain films directed by Samuel Arkoff in the 50s. Among those was War of the Colossal Beast, whose title was changed, only after filming, to Mermaid Chronicles Part I: She Creature (initially implying the beginning of a trilogy), and later to simply She Creature — a title deemed “more appropriate.” Scattered references to War of the Colossal Beast, however, can still be spotted in the final film.

Stan Winston Studios was of course the special effects house of the film, and had to bring to the screen a legendary, almost lovecraftian Mermaid. Setting itself apart from precedent examples of Mermaids in the history of motion pictures (such as the 1984 film Splash), “the Mermaid that we were going to end up creating for this film had to be much more organic,” Stan Winston said in the commentary of the film, “and not feel in any way like a woman wearing a mermaid costume.” With a budget limited to 3,5 million dollars and a pre-production schedule of only three weeks, such task was quite complex.

The main concept behind the Mermaid was its ability to transform its initial appearence into that of a far more monstrous and abyssal creature. It is a Queen of its kind, a mysterious species living in remote island chains in the world’s oceans. It is able to psychically influence human beings, and induce nightmares. The first stage was played by actress Rya Kihlstedt; the make-up process lasted 3 hours a day. Prosthetic webbed hands were sculpted, casted in latex and worn as gloves by the actress. Hair designs went from wigs with widely different appearences. Early designs featured algae-like protrusions, and cephalopoid tentacles. Deemed as “not attractive enough,” they were discarded in favor of the final design — long hair with algae-esque reflective colors. Prosthetic teeth, whose design was based on Piranhas, were built by David Beneke.

The Mermaid spends most of its time in a “fish tank”, a set specifically designed to hide certain parts of equipment and mechanisms. When the Mermaid was played by the actress, the shots used a combination of her and a full-sized mechanical tail, moved by Richard Landon from below the fish tank set. The Mermaid’s tail had to be recognizable, and yet innovative. Shane Mahan said: “we were looking for something that was obviously a Mermaid, and when you look at it you go, ‘that’s a real Mermaid!’ But at the same time beyond what we’ve seen before as far as Mermaid designs [go]. And [we had] this beautiful split tail design no one had ever seen before. It adds to that really special look to her.” It was imperative that the tail would not conceal leg-like structures within it; research of Mermaid mythology was also an important part of the process. Mahan added: “we referenced a lot of incisions and paintings — there’s a lot of artwork done because of the mythology of the Mermaids. Looking at films that had been done before, I wasn’t really that convinced from previous works — you know — because you could detect that there were knees inside the tail, and the girl bending her knees. So our approach was to build the puppet so we could get this marvelous arch that has no bone structure of legs there.” A specific sequence showed the Mermaid in full view; the actress was digitally combined with the animatronic tail. In a few shots a full-size rod puppet silicone double of the Mermaid was also used, weighing about 90 kilograms.

It is in the climax of the film, when the ship is reaching the Mermaid’s home (an island chain not recorded in any map), that the creature finally reveals its real, monstrous appearence. A mid-transformation puppet head was built, and the transformation itself was achieved with a “simplistic” morphing from actress, to puppet head, to final creature. designed by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery. She was designed to reflect her status of Queen, with a long, crown-like crest adorning her head, sculpted by Shane Mahan — the body was sculpted separately from the head by a team of sculptors. Hand extensions with a metallic understructure were used to create the Mermaid’s long-clawed hands. Six thorned barbs adorn the caudal fin and serve as perforating weapons; their efficiency is violently demonstrated on Angus towards the end of the film. The design also had to partially adhere to the 1900s motif of the film; Mahan explained: “I thought it was important that the design of the creature reflect[ed] the 1900s sort of motif of the film. I think [that] if the design was more modern looking, it might not have worked as well. I think it has an illustrative quality to it.”

This stage of the creature was played by veteran dancer and actress Hannah Sim. A suit was used for the upper part of the Mermaid, combined with a puppet rig of the lower portion of the body — which could be raised and lowered. The actress’ legs were locked into the puppet part with a harness engineered by Kevin Mohlman. A lot of strength on the back was needed to mantain specific body angles whilst inside the suit-harness. The Mermaid had to move with “slithering eel-like” movements. The special effects crew also noted an “evil elegance to them.”

For more images of the She Creature, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: She Creature

With the departure of the original Hunter, the film crew of Predator still needed a Monster to star as the titular antagonist; all the scenes it was to be featured in — including the tension-oozing climax sequence — were still to be shot. Shooting was interrupted for about six months until a solution for the bugging issue was found. The film’s main star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, recommended Stan Winston Studios; the two had precedently collaborated on the set of James Cameron’s The Terminator about four years earlier. “I met with John McTiernan and Joel Silver,” Winston said in The Winston Effect, “and we talked about the Predator. My feeling from reading the script was that the Predator had to be a real character, rather than a generic creature.  He needed to be a very specific character — and that’s what we came up with.” Understandably, the time to design and bring the creature to the screen was significantly shortened — compared to usual circumstances — to only six weeks. Winston explained: “there was a lot of pressure to get this done, because production was waiting for the new character so they could start shooting again; and there was additional pressure because somebody else had already failed.  We didn’t want to be their ‘strike two’.  Not only that, we’d been recommended by Arnold, who was a dear friend, and we didn’t want to let him down.” Alec Gillis, member of the special effects Studios at the time, found the choice controversial; “we got a little confrontational with him,” he said. “‘Why are we doing this, Stan? This is going to kill us!’ We’d just heard that another shop had been given a year to build a similar type of thing, and we mentioned that to Stan.  ’Why can’t we get jobs like that?’ And Stan said: ‘Listen, guys.  I will never strap a production with a one year build schedule. That’s not fair to them. These people are trying to make movies, and they are trying to do it in a timely fashion. I’m always going to be as flexible and accommodating of that as I can be.’ And we said: ‘Okay, but why this?  Why Predator?’ And he said, ‘Because this is going to be a great movie.’ He was doing it as a favor to Arnold, partly, but his instincts told him that Predator was going to be great, which shows his good judgement of material.”

At this point, Winston Studios was attached to two films (with the other being Monster Squad); as such, the special effects artists of the company were split into two crews, one for each film. The efforts of the entire crew sent to work on Predator went into the final design, which was based on a painting in Joel Silver’s office. Said design presented the Predator as a humanoid warrior, influenced by rastafarian culture. The painting was rather influential on the final design, and estabilished much of its appearence — most importantly, the Predator’s peculiar ‘dreadlocks’. “I saw that,” Winston said, “and thought it was a great starting concept for the Predator; I started drawing and designing this alien character with quills that in silhouette would look like dreadlocks. During this same period of time, Aliens had come out, and Jim Cameron and I were flying to Japan to participate in a symposium about the movie. We were sitting next to each other on the plane, and I was sketching and drawing the Predator. Jim suddenly said, ‘you know, I’ve always wanted to see something with mandibles.’ And I said, ‘Hmmm, that’s an interesting idea.’ And I started drawing the now-famous mandibles of the Predator. So, between the Rastafarian painting in Joel Silver’s office and the mandible idea from Jim Cameron, I came up with ‘Stan Winston’s Predator’. And I take complete credit for it, even though I had nothing to do with it, obviously!”

Alan Munro’s Predator concept.

It was only two years later, on the set of A Nightmare on Elm Street V: The Dream Child, that Shannon Shea discovered that said painting was in fact concept art by Alan Munro, precedently drawn for the film. Other concepts by the same artist also proved to be influential. Shea explained to FilmSchoolRejects: “During that shoot, Alan told me the tale of being hired by Joel Silver after the canceled Puerto Vallarta shoot to do some new concept art for the Predator. In his art, he had rendered one design that had twelve mandibles on its mouth. And then he told me that he had produced that piece of art that was left at Stan’s credited to Mitch Suskind. Dreadlocks, mandibles – sounds like Alan Munro had some influence on the design of the Predator.”

The final design mantained the mostly humanoid configuration of the Munro painting, and featured a facial design similar to the same artist’s early concepts. Wayne Strong sculpted a maquette, with thicker thorns on the torso and a forked tongue (already present in Winston drawings). None of these details were included in the final design, due to time and budget — although the forked tongue would finally be included in the Predator for Predator 2. Ultimately, the relatively simple humanoid outline allowed much more freedom in shooting the Predator — without any interference from harnesses and cranes, the very issues that plagued the original Hunter. Winston said: “Often you’ll hear filmmakers say, ‘Let’s do something that doesn’t look like a man in a suit. I’ve said it myself, in fact. ‘Let’s do something more high-tech, not a man in a suit.’ But a man in a suit works just fine as long as you connect the character’s mythology as humanoid, as an alien man.  ’Man in a suit’ only denotes the technology that got you that. As long as it doesn’t look like a man in a suit, it doesn’t matter if that’s the technology that got you there.”

The Predator suit during a test.

The Creature was sculpted by Steve Wang, Alec Gillis, Shane Mahan, Shannon Shea and Matt Rose, with the last working on the head and the former three on the body. The mandibles were sculpted separately, in order to infuse more detail into them and ease the final assembly over the mechanical understructure. Before being moulded, Rose made a mark on the sculpture to recognize the original mould. Due to time constraints, the armor parts (with the exception of helmet, shoulder cannon and wrist gauntlets) were sculpted directly onto the body and moulded with it. At this point it was suggested that the Predator would have elongated fingers — a design trait inherited by the Monster Squad Gillman. Finger extensions were sculpted and mounted on Hall’s hand casts.Wang was concerned about time, as Shea explained:  “Steve told Stan he was concerned that the sculpture would not be as refined as he had hoped[,] to which Stan told Steve that the Predator suit was going to be all about the paint job. How right Stan was.” Wang based the color scheme and painting style on a desert Locust species, Schistocerca gregaria. The suit was cast in foam latex, with the teeth cast in acrylic. Richard Landon designed the mechanics of the Predator’s face, which included 9 servomotors that enabled motion of brow area, mandibles, as well as “a cheek squint.” As a last addition, the lower mandibles — which previously did not open as widely as intended — were fitted with an external servomotor, hidden in the ‘backpack’ of the Predator. The dreadlocks singlehandledly moulded and attached onto the head, and the effect of the creature’s eyes was achieved with simple contact lenses. Hall’s jaw movements puppeteered the Predator’s mouth.

A total of two suits was built, along with a stunt head, a hero head, and a ‘caved in’ head used when the suit actor had to wear the helmet for a whole shot. Additionally, a red spandex suit was built for the sequences featuring the Predator’s peculiar camouflage. It was created by Shannon Shea with the help of Leslie Neumann; the dreadlocks were excised from it, as they would significantly add time to the displacement and animation process required for the camouflaging effect.

Creature performer Kevin Peter Hall — who curiously enough played another extraterrestrial hunter in the 1980 motion picture Without Warning — was hired to play the creature, due to his impressive height of 7′ 2.50″. Kevin was gifted at the end of production with a cameo in the finale of the film — as the helicopter pilot. Due to his height, the actor’s body cast was actually split into two parts, one for the upper torso, and one for hips and legs. The first suit test in Los Angeles proved that some design changes were required; along with other things, the elongated fingers were excised to ease Hall’s performance. Shea recalled on the matter: “we suited him up with as much as we had finished [--] which was a suit, a pair of unpainted hands with the finger extensions, and a test, stunt head that Steve had painted but had no dreadlocks on it. As we stepped back and looked at the creature, we noticed that some things were going to have to change instantly. Kevin, although his fingers looked long and spider-leg-like, was having difficulty handling the weapons and holding onto the little tools in his medical pack. New gloves would need to be sculpted, molded, run, seamed and painted immediately.” All the suits were fitted with a coolant mechanism, used to mantain the performer’s body temperature at normal levels (in a location such as Mexico).

The Predator’s blood is one of its peculiar characteristics — a glowing green liquid. Originally, the creative team had intended the blood to be glowing orange; when the special effects team was requested to make the blood of that color, some shots had already been rotoscoped with that feature. Due to an unavailability of glowing orange sticks, the production was forced to make the Predator’s blood green instead of orange — to the dismay of the visual effects team, who had to re-rotoscope the shots that had already been completed.

Of the Predator’s original weapons, only the wristblades and the shoulder cannon, all sculpted and painted by Steve Wang, made it to the final film.  The formers, mechanized by Wayne Strong, used customized air rams for the extending action. The shoulder cannon was developed by David Kindlon, and was manually coordinated with the movements of Hall’s head to create the impression that the helmet directly controlled the cannon. A spear and a spear-gun — seen in use only when the Predator injures Blain, seconds before shooting him in the chest — were proposed, but were ultimately discarded. Those ideas would be later recycled for the sequel.

A sword was also planned, but excised after the first suit test. Shea explained: “originally[,] there was to be a sword handle sticking out of the backpack close to the gun. You can see the ‘curve’ of the blade represented by the curve of the backpack (which always reminded me of a shrimp for some reason). But when Kevin turned his head to the left, the protrusion of the Predator’s muzzle would smack right into the handle of the sword[,] so it was eliminated. From a trivia point of view — there were two fiberglass swords that were run and painted. They ended up hanging, blades crossed on the wall of our truck when we got to Mexico.” The Predator’s medical kit was created by Brett Scrivener; a ‘spreader’ tool was also reconfigured into a ‘clamp’ by Richard Landon. A loin cloth was also built out of suede fabric as a last addition, to cover up a the raised belt line in the suit (a failed attempt to give the illusion of longer legs). Final touches included the netting and sculpted laces decorated with the bones of alien preys.

The Predator with its original mask.

The mask that the creature originally wore featured a complex texture design — a translation of the monster’s connotations to a mechanical device. According to Shannon Shea, Matt designed it to be “intimidating, beautiful, and yet look somewhat functional.” Producer Joel Silver, allegedly, “hated it instantly,” said Shea. “He said that part of the mystery of the Predator was that first he was ‘invisible’ then next when we see him, he’s wearing a mask, and finally he takes the mask off to reveal the face.  Matt’s design ‘tipped the hand’ too much revealing what was going on underneath.” The helmet was discarded and a new design was commissioned and built — with more tribal features and a more vague, featureless appearence. The original mask prop would be later recycled for Predator 2, in which it is worn by one of the Hunters of the Predator tribe.

Stan Winston commented on the result of his team’s effort, saying that “the Predator is an iconic character, as well known and loved in science fiction film history as any character out there. And he’s basically a man in a suit. I think one of the reasons that the characters that have come out of Stan Winston Studio are so memorable is because they are not about the technology. We use higher technologies where they need to be used; but we don’t used them for their own sake.  Predator was a perfect example of that philosophy.”

For more images of the Predator, visit the Monster Gallery.

For an insight on the visual effects techniques behind the camouflaging effect of the Predator, visit the Appendix [COMING SOON].

Next: Part II: Predator 2.

The success of the first Predator convinced Twentieth Century Fox to produce a sequel to the film. From a jungle to a metropolis, the new Predator chooses a fictitious future Los Angeles as its hunting ground. Stan Winston Studios and Kevin Peter Hall returned to bring another Intergalactic Hunter to the screen in Predator 2, updating its design according to the director’s request. Stephen Hopkins wanted a “more urban and hip design” for the new character, fitting with the film’s setting — a concrete jungle. “The director wanted this Predator to be more colorful, with flashier, more intricate weapons,” said Shane Mahan in The Winston Effect. “The design of the Predator’s head was also altered a bit to make it look like it was a different individual – the same species, but a different character. It was steeper and a little shallower. We didn’t just want to pull out the old mold from the first movie and paint it differently, because we thought audiences would detect that.” Despite that, the creature obviously had to mantain the general outline of its predecessor. The special effects team found inspiration in the wide phenotypical diversity found in reptiles, and in particular snakes.  “The concept is the same,” explained Stan Winston, “the difference is this is a different individual. A different individual of the same species. There’s a snake, a snake, a snake, but they’re all different, the coloring is different, different parts of their characteristics, facial structures, many differences.”

Concept art of the new Predator head, by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery.

The new design was conceived by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery — an admirer of Winston’s effects, in his first film work — a designer who would eventually become the Studios’ main concept artist. The Predator’s appearence was inspired by snakes in both its texture and color scheme. Its head was refurbished with “a horned brow ridge,” as well as other cosmetic additions: thorn-like protrusions were added to its mandibles, the lower ones of which feature evident gums — as opposed to the first Predator’s, which just blended with its outer skin layer. The Hunter was also given a forked tongue, a concept originally found in Winston’s drawings (as well as Wayne Strong’s maquette) for the first film, but eventually excised for reasons of time and budget. Said problems, that were fundamentally dominant in the creation process of the first Predator, were mostly absent; the special effects team was allowed much more creative freedom. “Every time you do something,” Shane Mahan said, “you come out of it knowing what you would do differently next time, if you got a chance. On Predator 2, we got that chance to improve.”

The Special Effects team built two suits, a stunt head, and a hero head — as well as an inset puppet torso and head of the creature, used for certain scenes of the film where the Predator is seen talking. It was built due to the necessity of showing mouth motion that would actually suggest speech — an action that the basic mouth puppeteering of the hero head could not deliver.  The new mask followed the same idea of its predecessor, but displayed a more angular design combined with a mainly bronze-based color scheme. The new armor featured more ridged patterns, and generally remained consistent with the color scheme of the mask. Much like the forked tongue, several weapon ideas proposed for the first film — but eventually discarded — were recycled for the new project. Accompanying the wristblades and cannon — which was refurbished with a more streamlined appearence and a ridged design — a whole new set of weapons aided the Predator in Predator 2. The Hunter’s spear — or combi-stick — was built in three versions: hero, stunt, and a telescoping spear. The smart disc and the net launcher could attach to different parts of the Predator’s armor, located, respectively, in the right thigh and right calf. The spear-gun, another recycled idea, was housed in the left gauntlet.

“You can’t see the eyes of the Demon… till him come callin’.”

In the climax of the film, Harrigan uses the Predator’s own disk to chop his left arm off, disabling the gauntlet. Two stunt ‘chopped’ arm pieces were built; the left arm-less Predator was played by stuntman David Smith. The Los Angeles cop then proceeds to follow the Predator down to its ship — another idea that was cut from the first film’s finale. It is here that the final battle between man and Predator takes place — with Harrigan ultimately stabbing the Predator mortally with the disk. With the Hunter dead (or so it seems — the Predator is seen moving its mandibles), his entire clan reveals itself to the cop. For this sequence — the most expensive in the entire film — Stan Winston Studios built 9 additional Predator suits; single artists worked on each Predator suit, giving them their personal touches and signature traits. Each Predator was distinguished by its texture, color scheme, armor style, and mask (or lack thereof). Unlike the first film, in fact, the sculpture of the Predator featured only minor armor parts; this enabled it to be moulded multiple times, and each mould to be ‘customized’ in different ways. As such, a wide array of creative liberties and arrangements was allowed on the crew’s part. For the rest, specific head and mask designs (5 of the Predators appear masked) were individually sculpted and moulded.

Previously unused mask designs made their way into the screen, including the original mask prop of the hunter of the first film. Said mask was labeled as ‘Gort’, after the nickname of a garage seller that had previously bought the prop. The first Predator’s mask was also recycled and worn by one of the members of the Tribe. One of the Predators also displays a peculiar, naginata-like weapon — a thin spear with Predator blades mounted on top. The clan was played by a team of basketball players.

A crewmember working on the Elder Predator’s head.

The Elder Predator was actually sculpted with the original creature moulds as a base. Its details and textures were modified to give the character a more worn-out, senior look — additional quills, thorns, and plates. The exposed lower mandible gums of the new design are also present. “We changed the structure and the look of it a bit,” said Shane Mahan of the Elder, “and broke a tusk on it to make it look older. It was fun to go back and do that guy again.” The creature was given a self-targeting shoulder cannon, and a machete-esque cutting weapon. The Elder Predator was played by Kevin Peter Hall in his last role as the Intergalactic Hunter; the actor unfortunately died after a contaminated blood transfusion in 1991.

For more images of the Predator and its tribe, visit the Monster Gallery.

For an insight on the visual effects techniques behind the camouflaging effect of the Predator, visit the Appendix [COMING SOON].

Next: Part III: Alien Vs. Predator [COMING SOON].

Main Article: Predator Metamorphosis — Part II: Predator 2

Main Article: The Zorgons [COMING SOON]

Keep away from Pumpkinhead,
Unless you’re tired of living,
His enemies are mostly dead,
He’s mean and unforgiving,
Laugh at him and you’re undone,
But in some dreadful fashion,
Vengeance, he considers fun,
And plans it with a passion,
Time will not erase or blot,
A plot that he has brewing,
It’s when you think that he’s forgot,
He’ll conjure your undoing,
Bolted doors and windows barred,
Guard dogs prowling in the yard,
Won’t protect you in your bed,
Nothing will, from Pumpkinhead.

–Ed Justin, Pumpkinhead

Whilst working on Parasite (1982), veteran Monster Maker Stan Winston began considering that he could actually direct a film of his own. The chance arose when producers of DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group sent Winston a copy of a script for a low budget horror film — titled Pumpkinhead — in order to hire him to create the titular creature, a demon of vengeance summoned by a farmer whose son was killed. The story was inspired by the homonim poem written by Ed Justin, also the film’s writer. Winston realized that he could actually direct the film. He recalled in The Winston Effect:  “it was a small picture, something I thought I could handle as a director; and I felt there was a lot that I could bring to the story. So I told the producers, ‘yeah, I’ll do the creature — but only if I can direct the movie.'”

Winston expanded the script with themes inspired by Forbidden Planet, one of his favourite science-fiction films. He explained: “the essence of Forbidden Planet was the Monster of the Id. Ultimately, what killed everyone was this creature that had been created out of the subconscious mind. That concept had always grabbed me, and I wanted to bring some of that to Pumpkinhead. On the surface, Pumpkinhead is a demon that a witch conjures up; but, at a deeper level, Pumpkinhead is an extension of Ed Harley. By the end of the film, Ed comes to understand that the only way to kill Pumpkinhead is to kill himself. That’s the story I wanted to tell.”

Occupied with director duties, Winston was mostly unable to collaborate to the design process beyond simple director approvals; Pumpkinhead was designed and built by the artists of Stan Winston Studio. Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis conceived the appearence of the creature. “Since Stan was directing the movie,” Gillis recalled, “he turned the creature work over to us. Stan said: ‘I’m the director on this. I’m the client — you guys are the effects guys.’ It was great to have Stan’s encouragement to just go with it, on our own. We sat down and started drawing, and then we presented those drawings to Stan, and he made suggestions. That’s how the character of Pumpkinhead developed.” Woodruff added in an interview with Icons of Fright: “It was like your parents turning over the keys to the house and saying, “Ok, we’ll be back in 3 months”, and everyday was just an amazing day at work. You just felt like nothing is going to go wrong with this movie. Not that it wasn’t hard work, you just knew that everything we built was going to be used the proper way because there was a director involved who knew and understood the importance to make our stuff on-set work.”

Pumpkinhead concept by Alec Gillis.

Pumpkinhead’s design was primarily inspired by reference photos of cadavers and decomposing bodies. “It was mostly from cadavers and dead bodies,” Woodruff said.”We definitely wanted it to have the feeling of something that had been dead and something that was partially human, but also more evil and monstrous. Not in a science-fiction way, but more of a folklorish kind of way. A legend that was brought to life.” Various designs were considered, with the final Pumpkinhead taking elements from earlier incarnations. The creature features ovegrown bones on its shoulders and legs, long and skeletal fingers, and pale eyes with slit, reptilian pupils — almost unnoticeable in the film. Completing Pumpkinhead is its namesake bloated cranium. Its color scheme also reflects its nature, with hues based on decaying flesh. Pumpkinhead was also portrayed as growing from a fetus-like stage which is unearthed to begin the summoning.

The maquette.

Winston’s limited collaboration also eased the process. “There was a shorthand with Stan that made it so easy,” Rosengrant related. “We could go to him with something, and ask: ‘is this enough? Will this do it?’ And he could look at it, and immediately say, ‘yeah, that will be fine,’ or, ‘no, we need more.’ That’s very different than the normal situation where we have to overbuild, just in case the director changes his mind and wants something more once he is on the set. Stan knew exactly what the tools were, what he needed and what he didn’t need. We didn’t have to go through the process of educating him, as we do with many directors. That made the whole job easier, and a lot more fun.” With the final design selected, construction of Pumpkinhead began. The fetus stage was sculpted by Alec Gillis and John Rosengrant, and painted by Tom Woodruff, Jr.; it was built as a featureless dummy covered in dirt, as well as a simple cable animatronic that could rear itself. A second stage, seen only in one single shot of the film, was also sculpted and painted by Shane Mahan.

The final stage Pumpkinhead was sculpted by Alec Gillis (for the head) and Tom Woodruff, Jr. and John Rosengrant (for the body). Rosengrant and Howard Berger painted the creature, which was built as a full-size suit, performed by Woodruff. The skin was casted in foam latex, with spandex embedded to enhance the suit’s durability, whereas the claws were casted in translucent resin. The creature’s hands were poseable, but not articulated; for that reason, two insert animatronic arms were constructed by David Nelson. Both a fully-articulated hero head and a stunt head were built to be mounted on the suit, right above the performer’s actual head — to increase the Monster’s height. Pumpkinhead’s digitigrade leg design also dictated that a system of leg extensions would be employed. They were devised by Richard Landon, and used in combination with a harness due to their design. “We never really intended [the extensions] to be weight-supporting so that I’d be able to walk on two legs,” Woodruff said. “The idea was always that we’d have some kind of rig system to take some of the weight off, because we didn’t want to build them up so big that we’d have to make them bulky. We wanted to keep everything really sleek in design.” Pumpkinhead’s leg extensions were among the first to be successfully employed in a film. Scenes with Pumpkinhead shot from the waist up did not even need to employ the extensions, and as such the performer simply walked on platforms to mantain the illusion of the creature’s height.

Woodruff, who could see through two holes in Pumpkinhead’s neck, wanted to infuse specific vibes in the performance, also inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s special effects work. “We had to get the feeling that it was a creature born from a dead body,” Woodruff said, “a regenerating thing. That was the point where I tried to work in those Ray Harryhausen-type moments, always trying to look toward his stuff. I incorporated a lot of his idiosyncrasies into not just Pumpkinhead, but things I’ve done since then. There are times where I’ll try to put a lot of that body language into a performance.”

In the end of the film, to illustrate the creature’s bond with the farmer, Pumpkinhead’s face mutates into a more humanoid configuration, reminescent of Ed Harley’s face. Again, a hero head and a stunt head were built; John Rosengrant sculpted the new face, infusing traits and connotations from Lance Henriksen. Ed is ultimately damned to become the next Pumpkinhead — and is seen being buried as a deformed fetus, which was created as a featureless dummy, sculpted to include Henriksen’s features.

Thanks to Winston’s experience with creature effects, Pumpkinhead‘s budget was used to full potential. “It’s funny, but we never had a sense of being constrained by the budget on that show,” Mahan recalled, “and that was because Stan knew what to spend the money on and how to get the most out of everything we built.” He also commented on the experience: “When I revisit Pumpkinhead after all these years, and I realize that it was done in 1987, all in-camera, and for only three million dollars, I’m amazed at how much movie is there. I think it is a really impressive example of a first-time director’s work. And it is still used as a model for low-budget films. People reference Pumpkinhead all the time when they are looking at how to make an effective low-budget movie.”

Crew shot.

Winston remembered the film fondly: “all the things I had ever done on my life came together and helped me as a director for Pumpkinhead. I loved every part of the process, from the camera work to the editing to the sound mixing. Rather than being intimidated by the job of directing Pumpkinhead, I was energized by it. And, in the process, I learned that I was a pretty good director.”

For more images of Pumpkinhead, visit the Monster Gallery.

Hans Ruedi Giger, the original Alien designer, did not return to work on Aliens. None of the filmmakers involved in the project contacted the artist, whom at the time was attached as a creature designer to Poltergeist II. “we didn’t know exactly how long that commitment was, but we heard that he was busy,” director James Cameron said. “But honestly, I think that if we had really wanted to fight for him, we could have worked around it.” Giger himself recalled in The Alien Saga documentary: “I was a little depressed because nobody asked me to work on this film. I was in Los Angeles at the time working on Poltergeist II, and I asked around about Aliens. For me, it would have been the most logical thing to work on that film. I was very anxious to collaborate, but nobody called me. I’d much rather have done a second Alien than a second Poltergeist — because, naturally, I felt more related to Alien. Perhaps the Poltergeist II people wanted to keep me away from Aliens for fear of losing me. I inquired everywhere, but no one could or would inform me about it.”

Cameron, having already successfully collaborated with Stan Winston on The Terminator, hired the artist and his crew of Stan Winston Studio to bring the horde of StarBeasts to the screen. The creative team wanted the new Alien designs to adhere to the aesthetic estabilished by the first film, whilst also trying not to copy it in an uncreative manner. “My attitude on the Alien was to render unto Giger what was Giger’s,” Cameron told Cinefex, “but hopefully not limit myself too much in the process.” Winston himself said: “we tried to be as true to the original film as we could, without disallowing ourselves a little bit of artistic freedom to do things that we considered — if not improvements — something to keep your head above water, so you’re not just doing what was done before.” The special effects crew had at disposal some of the original models portraying all the stages of the Alien’s lifecycle — save for the Chestburster; those served as a base to create the new models for the film.

The Alien menace is actually visually introduced in the film when the Marines enter the Hive — composed of secreted resinous material. Similarly to the deleted Eggmorphing scene in the first film (which, at the time of Aliens, was simply excised and did not appear in any cut of the film) the Aliens pinned hosts to walls. Cameron explained: “the Alien structure provided an interesting opportunity for us to do a Gigeresque-type structure created biologically by the Aliens — much the way ants do when they cement the walls of their tunnels using saliva mixed with granules of rock and sand.”

A structure of otherwordly geometry, with swirling biomechanical shapes, the Hive was built as a massive ‘make-up’ for the Power Station set. It was sculpted in its various components in clay and then moulded in latex and fiberglass, depending on the specific piece. Production designer Peter Lamont explained: “We got two castings a day from each mold. Some were cast off in fiberglass and others were vacuformed. In all there were hundreds of pieces, most of which were painted by one of our scenic artists. We spent about three weeks on that while the power station was being cleaned up. Then we moved into the plant and started fitting these things into place. A team of painters had already gone through with I don’t know how many gallons of silver spray paint, so already it was starting to look not much like a power station. By the time we finished, it was really transformed. We had just three weeks to complete the work once we got inside. It was quite a chore. We started on the lower floor and were still working on the upper floor when production began. As Jim came up shooting, we were gradually retreating behind.” Most of the cocooned colonists were sculpted dummies with faces cast from various actors.

Building the miniature Hive.

When the Hive is introduced, the camera pans down the ceiling of the colony structure, encrusted with the resinous material. The sequence actually employs a miniature devised by Robert and Dennis Skotak, combined with forced perspective. Robert Skotak explained: “It would have taken forever to do that for real, not to mention the expense. So after thinking about it for a while, we decided the best way to do it would be with a hanging miniature. The way the shot was set up was that the actors would be very close, literally right on their heads underneath it — and then they’d kind of look around and walk back into the depth of the set. So what we needed to do was to continue the encrustation up above the actors, and also continue the pipe work and the scaffolding and the catwalks and everything else. The art department had gone to Acton and gotten all the measurements — where the lift was, where the pipes were, basically the whole floor plan. Then, to save time while the plant was being cleaned up, they reconstructed that section in plywood on L stage and built the cocoon mass over it in carved styrofoam. While it was there on the stage. Dennis and I set up a camera in a position we’d selected while at Acton and determined all the measurements we’d need for the hanging miniature and its supports. Then we ran some film through the camera of the beginning, middle and end of a tilt-down, made prints and traced on top of them where we wanted all the lines and pipes and everything to go. We gave that sketch to Steve Begg and he want up to Acton with Chrissy Overs, and together they finished the miniature on site.”

The miniature was 10 feet high and 12 feet wide, and had to be blended with the full-size Hive set beyond it. Dennis Skotak recalled: “there was a lot of last-minute adjustments to be made, mainly because the live-action set was not quite ready until a day or so before we started to shoot. Since a lot of what we had to do depended on the final set dressing and paint job, it was pretty crazy those last couple of days trying to get our blend just right.” Cameron decided to shoot the sequence in the fog, and as such vapour had to be emitted in lesser amounts on the miniature — since it was closer to the camera (an uniform emission would have caused “an inconsistency in aerial density”). Dennis Skotak continues: “it was a very delicate balance. We found as we were there that by adding the slightest amount of fill light on the miniature and then wetting everything down and blowing in just the right amount of fog that it all worked together. It was transitory, though. Cast and crew would be standing around waiting, and when everything looked right, we’d say: ‘that’s it! Shoot!’ — and everybody would go for it. The blend was there literally just for moments and then it would be gone. We were very fortunate that after all the struggle it worked.”

The Alien Eggs underwent cosmetic changes in proportions and animation — with their petals splitting and moving downward for their entire length. Rick Lazzarini devised the hero animatronic used when an Egg opens. “I used a cable stand-off on polypropylene technique,” he said, “to allow the petals, [or] lips to curl back an seal back up organically. The Hero Egg I worked on was used in a number of shots in the film.” Winston Studio also built several background Eggs — either closed, for Eggs with Facehuggers still inside, or open, for already hatched Eggs. Small scale vacuformed eggs — eight to ten inches in height — were also constructed for the miniature Egg chamber set.

The Facehugger’s role was expanded upon compared to the first film. “In the first film, the Facehugger — after its leap onto John Hurt’s face — appears simply as an inert form,” Cameron said. “In Aliens, we changed that. Now it has the physical capability, should it miss on that first leap, to run around on its eight legs and leap again — which made for a really interesting sequence.” The design of the Monster was partially changed, with its underside inspired by Giger’s paintings — a vaginal opening with an extruding proboscis. Cameron explained: “the bits of oysters and stuff inside [the first Facehugger looked great, but I did want to see the disgusting thing that had been down the inside of Kane’s throat. You never see it in the movie, so I figured we’d gross everybody out. All of Giger’s designs have a really sexual undercurrent to them, and that’s what horrified people about the Alien as much as anything. It worked on a kind of Freudian subconscious level, and Ridley and Giger knew that and went for that. This film was never intended to be as much of a horror film as the first one, it was working on a different thematic level, but I still wanted to be true to some of those ideas, some of those design concepts.”

Winston added: “we took a few artistic liberties, nothing anyone’s even likely to notice. It was just one of those things. If you work on something long enough, you’re bound to find things you feel can be a little bit improved. Sculpturally, I think ours was a little more organic than the first one, although the first one was brilliant. The finger appendages on ours are a little more like fingers than they were on the original. We made the knuckles a little more knuckle-like and on the tips of the fingers we actually put nails. Basically we took that which we saw as the intent of the original design and carried it a step further. Also, we lengthened the tail by about six inches so we could do more work with it — wrapping it around necks and getting a whip-like action out of it.”

Alec Gillis sculpted the Facehugger, with the original models as reference — whereas Lance Anderson devised the internal mechanisms of the main models. Several different Facehugger with specific ranges of motion were built, and used depending on the requirements of the sequences. As opposed to the original creature’s actually organic underside, the new Facehuggers had foam latex skin. Various dead and decomposed Facehuggers were built for the first Hive scene and the Med Lab scene, and a dead Facehugger with real organic innards — including chicken skins — was devised for the autopsy sequence.

In the Med Lab scene, two of the Facehuggers in the stasis tubes are still alive. To portray the creatures suspended in water, the models were controlled by cables. “For the [Facehugger] that slams up against the inside of the tube,” Winston said, “the difficulty was that it had to be operated underwater. The tube had to have a water-tight seal, but we had to be able to move in and out with our cables. Getting the tail to whip around in a confined space and underwater was a major challenge. We tried various things such as air pressure and water pressure, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, Ray Lowell came up with a spring-loaded tail that was cable-operated. Pulling on the cable would curl the tail up very tightly and then releasing it would allow it to whip open. At the same time, two other cables moved the base of the tail in a 360-degree axis so that it would pivot around while the tail itself was whipping. It worked beautifully.”

The two Facehuggers are released by Burke in the Med Lab. In this key sequence, several models were employed, including a fully articulated hero Facehugger. “Lance worked out most of the finger mechanisms before we left for England,” Winston said, “then, after we got over there, the tail whipping action and the extruding tongue elements were added, along with some fine-tuning of the controls. Everything worked on that one, requiring something like nine operators. For scenes where it’s crawling up the table, we built another one that was basically the same except that it didn’t have the tongue element within the body. Then Ian Rolph worked on a third one that had just the finger articulations. That was to help it scurry along and turn around on the wall before leaping off. We also made a series of floppy Facehuggers that had articulated fingers, but the fingers were left loose so the creatures could be thrown around like you’d throw a dummy off a cliff. Some of those were also used in the scenes where the Facehuggers are blown up. It’s amazing how some really good dynamics came out of stuff as simple as that. We’d be wondering what sort of fancy doodad to come up with for a particular shot and Jim would say, ‘let’s just make a bunch of dummies — we’ll throw them and blow them up.’ And for quick cuts that worked.”

Building the scuttling Facehugger.

One of the Facehugger animatronics was devised to scuttle around on the floor. Winston recalled: “I wanted to do a pull-toy type of thing, where we would literally pull it across the floor and a wheel would turn underneath or something and cause the legs to move. In a way, that’s pretty much what we ended up doing; but at the start we couldn’t quite figure out how to do it, so we got off on a few tangents.” Ultimately, Cameron was inspired by his earlier work on Piranha II. Winston continues: “Finally, Jim called me from England and said: ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of this, Stan, but I did this thing for Piranha II, where a fish was pulled through the water over a wire and we had a little mechanism inside to make the tail wiggle.’ So, working from that idea, he drew out a little design of what he thought the insides could be for the Facehugger, sent it over here, and Rick Lazzarini proceeded to make it work — which was quite a job since there were still an awful lot of problems to overcome. The Facehugger was on a wire that wrapped around a rubber-surfaced gear on the inside and was held taut by two operators on either end. Pulling the Facehugger along that wire would cause the gear to move which in turn would move other smaller gears connected to the legs. The gearing mechanism turned out to be very intricate, but the simple brilliance of the idea was that there was a correlation between how fast you pulled the Facehugger and how fast the legs would go. If you pulled it fast, the legs would move fast; if you pulled it slow, the legs would go slow.” Lazzarini himself added that “it could even ‘jump’ if the front operator moved his end of the cable up and down rapidly.”

An early dream sequence portrays Ripley’s nightmare, where she sees the Chestburster pushing itself through her chest. “It’s actually a wonderful effect,” Winston said. “She pulls her top up and you see her whole body stretch as the Chestburster pushes out from the inside. For that particular gimmick, Sigourney was on a slant board under the bed with a duplicate appliance body on top and an operator underneath pushing the Chestburster up. It was particularly effective because anyone who’s seen the first film knows exactly what it is, but it never actually bursts through. Tom Woodruff was largely responsible for that effect.”

When the Marines first enter the Alien Hive, Dietrich discovers one of the colonists still alive. The cocooned woman is however rapidly killed by the creature erupting violently from her body — the Chestburster. Winston commented in Superior Firepower: The Making of Aliens: “The Chestburster in the original Alien was one of the most shocking and wonderful effects in film history. We had to repeat it, but we had to do something a little different.” The design’s head and snout were partially altered, but the most prominent change was the addition of two developed arms — a trait originally considered by Roger Dicken for the original Chestburster. What remained in the final creature for the first film was a sculptural suggestion of arms at the sides of its small torso. Tom Woodruff, part of the crew, recalled: “the thing we were noticing  in the original sculpture was there was an indication [that] there were to be little arms on the thing, and I wasn’t really aware of them in the film.” Alec Gillis, part of the crew, added: “[Cameron felt that] it was a bit too larval, a little too disconnected from what it would later become.”

Adding the Chestburster’s teeth.

A Chestburster with arms would be able to help its eruption from the host’s chest — and would additionally be able to crawl on the Hive’s walls. Winston elaborated further: “the only thing we added to the Alien Chestburster was a pair of tiny little arms that folded up very tightly against the body. We thought the Chestburster ought to have them to help pull itself free — and, after all, the big one it grows into has arms. To mantain continuity, we made our Chestburster look exactly like the original when it first emerges. Then these little arms come out and work. Of course, the scene and the moment are so dramatic that only the most discerning eye will even notice, but we thought they ought to be there.”

“For the Chestburster scene,” Winston recalled, “we built the set so that the woman — Barbara Coles — was leaning slightly forward, cocooned between a couple of pillars. The lower part of her torso — from the waist down — was a fiberglass duplicate of her body surrounded by all this cocoon stuff. She could thus lay right up into that form and the upper part of her body would be real and the lower part would be fiberglass. That was the configuration at first, when she speaks. Then, for the scene where the Chestburster comes out, she was on a slant board with a foam rubber appliance from the neck down.”

Out of the mould.

The actual Chestburster was sculpted by Tony Gardner, and portrayed by two distinct puppets. The first model was used to actually burst through the colonist’s chest; Bill Sturgeon elaborated and built the mechanisms of the ramming Chestburster. “It had a very strong metal structure and cables that were used to provide its various movements,” Winston said. Three joints in its waist allowed it to move, achieving a crawling motion. “We were literally able to punch it through like a punching rod,” Richard Landon, creature effects coordinator, said. “[It came] through the foam latex skin and the t-shirt that [the colonist] was wearing, with a lot more energy than the John Hurt Chestburster from the first film.” Meeting an issue similar to the set-up for the first film, the crew had to film multiple takes of the bursting sequence, as the pre-distressed t-shirts did not tear appropriately until the last take.

The second animatronic, a fully articulated hero model, was developed by Steve Norrington. “That one had even more life than the first,” Winston said, “mainly because it didn’t have to push through anything, so it didn’t have to be as strong.” The puppet featured multiple layers of vertebrae-like discs, through which cables ran — allowing a total of four directions of motion for each segment. Cable actuated rods for the arms and a full jaw opening mechanism were also included. “For the last scene,” Winston said, “we built a complete duplicate of the actress in her death position — head, body, everything — which we then put into the set. At the same time, we replaced the original Chestburster with the one Steve Norrington had made and had it writhing around and really going crazy. The movement was stupendous — the little sucker was really alive!” To the dismay of Winston’s crew, however, the entire set — including the Chestburster — had to be torched.

ANGLE ON WALL as something begins to emerge. Dimly glimpsed, a glistening biomechanoid creature larger than a man. Lying formant, it had blended perfectly with the convoluted surface of fused bone. The troopers don’t see it.

-James Cameron, Aliens script draft, 1985

With the death of the Chestburster, the Hive awakens. “I think if you can do one, you can do any number,” Cameron explained. “Anyone who’s been through the process of creating a creature effect, or a character that’s sculpted in clay and molded and blown and painted or whatever, knows that to make one takes six months and to make two takes six months and a couple of extra days. I’m exaggerating slightly, but there’s an economy of scale there. It does create additional problems when you’re shooting, though. All the things that can go wrong with one creature go wrong five times as often with five creatures. On the other hand, you have times as much to look at so your attention is a bit divided.”

In the original story treatment for Aliens, Cameron included both the Alien Warriors (“my term for the single adult seen in Alien,” according to Cameron) and a new Alien caste among the horde — the ‘Drones’ — whose role was to excrete resinous material to build the Hive. “The Drone is a small albino version of the Alien creature,” the original treatment reads. “Where the Warrior has a set of striking teeth within its head, the drone has an excreting probe, like an organic stucco-gun [sic].” The concept was mantained in early drafts, but dropped in further drafts, and was not even explored in any conceptual designs.

In the final film, the Alien horde is represented by the Warriors — which adhered to the originally estabilished anatomy for the creature; the filmmakers were creatively constrained by the fact it had been shown in its entirety in the climax of the first film. Winston elaborated: “I loved Alien, it was probably my favourite horror movie of the decade. But if there was anything that I was disappointed in, it was at the very end when the Alien gets blown out of the ship and you realize at last that what you’ve been waiting to see all this time is simply a man in a suit — a great suit, but a suit nonetheless. I found that very disheartening in the movie, and even more disheartening going into Aliens knowing that millions of people had seen this thing and therefore knew exactly what the Alien looked like. Our hands were tied — we had to be true to the original.”

For that very reason, the artists were sent one of the original Alien suits to their Studio for reference purposes. Howard Berger, part of the crew, recalled: “we pulled this thing out of a crate, and it was unbelievable to see how it had been constructed. It had black-painted, hard macaroni pieces glued all over it to give it texture, with black-painted bottle caps at the waist; and the feet were just black Converse tennis shoes, covered with a slip-latex skin! When we got this thing out, put it on a mannequin, and saw it in broad daylight, it was amazing to realize what Ridley Scott had gotten away with, just by using slime and careful lighting and the right camera angles.”

Even using the suit as their fundamental reference, the filmmakers allowed themselves cosmetic changes to the Alien anatomy. The most prominent example was the removal of the Alien’s signature translucent dome on its head, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. Cameron recalled in a Cinefex interview: “on the original Alien, there was a translucent cowl covering the whole top of the head that looked kind of like a porpoise back. We planned to do the same thing with ours, and to that end Stan had Tom Woodruff sculpt up a ribbed, bone-like understructure that would fit underneath and be slightly visible through the cowl. When it was finished, they gave it a real nice paint job and I took a look at and said, ‘hey, this looks much more interesting the way it is.’ So we ditched the cowl and decided that this was just another of Aliens — slightly mutated.” A later explanation — initially suggested by David R. Larson on an issue of Starlog, and approved by Cameron — portrays the differences as results of an aging process. From a practical standpoint, the frenetic actions that were to be performed by the Alien suits represented a constant danger for the domes to receive consistent damage. “Jim just wanted to remove [the dome],” Gillis said, “thought it would be a hassle. He was afraid of it cracking or it having to be replaced — we’d have to cut and switch the dome.” The design of the ridges was actually based on the patterns that Giger had painted on the sides of the original Alien’s underdome structure.

Winston’s sketch of the Alien hand.

The removal of the dome implied that the Alien’s skull would be exposed; to mantain what Winston called “the Alien’s eyeless menace,” the human-like skull portion was smoothed over and painted with darker tones. Traces of it are still present, in the form of small indentations in the front of the Alien’s head — detectable upon close inspection. Other changes were strictly made to distance the appearence of the Aliens from “the man in a costume look of the original.” Those include the Aliens’ hands, whose fingers were greatly elongated. “We’ve redesigned the hands so that they are longer than original,” Winston said, “the fingers are a little bit longer — again, we took certain licenses to get away from the human look of a hand in a glove; and then we’ve developed articulated mechanical hands for close-ups, which do things that a person’s hand in a glove couldn’t do!” Interestingly enough, the sixth digit (corresponding to the double opposable thumb) was removed. The first digit of the Aliens’ feet was also modified and designed to grow at an angle, a trait included for them to convincingly climb walls. The rest of the changes amounted to simple cosmetic modifications. Winston explained: “It was all quite subtle. Details that were obviously tacked onto the first one — little hoses and things — we worked at in a sculptural way so that the organic and inorganic elements blended together better. It’s nothing you could ever detect on film — just the kind of thing you do to keep from getting bored duplicating exactly what someone else has already done.”

The original Alien suits were rather detailed, but were impractical: they could not perform the fast and agile movements that Ridley Scott wanted to portray. In order to avoid the same issues met by the filmmakers of Alien, Cameron and Winston decided to modify the structure of the suits — with an emphasis on movement rather than detail. “I thought that quick, blurring, lizard-like, or insect-like leap was more important than the physical, sculptural design of the suit,” Cameron said, “and I think that that’s a mistake that a lot of make-up and prosthetics people make when they’re dealing with this sort of thing is that they lavish all their attention on the sculptural detail –the surface texture, etc. — and they fail to realize that people need very few pixels of information to identify a human figure, and most of that identification is through motion. The way we walk is so ingrained in us mentally that you can see it just like that; so what we did was we actually redesigned the suit and made it simpler and less sophisticated and basically freed it so that it was much more flexible.”

Winston explained further: “what Jim wanted were movements that were sporadic and odd and strange, so that even though they were men in suits, they didn’t move like men in suits. So the big thing for us was to figure out a way to make these guys move and act in ways that were unlike a human — hanging from ceilings, hanging from wall to wall, doing insect-like moves and so on. The Alien in the first film could never have done these things because it was a full tubber suit and was very difficult to move around in. To avoid that problem, we had to come up with an alternative design that allowed for great freedom of movement. We did that by eliminating the rubber suit aspect altogether and using instead black leotards with lightweight foam pieces attached to them. If you were to look at them hanging on a rack, you’d think, ‘my God, those are just black leotards with pieces of stuff on them.’ But when you see them in the film and they’re wet and they’re slimy, you can’t tell the difference at all between ours and the original — and ours had complete freedom of movement.” The lighting and angles of the film also aided in the objective.

The Aliens were sculpted and constructed by Tom Woodruff, John Rosengrant, Julian Caldow, Nigel Booth, Lindsay McGowan and David Keen. Various stuntmen and dancers portrayed the Aliens in the various scenes featuring the creatures; none of them reached Bolaji Badejo’s towering height, and as such the filmmakers had to resort to camera trickery. Cameron recalled: “for Alien, they went out of their way to find a very tall person to be inside the suit — Bolaji Badejo was something like seven feet tall. We knew right off that we weren’t going to be able to find ten people who were seven feet tall. On the other hand, in studying Alien we found that there was really only one shot in the entire film that shows a direct scale relationship between the creature and a human being. In all the other shots, it exists separately in the frame.” In actuality, both the Alien and an actor are seen in the same shot in a number of sequences, but only one — the Alien raising in front of Lambert — offers a real sense of scale. Cameron continues: “we decided that rather than go for height, we’d go for people who had the right physique to be in the suits — the thinnest people we could find that had the strength to do the kinds of movements we wanted, such as hanging on wires and crawling upside-down and that sort of thing. In the end, they averaged under six feet tall, but by putting them on footstools or doing low angles on the creatures and high angles on the people looking at them we were able to create the impression that the Warriors were much taller than they actually were.” The Aliens’ tails were at times puppeteered with wires. For specific sequences, upside down sets were built and filmed with the performers in the Alien suits; the footage was then mirrored vertically, creating the illusion of the creatures scuttling on the ceiling.

The hero puppet.

One of the full stunt puppets.

The suits were actually combined with a large number of stunt and hero puppets with various purposes. The Winston Studio crew built a total of six, eight feet tall stunt puppets — whose purpose was to be damaged, shot at, or crushed. “Whenever we could,” Winston said, “we used one of the puppets because they were about eight feet tall and very thin — there was no way they could have been humans in suits. A couple of them were rod and cable actuated and we could put their arms into positions that a human just couldn’t get into. Others were floppy puppets that were just jointed so they could be thrown or crushed or blown up — whatever was needed.” Insert animatronic arms were also built. For the most detailed actions, a single, fully articulated hero puppet was constructed from the torso up. It featured articulated lips, head, neck and hands, whereas its arms were puppeteered with rods. To further differentiate the Aliens, the suits included hollow blade-like extensions on their arms, something absent in the stunt and hero puppets.

Giger commented on the Alien designs, saying that “I didn’t like the ribbed cranium of the Alien Warrior, although you couldn’t see the Aliens very much.” Otherwise the artist stated in a Cinefantastique interview that “It’s all beautifully done, everything, the designs and the way they’re executed.”

For more images of the Aliens, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Part Ic: Alien
Next: Part IIb: Aliens, the Alien Queen

Main Articles:

• StarBeast — Part IIa: Aliens
• StarBeast — Part IIb: Aliens, the Alien Queen

A PIERCING SHRIEK fills the chamber.

She turns. And there it is.

A massive silhouette in the mist, the ALIEN QUEEN glowers over her eggs like a great, glistening black Insect-Buddha. What’s bigger and meaner than the Alien? His Momma. Her fanged head is an unimaginable horror. Her six limbs, the four arms and two powerful legs, are folded grotesquely over her distended abdomen. The egg-filled abdomen swells and swells into a great pulsing tubular sac, suspended from a lattice of pipes and conduits by a web-like membrane, as if some vast coil of intestines was draped carelessly among the machinery.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

Before being attached to Aliens, and even before the production of The Terminator, director James Cameron wrote a treatment for a story called Mother, which featured “its own type of Alien Queen.” Although it would never eventually be greenlit, Mother was heavily influential on Cameron’s conception for Aliens. First written towards the end of 1980, the treatment fundamentally concerned “a female, genetically engineered creature attempting to ensure the survival of its young,” hence the title itself. The concept of the Alien Queen and the climax of Aliens itself was, in fact, an idea first conceived for Mother. Cameron continues: “in the final confrontation in Mother, a human in a ‘power suit’ — a utility exoskeleton that is a sort of cross between a fork-lift and a robot — fights the alien creature that I called the ‘Skraath’ or ‘Skraith’, a black six-limbed panther that I had previously created for another project called Labyrinth.”

Cameron’s concept of the Skraith. Whilst the idea had to be visually adapted for Aliens, this sketch would later serve as the starting point for the Thanator in Avatar (many other elements from that film were also extrapolated from the ideas for Mother).

In a deleted scene from the first film, the Alien’s life cycle had already been revealed — with the so-called Egg-morphing. Cameron, however, exploited on its excision to introduce his new idea. He explained: “If you follow Dan [O’Bannon]’s original concept, the closure of the original cycle was the human host turning back into a cocoon. I never found that to be very satisfying as it showed — when one had the facehugger attached, the embryo implanted, and when it burst out it killed that person. There was nothing going on with John Hurt in that respect. So there was a different version of it when the Alien grabbed Harry Dean Stanton and presumably put him into a cocoon. It’s certainly no great logical detour to assume that it might have used him as another host but I think it would be a bit odd that he turned into an egg. That’s something that would have been hard for the audience to swallow because it involved the transformation of the human host and although one can assume the Alien can metamorphose,  to have its biological properties take up residence in a human being and change it was going beyond the ground rules they set themselves. One of Alien‘s great attributes was that it set up a very weird biological process, but it has a basis in science fact all the way through, like the cycle of a digger wasp which paralyses its prey and injects an egg into the living body to mature. There’s a validity in all of that, but I dispensed with it because we never saw that in the film anyway. Had it appeared in the film I wouldn’t have violated any logic turbulence.”

Without the Egg-morphing sequence (which would be reintegrated in the Director’s cut of Alien decades after the production of Aliens), the original film did not explain how the Eggs in the Derelict spacecraft came to be. Cameron thus elaborated the Queen’s role in The Winston Effect: “that adult [Alien] form — one of them, anyway — couldn’t possibly have laid the thousand or so eggs that filled the inside of that Derelict ship. So, working from that image — acres and acres of these quite large eggs, two and a half to three feet tall — I began focusing on the idea of a hierarchical structure where the central figure is a giant Queen, whose role is to further the species.” The director explained further in a letter to Starlog: “Extrapolating from entomology (ants, termites, etc.), an immature female, one of the first to emerge from hosts, grows to become a new Queen, while males become Drones or Warriors. Subsequent female larvae remain dormant or are killed by males… or biochemically sense that a Queen exists and change into males to limit waste. The Queen locates a nesting spot (the warmth of the atmosphere station heat exchanger level being perfect for egg incubation) and becomes sedentary. She is then tended by the males as her abdomen swells into a distended egg sac.”

James Cameron’s first Alien Queen concept.

Since the integration of the Queen concept in Aliens‘ script, Cameron had a precise idea of what the Mother creature’s appearence should eventually be. Winston told Cinefex: “Right from the start, Jim had a concept of the Alien Queen in the back of his head. In fact, when we first began talking about the project he showed me the beautiful rendering he had done of it which I liked immediately.” Heavily influenced by Giger’s biomechanical aesthetic, Cameron envisioned a tall, proportionally thin and feminine Monster, with an elongated head ending in a crown, and six limbs; although the general anatomy would inevitably be parallel to a dinosaur (essentially, a biped creature with a tail) — Cameron wanted the design to distance itself from those, instead taking inspiration from arthropods: “I feel a sense of authorship when it comes to the Queen. Somebody once described it as an anorexic dinosaur, which I suppose is inevitable even though that’s not what I had in mind. In fact, I wanted specifically not to suggest a dinosaur concept — at least overtly — because that would have been a little too commonplace and boring. For me, the Queen is really a blend of what Giger does with what I wanted to do, which was to create something that was big and powerful and terrifying and fast and very female — hideous and beautiful at the same time, like a black widow spider.”

One of the maquettes. Two wooden figures represent the placement of the two stuntmen inside the animatronic.

Cameron also conceived the basic structure of a full size animatronic Alien Queen, a marvel of unprecedented complexity. Suspended from a cable rig, the creature would contain two puppeteers that would control one large and one small arm each — in order to achieve organic fluidity to their movements. The rest of the Monster — which included the head, legs and tail — would instead be puppeteered with a combination of hydraulic mechanisms, wires and rods. Although Winston was intrigued by Cameron’s concept of the Queen, he was initially skeptical about the intended structure of the puppet, for primarily practical reasons. “Jim had seen what we could do with puppets on The Terminator,” he said, “and so it made perfect sense that he thought of puppeteering techniques when he needed a way to realize the Alien Queen. But, even so, it was a huge leap of faith to believe we could build a 14-foot tall, acting puppet.”

One of Winston’s concepts.

Winston tried to elaborate his own renderings of the Alien Queen. He explained: “there were a few little things about the design that I thought could be improved, so I worked up a few sketches of my own and showed them to Jim. Actually they were pretty much like his, although on one of them I had deleted the extra set of arms and reconfigured it so that only a single stuntman would be needed inside.” Cameron however rejected the ideas, adamant to adhere to his vision.

Giger’s Alien Monster IV. Notice the hands and the neck of the creature, which were translated onto Cameron’s Queen design.

Though the director did not intend to use Winston’s designs, some of their traits were implemented in the final design — which, otherwise, essentially adhered to Cameron’s concept. “One thing Jim did like,” Winston continues, “was an idea from my redesign of the leg that gave it a double joint and made it look less human. In the end, Jim took into consideration some of what I’d said and the things I’d drawn and he went off and drew another Queen which was similar to his first but much more refined. In fact, when he came back, it was obvious that that was the Alien Queen. There was no doubt about it. We then sat down together and worked out a scale drawing — literally blueprinting her out in profile and front view, with her exact shape and exactly how she would have to be done to get two people inside.” The final Queen design also included more overt influence from Giger’s paintings — such as Alien Monster IV, which provided inspiration for both the Queen’s neck and hands. The Queen’s head also included a front portion able to move independently from the crown and ‘retract’ inside it when at rest. When the Queen is revealed, she is still attached to her Egg-laying sac, inspired by queen termites.

Cameron’s final Queen design.

The garbage bag test.

Once Cameron defined the final appearence of the Queen,  the director worked with Winston to further elaborate the structure of the full-size animatronic, and whether or not it could be actually brought to the screen. A test was made, with a ‘garbage bag’ mock-up Alien Queen. Winston recalled: “once we came up with a design and an idea of how we were going to get it to work, we rented a crane and built a quick little body plate setup out of wood that would hold two stuntmen. Then we made a rough mock-up of the Queen using black foam-core and plastic trash bags and suspended our stuntmen inside it. For the big arms, we used ski pole extensions — which were lightweight, but very strong — and attached them to some creature hands I had developed for another project. Each stuntman would hold one with his arm stretched out straight so that from his shoulder to his fist would be the Queen’s upper arm and from his fist to the end of the pole would be her forearm. For the smaller arms in front, the guys were able to use their own arms without any extensions. We set this thing up out in our parking lot to see if it was going to work — and it did. There was still a lot of fine-tuning to be done, but the basic concept was good.”

The Alien Queen was first built as a 1:4th scale maquette, which served as a base for the construction of the full-scale puppet, as well as a moulding base for the quarter-scale rod puppet used in the miniature sequences. The maquette was sculpted and painted by a team of sculptors: Shane Mahan for the head; John Rosengrant for the body; Greg Figiel for the arms; Alec Gillis and Willie Whitten for the legs; and Brian Penikas and Shawn McEnroe for the tail. “We all had such a wonderful time sculpting that thing,” Rosengrant said in The Winston Effect. “At the end of each day of sculpting, we’d all look at it, and say, ‘this is going to be great.'”

The creation of the full-size animatronic Queen began with the construction of a solid understructure able to support the various components and mechanisms, as well as the two internal stuntmen. The two puppeteers inside the Queen were Nick Gillard and Malcolm Weaver. Winston recalled: “the first thing we had to do was build the inner body of the Queen. The strong fiberglass shells that would hold the stuntmen and the strong aluminium plate inside that would carry the hydraulics. That inner section would in large part dictate the size of the Queen’s body, so it was necessary to work that out in advance.” Assigned to the fabrication of the supporting structure were Rick Lazzarini and Wayne Sturm. Once completed, it was shipped to London, where the rest of the construction would be held. “We set up shop on a large effects stage at Pinewood,” Winston said, “and began building the different components of the Queen — which basically we designed and built and sculpted exactly as we had done the miniature. Armatures were built for the legs and arms and body and head and tail — all separately.”

The first section to be constructed was the Queen’s tail. “The simplest armature to build was for the tail, so I decided we should do that first,” Winston said. “Not that it was simple by any stretch of the imagination, but the tail was probably the easiest to build quickly and I figured it would be a good break-in project for my English crew to help me assess individual strengths and weaknesses. Once the tail armature was done, we could then go to clay on it while the rest of the armatures were being built.” The tail was sculpted by Steve Norrington, John Robertson, Christine Overs and Philomena Davis, whereas its internal mechanisms were devised by Ray Lovell and Richard Landon. The torso had to accommodate two stuntmen inside of it to operate the arms. Winston said: “foam human figures representing the two men were placed inside our already-completed body plate, and a wire mesh sculpting armature was constructed around it. That way we could be sure of having enough room.” John Rosengrant, who had sculpted the maquette’s torso, also sculpted the full-size torso. Welded steel armatures were built for the head, arms and legs. Shane Mahan, who had sculpted the maquette’s head, also worked on the full-size head; Chris Overs, Steve Norrington and Philomena Davis sculpted the outer arms; John Rosengrant, Tom Woodruff and John Robertson sculpted the inner arms (which matched those of the Alien Warriors); and Graham High and John Robertson sculpted the legs. The same people collaborated in painting the Queen. A team of moldmakers from Pinewood, headed by Keith Shannon, worked on the casts and molds of the Queen’s components. To minimize the weight of such a massive puppet, the Queen’s skin or surface was cast in a very light polyfoam — placed directly over the armature sections — and fiberglass for the more rigid parts, such as the crown extension.

For most of the sequences involving the full-scale puppet, it was supported by a crane arm; depending on the shot, it would be above, with wires, or from below, with a rigid bracked mount. Winston said: “the wires and the bracked both attached to a point midway down the Queen’s back. The wires were used primarily for the shots where you see her full body. Usually, though, you never see below her knees, and that’s where the bracked came in. The bracked came out of the Queen’s back, down one side of her spine and then under her body where it connected to the crane arm, at her pivot axis. The configuration of this bracket — which was built for us by John Richardson and his effects crew —  enabled us to shoot the Queen without showing the crane arm, because the arm connected to the bracked well below the frame line. The bracked itself was also virtually invisible, mainly because we could run it down either side of her back and it would be concealed by her spiny vertebrae. The pivot action that allowed her body to turn was hydraulically controlled by a power steering unit off the crane arm. So an operator, if we wanted the Queen to turn from right to left, would simply turn a steering wheel from right to left and the body would do the same.” Two pivot devices allowed the Queen to respectively tilt forward and back, and move her neck up and down. Trevor Butterfield devised the hydraulic mechanisms of the body. The controls for all body portions were connected to separate power steering units, each maneuvered by a single operator.

The Queen’s head had a wide range of motion. Both a stunt and a hero version of it were built. “We had two slightly different versions,” Winston said. “One was our major fighting head — which was built to take abuse — and the other was our ‘hero’ head which was finer tuned and lighter weight. Functionally, it was about the same as the fighting head, except that it had an extruding tongue mechanism inside and also had tilt capability. In addition to hydraulic controls, the head had cable-actuated functions as well. The face, for example, had its own movement that was independent of the head. The first time the Queen is shown, in fact — when Ripley discovers her in the Egg chamber — her face extrudes from the head almost like a turtle coming out of its shell. Along with the 360-degree facial movement, there were also cable-operated jaws and snarling lips.”

Since the elbow movement was to be controlled by a wrist, the Queen’s arms had to be very light weight and maneuverable. Winston said: “it was especially important that the large arms be as lightweight as possible. As with our foam-core and trashbag mock-up, the stuntmen’s arms reached only as far as the Queen’s elbows, so the whole movement of each forearm and hand had to be controlled by the wrist of a person whose own arm was stretched out straight. For the forearms, we again used a ski pole set-up — this time with hands that could be either positionable or floppy. Depending on the shot, we could position them in dynamic poses or loosen them up so that they would move around freely when the arms moved. In either case, there was no real articulation as such — but amazingly, the approach worked very well. With all the thrashing around the Queen did, it was impossible to tell if the hand movements were free or directed. For our fighting arms, the ski poles were foamed right into the forearm section, which could thus take quite a beating. We also had a set of lighter-weight arms that were polyfoam down to the Queen’s elbows, but then the forearm was a thin vacuformed shell that weighed practically nothing. Those allowed the stuntmen to have much freer movement — but they were very fragile, so we couldn’t use them to bash up against things or else they’d crush.”

Insert arms were also built for scenes requiring great dexterity, such as when the Queen tries to catch Newt under the Sulaco floor grates. Winston explained: “the insert arms — which were done by Ray Lovell — had completely articulated fingers, cable-controlled by external operators. These we could use in one of two ways. Either we could position the Queen with her elbows out of frame — then come in from the outside with these articulated hands — or we could connect the whole articulated arm right to the Queen’s body. If we did that, though, we couldn’t have our stuntmen inside.”

For the legs, Steve Norrington and Richard Landon devised inner articulated armatures, in two versions. “One was for the full legs that were puppeteered externally by wires,” Winston said. “The other was for a separate set of legs that had no foam below the calf. These were used for closer shots where the feet were not in frame and could therefore be moved about simply by having operators grab onto the base of the armature and manually step the Queen through her paces.”

The internal stuntmen also contributed to puppeteering the Alien Queen’s lower body section and tail. Winston explained: “there was hydraulic movement of the tail at the base for ups and downs, but the side-to-side moves depended upon the amount of pressure the stuntmen put on their footplate — which also happened to be the Queen’s hips. Putting pressure alternately on one side or the other would cause the hips to move from side to side. That, combined with the hydraulic action, created a great deal of base tail movement. At the same time, the outer extremity of the tail was actuated by external wires — usually a combination of two or three wires, each controlled by a different operator.”

Although Cameron intended to use the full-scale Queen for most of the sequences, he acknowledged that it could not perform specific movements required by a number of scenes in the script. It was decided to combine the Winston animatronic with a quarter scale puppet, maneuvered with rods and wires. Stop-motion was initially considered, but ultimately discarded for budget and practical reasons. “As a director, I find it tough to deal with stop-motion,” Cameron recalled. “I was very happy with what was done on The Terminator, but by that point in the story we were dealing with a mechanical device and I didn’t feel the look of stop-motion violated anything we’d already done. I was a little more worried about it with Aliens; the scenes involving the Alien Queen were very important, and what we were trying to do was create a real and believable character. Plus, when we started to analyze the types of shots we’d be doing we realized that most of them would require fairly quick action — turns and spins and rapid strides — the sorts of moves that in stop-motion would cause so much displacement per frame that the arms and legs would end up strobing. There are things you just can’t do in any other way, though, so originally the plan was to have a rod puppet version and a stop-motion version. But eventually it got down to budget and it became a choice of either one or the other. Given that, the rod and cable-actuated puppet seemed more appealing for a number of reasons. One was that I had never worked with that kind of thing before and I wanted to fool around with it and see what could be done. Also I just had a feeling that with a lot of the floor effects we’d be usig — smoke and steam and that sort of thing — we’d have more flexibility with puppets we could shoot ‘live’ on a miniature set.”

To build the  fully articulated small-scale puppet, Cameron hired Doug Beswick — who, like Winston, had already collaborated with the director on The Terminator, being responsible for the stop-motion effects of the Robot. Among his effects crew for Aliens were mechanical designer Phil Notaro, cosmetics supervisor Tony Gardner, and construction supervisor Jim Belohovek. “Our puppet was going to be the same size as Stan’s miniature model — about three feet tall — so while they were still in the process of sculpting, Phil would go over there and take measurements and photographs of it so that he could begin working on some early mechanical designs.” As devised by Beswick and Notaro, the Queen would be supported by a pole that extended from the base of her spine and was attached to a maneuverable overhead crossbar. Her basic motion was controlled by rods attached to her feet and inserted through slots in the miniature set floor. The Queen’s proportionally thin design made it complex to devise a mechanical system that could be fitted inside her anatomy. Beswick continues: “from a mechanical perspective, the design was very difficult — mainly because the Queen was extremely complex and extremely skinny. During that first month when the model was still being sculpted, Phil was able to do some of the mechanics we’d be needing, but not a whole lot because the dimensions weren’t totally locked in yet. In fact, we ended up having to do a couple of things over — like the back joint. Phil underestimated how deep they were going to sculpt the undercuts all around the thorax and, as a result, when it was finished the mechanism he’d worked out for it didn’t fit. So he had to cut it way down, and even then it just barely made it.”

The internal mechanisms fit tightly inside the miniature Queen. “The thorax narrowed down to a tiny triangle-shaped area that was maybe three inches from corner to corner,” he said. “That in itself wasn’t bad, but because the Queen had so many mechanical functions we ended up having to run 49 cables through that area — through a hole that was only about an inch and a half around. Complicating things further was the fact that the Queen was going to have to bend at the waist. As a result, we had to put in a massive joint that would enable her to bend with all those cables in there, plus an inch of foam all the way around. It was important that we have a lot of control over the body. Most especially, it had to be solid enough to hold its position so that when the head was slashing back and forth, the body wouldn’t follow it. The arms were also a problem. They were only three-quarters of an inch in diameter on the outside, yet they had nine functions each. The arms and shoulders moved up and down, forward and back, and rotated. The elbows and wrists bent, the forearms rotated, and even though they were smaller than a soda straw — about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter — all of the fingers had to be functional. We kept trying to talk Jim into either simplifying the Queen or fattening her up a bit but he was very adamant that we stick to the design. It got to be kind of funny because we’d go to him and say, ‘couldn’t the fingers be a little bit bigger?’ And he’d say, ‘that’s not the design.’ Or we’d say, ‘there’s not enough room for a mechanism in here.’ And he’d say, ‘but that’s the design.’ Everything we asked for, we didn’t get.” Ultimately, the small scale puppet replicated the final Queen design perfectly, as Cameron had intended it to do.

A basic aluminium armature was built and mechanized. Available space was always a concern. “As each new mechanism went in,” Notaro said, “space became very tough to come by. I’d lay out a game plan for where I could put something — usually in some tiny little space somewhere — and then I’d have to go in and shift everything all around to actually make it work. It was a long, continuous process. By the time I finished, there was virtually no room left inside at all.” The Queen puppet was fully articulated; the head could be moved widely, complete with the signature independent facial motion, as well as opening jaws and an extending tongue. Her lower neck section could also perform a wide range of movements. The outer arms could move fluidly, and were fitted with functional fingers — whereas the inner arms had more limited motion. The wrists of both versions were floppy, allowing the hands to move about as the arms were puppeteered. The Queen’s back spines could also move up and down, whereas her tail was both mechanized and puppeteered with external wires.

In order to minimize the number of required puppeteers for the 1:4th scale puppet, Notaro devised coordinated cable functions that could be controlled with a single joystick — an idea that also allowed more organic movement. Notaro explained: “oftentimes the difference between jerky, unnatural-looking movement and fluid, natural-looking movement is the way the functions have been organized for operation. When I hook up these kinds of things, I try to group the cables together in such a way that one puppeteer can handle several functions. But they have to be interrelated functions. On the Queen, for example, the head, neck and face functions were all fed into one set of joysticks so that just one operator could control everything needed to give the character expression. That’s the only way to get a real flow in the character. You don’t want to have one operator controlling two different functions; nor do you want to have one function operated by a whole bunch of people. It just makes sense. If the functions are interrelated, you can get a better feeling for the character and make it look more realistic. It also means less breakdown in communication. If you want something to happen, you tell one person as opposed to telling three or four and then trying to choreograph their movements.” The Queen’s 49 cables were controlled by ten joystick systems, operated by a total of five puppeteers on the set — although four assistants were also needed: from above the set, two supported and directed the Queen, and two others puppeteered the legs from below the set. At times, the Queen was also shot upside-down, in order to better conceal the wires.

Placing the Queen’s skin also proved to be difficult — since the special effects artists had to determine the thickness of the layer of foam latex. “Usually, we have a fiberglass substructure in our figures,” Notaro said, “but in this case there was no room for one. So the foam had to be thick enough that we wouldn’t have metal things poking through it, yet thin enough to still bend and fit the character. We had a core that was put inside to hollow out the foam body, but by the time I was done putting in all the mechanics, Tony had to literally cut the foam down to paper thinness in some spots.” The Queen’s large crown also posed a practical challenge due to its sheer size and ratio between it and the Monster’s neck. The structure had to be light and resilient. “It was about 18 inches long,” Beswick said, “which was huge in relation to the tiny neck joint it had to rest on. So it had to be very light, yet strong enough to make it through shooting. We made it out of the thinnest fiberglass we’ve ever used — about 30 thousandths of an inch thick. We used a little bit of gel coat, then one layer of angel hair, one layer of half-ounce cloth and a very little bit of resin. We did it in two sections — the top and bottom separately — and then seamed them together. Amazingly, it was very strong and it held up through the filming like a trooper.”

A more robust, stunt version of the Queen puppet was built by Graham High, Verner Gresty and Steve Onions.  “Jim realised it was a bit precious to risk on the egg sac sequence,” High said, “and took too many operators to get a smooth performance, so Stan asked me to build another more robust cable controlled [version].” The stunt Queen, supposedly simpler, actually featured 70 control cables inside its anatomy. It was used to shoot scenes where articulation was not required. High and his crew also built a third stunt puppet, but it was never actually used for shooting. Both miniature versions of the Queen seen in the film featured an additional finger in the inner arms — but they were filmed so that it would be never shown onscreen, keeping consistency with the footage of the full-size creature.

Following Cameron’s instructions, the Queen was animated with quick and agile movements. Beswick said: “one of Jim Cameron’s comments when he saw our dinosaur from My Science Project was that the Alien Queen would have to move very fast — almost like a blur. The dinosaur had to move very slowly, which was actually more difficult. It’s really much easier to get smooth movement from something that’s moving quickly than it is from something that’s moving slowly. I think Jim got the effect he wanted from the Alien Queen — quick, yet fluid action.”

Expectedly, both the miniature and full-scale Queen proved to be very complex to film, although the anatomy of the Mother creature allowed more screen exposure than the Warriors. Some of the Queen sequences were shot at quicker speed, at times with 12 to 16 frames per second. “In photographing the Warriors,” Cameron explained, “we tried to be circumspect so as not to make them look like men in suits. That was always a concern. With the Queen, however, we felt sure that it would hold up because it clearly isn’t a person. It has extra limbs and spines and other features that defy normal human geometry, and we therefore knew we could show it longer without blowing the game. All we had to do was make it look nonmechanical — which proved not to be a major problem, given Stan Winston’s handiwork and my own tendency to shoot action scenes in very quick cuts.”

The Queen is introduced in the Egg chamber, which was built both as a miniature set and as a full-scale portion of the environment. The scene, in fact, employed a combination of the full-scale Queen and the 1:4th scale, stunt puppet built by High and his crew. In this ambience, the Mother creature is secured in position by extensions of hive material, and is still attached to her Egg sac– which was built both as a partial, featureless extension of the full-size puppet, and as an animatronic extension of the 1:4th scale puppet. The miniature Egg sac was also filled with miniature Eggs, KY Jelly and egg yolk. A miniature puppet of the Queen’s ovipositor was also built. All of the components of both versions of the Egg sac were cast in translucent foam latex. Dennis Skotak recalled: “it was a very difficult environment to work in, and as usual, Jim was very specific about how everything had to be. The egg sac had to operate in a certain manner, the eggs had to move in just such a way and the ovipositor had to deposit an egg precisely and with just the right amount of goo. To create a breathing effect, we had wood poles on the sac leading away from the camera and wires to move the Eggs inside. Then, to get the ovipositor to work, someone had to reach way over through an opening in the side of the set, slide his hand into the Egg sac from the rear and guide the Egg out. One of the biggest problems was that there was so much slime in there that we’d get an Egg all positioned and ready to go and it would keep popping out before we got to shoot it. So someone would have to climb back in and reposition it — and it got messier and more disgusting every time. In fact, everything about that set was unpleasant. There was KY jelly and ‘superslime’ dribbling all over the place and it was extrmely hot. We had steam rising from below and smoke and all kinds of smelly things in there — even cans of freon spurting from both sides. It was like shooting in hell.”

Ripley sets the Egg chamber ablaze, and shoots the Queen — also discharging her grenade launcher at the creature in the process. Skotak continues: “that was another messy one — especially since we found that the most dynamic way of shooting it was up close, with a fairly wide lens, so the sac exploded right into the camera. We0d get everything all set up and then blow the sac apart with charges and all of this goo would come splurting out and collect in a bucked down below so we could recycle it. For some reason, shooting that scene always drew an audience. We’d warn people to keep their distance, but invariably someone would wind up with a face full of slime.”

Lashing in a frenzy, the QUEEN DETACHES FROM THE EGG SAC, ripping away and dragging torn cartilage and tissue behind it. SEEN DIMLY THROUGH swirling smoke, it rises on its powerful legs and steps forward.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

When the Queen detaches from her Egg sac, “it wasn’t possible to do that in full-size, so we were faced with the difficulty of dealing with flame in scale. Bob came up with the idea of using mirrors. One of them was placed behind the Queen and positioned in such a way to reflect a flame bar we had set up about 15 feet away. At that distance, the flames — which were six or seven feet high — looked quite small in the mirror. It was a good scale. In the same shot, another flame bar was positioned similarly, but in such a way that when photographed through a beam-splitter, flames would also appear to be in front of the Queen. Obviously, we could have done the same effect optically, but this method allowed us to move the camera during the shot and also introudce mechanical effects and falling debris in front of the background flames — and do it all quite simply.”

Ripley sees a silhouette moving in the smoke… a glistening black shape which FILLS THE CORRIDOR TO THE CEILING… the QUEEN.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

The Alien Mother chases Ripley and Newt as they reach the lift at the end of a corridor — one of the last scenes to be filmed with the 1:4th scale Queen. “The idea was that the Queen was really too big to fit in the corridor very well,” Notaro said, “and that’s how Ripley gets ahead. For us, it was a difficult shot in that she had to be crushed down to much shorter than her usual height and then sequeezed through a quarter-scale set representing the hallway. To make it work, I readjusted the support post so that rather than coming out of her back and up, it came out from the rear, away from camera. Then I disconnected the joysticks and ran all the cables through slots I had cut in the post. She had to travel about six feet down the corridor, so I put the post with the cables on it on a camera dolly that I’d rented and then reconnected the joysticks. It was still a very tight squeeze. Even shortened to her minimum height, she just barely fit in the hallway.” As Notaro had to fly back home, the Queen was eventually maneuvered by other puppeteers at Pinewood — but according to him, “it came out real nice.”

During the film’s climax, the Queen’s acidic blood announces her presence in the Sulaco. Several different chemical combinations were tested, but ultimately the crew had to resort to the polystyrene approach. Richardson recalled: “we went back to the polystyrene approach, but tried to give it a different look. Instead of acetone, we used carbon tetrachloride — which produces basically the same effect — and we mixed it with all sorts of dyes and soaps and other chemicals so that when it hit not only would it dissolve the polystyrene, but it would smoke and bubble while doing so — which was much better than just seeing something melt through. Also, I found that by adding metallic powder onto the surface of the polystyrene, as it dissolved the powder floated on top of the solution — and looked very much like molten metal.”

The Queen violently impales Bishop with the dagger-like tip of her tail — then lifts him up and rips him apart. Winston explained the complex effect: “the Bishop rip-apart was a multistep effect. At first he’s just standing there and he gives a little jolt and for an instant you think maybe he’s got a Chestburster inside him. Then the tail comes right through him from behind. The normal way to do that effect would be to put him on a slant board with a fake body, but we didn’t want to do that. We wanted him to be standing in plain view and then suddenly have this thing shoot out of his chest. To do it, we made a slightly built-up chest plate for Lance Henriksen that allowed a flexible rubberized tail to be inserted and take a bend. So in the start position, the tail piece was lying flat inside the chest plate. It was then pulled up and out through his shirt by a wire that you couldn’t see because of the way it was shot — wires can be hidden. Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis developed that part of the effect. Then we did a switch. The next shot was a variation of the old arrow-through-the-head trick. John Richardson’s crew built a harness that went through Lance’s back. On the front side there was a rigid tail piece that was the length we had pulled out in the previous shot. The back side connected to the Queen’s actual tail. Lance’s feet weren’t in the frame, so we were able to put him on a teeterboard to lift him up. Jim set up the shot in such a way that it starts out tight on Lance with the tail sticking through his chest, then widens out to reveal that it is in fact an Alien tail that has come through from behind and finally follows that tail all the way up and into the drop-ship where the Queen is looming overhead. With her tail, the Queen lifts Bishop right up to where she is in the drop-ship. Her arms come out. One hand grabs the upper part of his body and the other hand grabs the lower half of his body and she literally rips him in two. Lance said they weren’t paying him enough to do that shot, so we had to come up with a dummy rig.” The two-part dummy that had to be ripped apart featured a spring-loaded armature that would “pop apart” and push the Queen’s hands (which were put into slots) along with it, creating the illusion that they were actually tearing the android apart.

After ripping Bishop apart, the Queen lowers herself down from the dropship; the full-scale Queen was used. Winston recalled: “for the scene where she lowers herself down from the dropship, we ran wires from the pivot point on her back up through the ship to the top of the stage. Our stuntmen were inside operating the arms and we had wire riggers off to the side lowering the Queen down onto the ramp. Other wires — connected to the knees  and to the ankles — allowed the legs to be controlled from above too. It was like a giant marionette. And so the moves wouldn’t look floppy, we ran additional wires from her ankles to specific landing points so she could step down firmly in a dynamic position. Her tail also had to uncurl, which meant other wires and other puppeteers. It was pretty rugged. Jim had multiple cameras going and we did it a multitude of times, but the shot was worth it.”

The Alien Mother chases Ripley when she runs towards the cargo hold door. This was actually the first scene to be filmed with the 1:4th scale Queen puppet. “We had everything working on that shot,” Notaro explained, “two guys supporting the Queen from above, two others walking her from below and five cable operators for the other functions. In all, the Queen was capable of about thirty movements, but Jim wanted one more when we got to shooting — a rotating move right at the top of the tail so that she’d be able to turn more quickly. So we added a tiny mechanism in her butt that allowed her whole body to turn around farther and faster. That was also helped along by turning the post she was mounted on. By turning the post, everything turned.” After several sessions of rehearsal, smoke and alarm lights were introduced into the set as the scene required. The sequence was shot at 36 frames per second, meaning that the puppeteers had to maneuver the creature faster than usual.

Cameron allegedly “showed no mercy” to the small-scale Queen puppet during filming, according to Notaro: “during our next shot, we had two puppeteers literally ramming the puppet into the sliding doors as hard as they could — over and over again. Then, after about ten takes, Jim would say, ‘here’s how I want you to do it.’ And he‘d it three times harder than anybody else had. Luckily, the Queen turned out to be very durable. We did have some slippages in the mechanisms, but that was to be expected since they had been built to fit into a very thin, small area and they were being abused very badly. I was constantly adjusting things to keep it operating correctly. We also had to keep it looking good because we might do a scene one day where she was completely battered and the next day do a scene where she had to look brand new. There was constant maintenance going on.”

The climactic fight with the power loader ensues. Special effects supervisor John Richardson explained: “during the fight, there were a lot of different things happening all at once. In fact, for the scenes where we had the Alien Queen and the power loader working together, the whole stage was full of special effects people pulling wires and pushing levers. It was quite a sight.” The sequence employed an orchestrated combination of footage with the full-size Queen and the 1:4th scale puppet. When the Power Loader violently smashes the Queen with its lifting arms, the dummy version was used. “We used the floppy Queen for a lot of the tumbling and alling sequences,” Notaro said. “It was just hard and soft foam pieces glued together. We’d throw the floppy Queen over a bunch of boxes, for example, then cut back to the articulated Queen for when she stood back up.”

Ripley realizes that the only way to defeat the creature is to eject it out of the Sulaco’s main airlock — a method familiar to her. “Where Ripley wallops the Queen with the Power Loader arms, then grabs her by the neck and lifts her into the air — that was all done live action,” Notaro explained. “We picked it up with the puppets at that point, just as Ripley is about to toss the Queen into the airlock. We had a couple shots of them fighting, then the Queen breaks one of the hydraulics on the right knee of the Power Loader and it buckles up, sending both of them crashing to the bottom of the airlock.” When the Queen falls into the airlock, the dummy Queen was used. To portray the Queen being ejected into outer space, the airlock portion of the set was bolted to the ceiling, with a starfield blanket below. Both the miniature and full-size Queen (which was adequately supported by wires) were used when the creature attempts to hold onto Ripley’s leg, before finally falling to her demise.

The final shot of the Queen writhing aimlessly as she falls towards the camera was again achieved with the 1:4th scale puppet — which was attached to a motion control system, and filmed against bluescreen. Visual effects supervisor, Brian Johnson (who had already worked on Alien) commented: “in addition to the rotation, the Queen had cable-operated head movements, cable-operated arms and legs, plus a few exterior wires to jiggle the tail a bit — all of which were nonrepeatable. So that was another instance where we had to use bluescreen.”

Giger himself commented on the Mother Monster, asserting that “the Alien Queen is very complicated, like the way I would have done. I like how she moves.” He also said in an interview with Cinefantastique that “She’s a bit smaller in the face than my Alien, but my basic design was very well studied. She was frighteningly well animated.”

Special Thanks to Graham High and Ady Parish, who have provided additional information for this article.

For more images of the Alien Queen, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Part IIa: Aliens
Next: Part IIIa: Alien³, Giger’s Beast

Main Article: Pumpkinhead

Main Articles:

• StarBeast — Aliens
• StarBeast — Aliens, the Alien Queen

A PIERCING SHRIEK fills the chamber.

She turns. And there it is.

A massive silhouette in the mist, the ALIEN QUEEN glowers over her eggs like a great, glistening black Insect-Buddha. What’s bigger and meaner than the Alien? His Momma. Her fanged head is an unimaginable horror. Her six limbs, the four arms, and two powerful legs, are folded grotesquely over her distended abdomen. The egg-filled abdomen swells and swells into a great pulsing tubular sac, suspended from a lattice of pipes and conduits by a web-like membrane as if some vast coil of intestines was draped carelessly among the machinery.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

Before being attached to Aliens, and even before the production of The Terminator, director James Cameron wrote a treatment for a story called Mother, which featured “its own type of Alien Queen.” Although it would never eventually be greenlit, Mother was heavily influential on Cameron’s conception for Aliens. First written towards the end of 1980, the treatment fundamentally concerned “a female, genetically engineered creature attempting to ensure the survival of its young,” hence the title itself. The concept of the Alien Queen and the climax of Aliens itself was, in fact, an idea first conceived for Mother. Cameron continues: “in the final confrontation in Mother, a human in a ‘power suit’ — a utility exoskeleton that is a sort of cross between a fork-lift and a robot — fights the alien creature that I called the ‘Skraath’ or ‘Skraith’, a black six-limbed panther that I had previously created for another project called Labyrinth.”

Cameron’s concept of the Skraith. Whilst the idea had to be visually adapted for Aliens, this sketch would later serve as the starting point for the Thanator in Avatar (many other elements from that film were also extrapolated from the ideas for Mother).

In a deleted scene from the first film, the Alien’s lifecycle had already been revealed — with the so-called Egg-morphing. Cameron, however, exploited on its excision to introduce his new idea. He explained: “If you follow Dan [O’Bannon]’s original concept, the closure of the original cycle was the human host turning back into a cocoon. I never found that to be very satisfying as it showed — when one had the facehugger attached, the embryo implanted, and when it burst out it killed that person. There was nothing going on with John Hurt in that respect. So there was a different version of it when the Alien grabbed Harry Dean Stanton and presumably put him into a cocoon. It’s certainly no great logical detour to assume that it might have used him as another host, but I think it would be a bit odd that he turned into an egg. That’s something that would have been hard for the audience to swallow because it involved the transformation of the human host and although one can assume the Alien can metamorphose,  to have its biological properties take up residence in a human being and change it was going beyond the ground rules they set themselves. One of Alien‘s great attributes was that it set up a very weird biological process, but it has a basis in science fact all the way through, like the cycle of a digger wasp which paralyses its prey and injects an egg into the living body to mature. There’s a validity in all of that, but I dispensed with it because we never saw that in the film anyway. Had it appeared in the film I wouldn’t have violated any logic turbulence.”

Without the Egg-morphing sequence (which would be reintegrated in the Director’s cut of Alien decades after the production of Aliens), the original film did not explain how the Eggs in the Derelict spacecraft came to be. Cameron thus elaborated the Queen’s role in The Winston Effect: “that adult [Alien] form — one of them, anyway — couldn’t possibly have laid the thousand or so eggs that filled the inside of that Derelict ship. So, working from that image — acres and acres of these quite large eggs, two and a half to three feet tall — I began focusing on the idea of a hierarchical structure where the central figure is a giant Queen, whose role is to further the species.” The director explained further in a letter to Starlog: “Extrapolating from entomology (ants, termites, etc.), an immature female, one of the first to emerge from hosts, grows to become a new Queen, while males become Drones or Warriors. Subsequent female larvae remain dormant or are killed by males… or biochemically sense that a Queen exists and change into males to limit waste. The Queen locates a nesting spot (the warmth of the atmosphere station heat exchanger level being perfect for egg incubation) and becomes sedentary. She is then tended by the males as her abdomen swells into a distended egg sac.”

James Cameron’s first Alien Queen concept.

Since the integration of the Queen concept in Aliens‘ script, Cameron had a precise idea of what the Mother creature’s appearance should eventually be. Winston told Cinefex: “Right from the start, Jim had a concept of the Alien Queen in the back of his head. In fact, when we first began talking about the project he showed me the beautiful rendering he had done of it which I liked immediately.” Heavily influenced by Giger’s biomechanical aesthetic, Cameron envisioned a tall, proportionally thin and feminine Monster, with an elongated head ending in a crown, and six limbs; although the general anatomy would inevitably be parallel to a dinosaur (essentially, a biped creature with a tail) — Cameron wanted the design to distance itself from those, instead taking inspiration from arthropods: “I feel a sense of authorship when it comes to the Queen. Somebody once described it as an anorexic dinosaur, which I suppose is inevitable even though that’s not what I had in mind. In fact, I wanted specifically not to suggest a dinosaur concept — at least overtly — because that would have been a little too commonplace and boring. For me, the Queen is really a blend of what Giger does with what I wanted to do, which was to create something that was big and powerful and terrifying and fast and very female — hideous and beautiful at the same time, like a black widow spider.”

One of the maquettes. Two wooden figures represent the placement of the two stuntmen inside the animatronic.

Cameron also conceived the basic structure of a full-size animatronic Alien Queen, a marvel of unprecedented complexity. Suspended from a cable rig, the creature would contain two puppeteers that would control one large and one small arm each — in order to achieve organic fluidity to their movements. The rest of the Monster — which included the head, legs, and tail — would instead be puppeteered with a combination of hydraulic mechanisms, wires and rods. Although Winston was intrigued by Cameron’s concept of the Queen, he was initially skeptical about the intended structure of the puppet, for primarily practical reasons. “Jim had seen what we could do with puppets on The Terminator,” he said, “and so it made perfect sense that he thought of puppeteering techniques when he needed a way to realize the Alien Queen. But, even so, it was a huge leap of faith to believe we could build a 14-foot tall, acting puppet.”

One of Winston’s concepts.

Winston tried to elaborate his own renderings of the Alien Queen. He explained: “there were a few little things about the design that I thought could be improved, so I worked up a few sketches of my own and showed them to Jim. Actually they were pretty much like his, although on one of them I had deleted the extra set of arms and reconfigured it so that only a single stuntman would be needed inside.” Cameron rejected the ideas, adamant to adhere to his vision.

Giger’s Alien Monster IV. Notice the hands and the neck of the creature, which were translated onto Cameron’s Queen design.

Though the director did not intend to use Winston’s designs, some of their traits were implemented in the final design — which, otherwise, essentially adhered to Cameron’s concept. “One thing Jim did like,” Winston continues, “was an idea from my redesign of the leg that gave it a double joint and made it look less human. In the end, Jim took into consideration some of what I’d said and the things I’d drawn and he went off and drew another Queen which was similar to his first but much more refined. In fact, when he came back, it was obvious that that was the Alien Queen. There was no doubt about it. We then sat down together and worked out a scale drawing — literally blueprinting her out in profile and front view, with her exact shape and exactly how she would have to be done to get two people inside.” The final Queen design also included more overt influence from Giger’s paintings — such as Alien Monster IV, which provided inspiration for both the Queen’s neck and hands. The Queen’s head also included a front portion able to move independently from the crown and ‘retract’ inside it when at rest. When the Queen is revealed, she is still attached to her Egg-laying sac, inspired by queen termites.

Cameron’s final Queen design.

The garbage bag test.

Once Cameron defined the final appearance of the Queen,  the director worked with Winston to further elaborate the structure of the full-size animatronic, and whether or not it could be actually brought to the screen. A test was made, with a ‘garbage bag’ mock-up Alien Queen. Winston recalled: “once we came up with a design and an idea of how we were going to get it to work, we rented a crane and built a quick little body plate setup out of wood that would hold two stuntmen. Then we made a rough mock-up of the Queen using black foam-core and plastic trash bags and suspended our stuntmen inside it. For the big arms, we used ski pole extensions — which were lightweight, but very strong — and attached them to some creature hands I had developed for another project. Each stuntman would hold one with his arm stretched out straight so that from his shoulder to his fist would be the Queen’s upper arm and from his fist to the end of the pole would be her forearm. For the smaller arms in front, the guys were able to use their own arms without any extensions. We set this thing up out in our parking lot to see if it was going to work — and it did. There was still a lot of fine-tuning to be done, but the basic concept was good.”

The Alien Queen was first built as a 1:4th scale maquette, which served as a base for the construction of the full-scale puppet, as well as a moulding base for the quarter-scale rod puppet used in the miniature sequences. The maquette was sculpted and painted by a team of sculptors: Shane Mahan for the head; John Rosengrant for the body; Greg Figiel for the arms; Alec Gillis and Willie Whitten for the legs; and Brian Penikas and Shawn McEnroe for the tail. “We all had such a wonderful time sculpting that thing,” Rosengrant said in The Winston Effect. “At the end of each day of sculpting, we’d all look at it, and say, ‘this is going to be great.'”

The creation of the full-size animatronic Queen began with the construction of a solid understructure able to support the various components and mechanisms, as well as the two internal stuntmen. The two puppeteers inside the Queen were Nick Gillard and Malcolm Weaver. Winston recalled: “the first thing we had to do was build the inner body of the Queen. The strong fiberglass shells that would hold the stuntmen and the strong aluminium plate inside that would carry the hydraulics. That inner section would in large part dictate the size of the Queen’s body, so it was necessary to work that out in advance.” Assigned to the fabrication of the supporting structure were Rick Lazzarini and Wayne Sturm. Once completed, it was shipped to London, where the rest of the construction would be held. “We set up shop on a large effects stage at Pinewood,” Winston said, “and began building the different components of the Queen — which basically we designed and built and sculpted exactly as we had done the miniature. Armatures were built for the legs and arms and body and head and tail — all separately.”

The first section to be constructed was the Queen’s tail. “The simplest armature to build was for the tail, so I decided we should do that first,” Winston said. “Not that it was simple by any stretch of the imagination, but the tail was probably the easiest to build quickly and I figured it would be a good break-in project for my English crew to help me assess individual strengths and weaknesses. Once the tail armature was done, we could then go to clay on it while the rest of the armatures were being built.” The tail was sculpted by Steve Norrington, John Robertson, Christine Overs and Philomena Davis, whereas its internal mechanisms were devised by Ray Lovell and Richard Landon. The torso had to accommodate two stuntmen inside of it to operate the arms. Winston said: “foam human figures representing the two men were placed inside our already-completed body plate, and a wire mesh sculpting armature was constructed around it. That way we could be sure of having enough room.” John Rosengrant, who had sculpted the maquette’s torso, also sculpted the full-size torso. Welded steel armatures were built for the head, arms, and legs. Shane Mahan, who had sculpted the maquette’s head, also worked on the full-size head; Chris Overs, Steve Norrington, and Philomena Davis sculpted the outer arms; John Rosengrant, Tom Woodruff, and John Robertson sculpted the inner arms (which matched those of the Alien Warriors); and Graham High and John Robertson sculpted the legs. The same people collaborated in painting the Queen. A team of mould makers from Pinewood — headed by Keith Shannon — worked on the casts and molds of the Queen’s components. To minimize the weight of such a massive puppet, the Queen’s skin or surface was cast in a very light polyfoam — placed directly over the armature sections — and fiberglass for the more rigid parts, such as the crown extension.

For most of the sequences involving the full-scale puppet, it was supported by a crane arm; depending on the shot, it would be above, with wires, or from below, with a rigid bracket mount. Winston said: “the wires and the bracket both attached to a point midway down the Queen’s back. The wires were used primarily for the shots where you see her full body. Usually, though, you never see below her knees, and that’s where the bracket came in. The bracket came out of the Queen’s back, down one side of her spine and then under her body where it connected to the crane arm, at her pivot axis. The configuration of this bracket — which was built for us by John Richardson and his effects crew —  enabled us to shoot the Queen without showing the crane arm, because the arm connected to the bracket well below the frame line. The bracket itself was also virtually invisible, mainly because we could run it down either side of her back and it would be concealed by her spiny vertebrae. The pivot action that allowed her body to turn was hydraulically controlled by a power steering unit off the crane arm. So an operator, if we wanted the Queen to turn from right to left, would simply turn a steering wheel from right to left and the body would do the same.” Two pivot devices allowed the Queen to respectively tilt forward and back and move her neck up and down. Trevor Butterfield devised the hydraulic mechanisms of the body. The controls for all body portions were connected to separate power steering units, each maneuvered by a single operator.

The Queen’s head had a wide range of motion. Both a stunt and a hero version of it were built. “We had two slightly different versions,” Winston said. “One was our major fighting head — which was built to take abuse — and the other was our ‘hero’ head which was finer tuned and lighter weight. Functionally, it was about the same as the fighting head, except that it had an extruding tongue mechanism inside and also had tilt capability. In addition to hydraulic controls, the head had cable-actuated functions as well. The face, for example, had its own movement that was independent of the head. The first time the Queen is shown, in fact — when Ripley discovers her in the Egg chamber — her face extrudes from the head almost like a turtle coming out of its shell. Along with the 360-degree facial movement, there were also cable-operated jaws and snarling lips.”

Since the elbow movement was to be controlled by a wrist, the Queen’s arms had to be very lightweight and maneuverable. Winston said: “it was especially important that the large arms be as lightweight as possible. As with our foam-core and trash bag mock-up, the stuntmen’s arms reached only as far as the Queen’s elbows, so the whole movement of each forearm and hand had to be controlled by the wrist of a person whose own arm was stretched out straight. For the forearms, we again used a ski pole set-up — this time with hands that could be either positionable or floppy. Depending on the shot, we could position them in dynamic poses or loosen them up so that they would move around freely when the arms moved. In either case, there was no real articulation as such — but amazingly, the approach worked very well. With all the thrashing around the Queen did, it was impossible to tell if the hand movements were free or directed. For our fighting arms, the ski poles were foamed right into the forearm section, which could thus take quite a beating. We also had a set of lighter-weight arms that were polyfoam down to the Queen’s elbows, but then the forearm was a thin vacuformed shell that weighed practically nothing. Those allowed the stuntmen to have much freer movement — but they were very fragile, so we couldn’t use them to bash up against things or else they’d crush.”

Insert arms were also built for scenes requiring great dexterity, such as when the Queen tries to catch Newt under the Sulaco floor grates. Winston explained: “the insert arms — which were done by Ray Lovell — had completely articulated fingers, cable-controlled by external operators. These we could use in one of two ways. Either we could position the Queen with her elbows out of frame — then come in from the outside with these articulated hands — or we could connect the whole articulated arm right to the Queen’s body. If we did that, though, we couldn’t have our stuntmen inside.”

For the legs, Steve Norrington and Richard Landon devised inner articulated armatures, in two versions. “One was for the full legs that were puppeteered externally by wires,” Winston said. “The other was for a separate set of legs that had no foam below the calf. These were used for closer shots where the feet were not in frame and could therefore be moved about simply by having operators grab onto the base of the armature and manually step the Queen through her paces.”

The internal stuntmen also contributed to puppeteering the Alien Queen’s lower body section and tail. Winston explained: “there was hydraulic movement of the tail at the base for ups and downs, but the side-to-side moves depended upon the amount of pressure the stuntmen put on their footplate — which also happened to be the Queen’s hips. Putting pressure alternately on one side or the other would cause the hips to move from side to side. That, combined with the hydraulic action, created a great deal of base tail movement. At the same time, the outer extremity of the tail was actuated by external wires — usually a combination of two or three wires, each controlled by a different operator.”

Although Cameron intended to use the full-scale Queen for most of the sequences, he acknowledged that it could not perform specific movements required by a number of scenes in the script. It was decided to combine the Winston animatronic with a quarter scale puppet, maneuvered with rods and wires. Stop-motion was initially considered, but ultimately discarded for budget and practical reasons. “As a director, I find it tough to deal with stop-motion,” Cameron recalled. “I was very happy with what was done on The Terminator, but by that point in the story we were dealing with a mechanical device and I didn’t feel the look of stop-motion violated anything we’d already done. I was a little more worried about it with Aliens; the scenes involving the Alien Queen were very important, and what we were trying to do was create a real and believable character. Plus, when we started to analyze the types of shots we’d be doing we realized that most of them would require fairly quick action — turns and spins and rapid strides — the sorts of moves that in stop-motion would cause so much displacement per frame that the arms and legs would end up strobing. There are things you just can’t do in any other way, though, so originally the plan was to have a rod puppet version and a stop-motion version. But eventually it got down to budget and it became a choice of either one or the other. Given that, the rod and cable-actuated puppet seemed more appealing for a number of reasons. One was that I had never worked with that kind of thing before and I wanted to fool around with it and see what could be done. Also I just had a feeling that with a lot of the floor effects we’d be using — smoke and steam and that sort of thing — we’d have more flexibility with puppets we could shoot ‘live’ on a miniature set.”

To build the  fully articulated small-scale puppet, Cameron hired Doug Beswick — who, like Winston, had already collaborated with the director on The Terminator, being responsible for the stop-motion effects of the Robot. Among his effects crew for Aliens were mechanical designer Phil Notaro, cosmetics supervisor Tony Gardner, and construction supervisor Jim Belohovek. “Our puppet was going to be the same size as Stan’s miniature model — about three feet tall — so while they were still in the process of sculpting, Phil would go over there and take measurements and photographs of it so that he could begin working on some early mechanical designs.” As devised by Beswick and Notaro, the Queen would be supported by a pole that extended from the base of her spine and was attached to a maneuverable overhead crossbar. Her basic motion was controlled by rods attached to her feet and inserted through slots in the miniature set floor. The Queen’s proportionally thin design made it complex to devise a mechanical system that could be fitted inside her anatomy. Beswick continues: “from a mechanical perspective, the design was very difficult — mainly because the Queen was extremely complex and extremely skinny. During that first month when the model was still being sculpted, Phil was able to do some of the mechanics we’d be needing, but not a whole lot because the dimensions weren’t totally locked in yet. In fact, we ended up having to do a couple of things over — like the back joint. Phil underestimated how deep they were going to sculpt the undercuts all around the thorax and, as a result, when it was finished the mechanism he’d worked out for it didn’t fit. So he had to cut it way down, and even then it just barely made it.”

The internal mechanisms fit tightly inside the miniature Queen. “The thorax narrowed down to a tiny triangle-shaped area that was maybe three inches from corner to corner,” he said. “That in itself wasn’t bad, but because the Queen had so many mechanical functions we ended up having to run 49 cables through that area — through a hole that was only about an inch and a half around. Complicating things further was the fact that the Queen was going to have to bend at the waist. As a result, we had to put in a massive joint that would enable her to bend with all those cables in there, plus an inch of foam all the way around. It was important that we have a lot of control over the body. Most especially, it had to be solid enough to hold its position so that when the head was slashing back and forth, the body wouldn’t follow it. The arms were also a problem. They were only three-quarters of an inch in diameter on the outside, yet they had nine functions each. The arms and shoulders moved up and down, forward and back, and rotated. The elbows and wrists bent, the forearms rotated, and even though they were smaller than a soda straw — about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter — all of the fingers had to be functional. We kept trying to talk Jim into either simplifying the Queen or fattening her up a bit, but he was very adamant that we stick to the design. It got to be kind of funny because we’d go to him and say, ‘couldn’t the fingers be a little bit bigger?’ And he’d say, ‘that’s not the design.’ Or we’d say, ‘there’s not enough room for a mechanism in here.’ And he’d say, ‘but that’s the design.’ Everything we asked for, we didn’t get.” Ultimately, the small scale puppet replicated the final Queen design perfectly, as Cameron had intended it to do.

A basic aluminium armature was built and mechanized. Available space was always a concern. “As each new mechanism went in,” Notaro said, “space became very tough to come by. I’d lay out a game plan for where I could put something — usually in some tiny little space somewhere — and then I’d have to go in and shift everything all around to actually make it work. It was a long, continuous process. By the time I finished, there was virtually no room left inside at all.” The Queen puppet was fully articulated; the head could be moved widely, complete with the signature independent facial motion, as well as opening jaws and an extending tongue. Her lower neck section could also perform a wide range of movements. The outer arms could move fluidly, and were fitted with functional fingers — whereas the inner arms had more limited motion. The wrists of both versions were floppy, allowing the hands to move about as the arms were puppeteered. The Queen’s back spines could also move up and down whereas her tail was both mechanized and puppeteered with external wires.

In order to minimize the number of required puppeteers for the 1:4th scale puppet, Notaro devised coordinated cable functions that could be controlled with a single joystick — an idea that also allowed more organic movement. Notaro explained: “oftentimes the difference between jerky, unnatural-looking movement and fluid, natural-looking movement is the way the functions have been organized for operation. When I hook up these kinds of things, I try to group the cables together in such a way that one puppeteer can handle several functions. But they have to be interrelated functions. On the Queen, for example, the head, neck and face functions were all fed into one set of joysticks so that just one operator could control everything needed to give the character expression. That’s the only way to get a real flow in the character. You don’t want to have one operator controlling two different functions; nor do you want to have one function operated by a whole bunch of people. It just makes sense. If the functions are interrelated, you can get a better feeling for the character and make it look more realistic. It also means less breakdown in communication. If you want something to happen, you tell one person as opposed to telling three or four and then trying to choreograph their movements.” The Queen’s 49 cables were controlled by ten joystick systems, operated by a total of five puppeteers on the set — although four assistants were also needed: from above the set, two supported and directed the Queen, and two others puppeteered the legs from below the set. At times, the Queen was also shot upside-down, in order to better conceal the wires.

Placing the Queen’s skin also proved to be difficult — since the special effects artists had to determine the thickness of the layer of foam latex. “Usually, we have a fiberglass substructure in our figures,” Notaro said, “but, in this case, there was no room for one. So the foam had to be thick enough that we wouldn’t have metal things poking through it, yet thin enough to still bend and fit the character. We had a core that was put inside to hollow out the foam body, but by the time I was done putting in all the mechanics, Tony had to literally cut the foam down to paper thinness in some spots.” The Queen’s large crown also posed a practical challenge due to its sheer size and ratio between it and the Monster’s neck. The structure had to be light and resilient. “It was about 18 inches long,” Beswick said, “which was huge in relation to the tiny neck joint it had to rest on. So it had to be very light, yet strong enough to make it through shooting. We made it out of the thinnest fiberglass we’ve ever used — about 30 thousandths of an inch thick. We used a little bit of gel coat, then one layer of angel hair, one layer of half-ounce cloth and a very little bit of resin. We did it in two sections — the top and bottom separately — and then seamed them together. Amazingly, it was very strong and it held up through the filming like a trooper.”

A more robust, stunt version of the Queen puppet was built by Graham High, Verner Gresty, and Steve Onions.  “Jim realised it was a bit precious to risk on the egg sac sequence,” High said, “and took too many operators to get a smooth performance, so Stan asked me to build another more robust cable controlled [version].” The stunt Queen, supposedly simpler, actually featured 70 control cables inside its anatomy. It was used to shoot scenes where articulation was not required. High and his crew also built a third stunt puppet, but it was never actually used for shooting. Both miniature versions of the Queen seen in the film featured an additional finger in the inner arms — but they were filmed so that it would be never shown onscreen, keeping consistency with the footage of the full-size creature.

Following Cameron’s instructions, the Queen was animated with quick and agile movements. Beswick said: “one of Jim Cameron’s comments when he saw our dinosaur from My Science Project was that the Alien Queen would have to move very fast — almost like a blur. The dinosaur had to move very slowly, which was actually more difficult. It’s really much easier to get smooth movement from something that’s moving quickly than it is from something that’s moving slowly. I think Jim got the effect he wanted from the Alien Queen — quick, yet fluid action.”

Expectedly, both the miniature and full-scale Queen proved to be very complex to film, although the anatomy of the Mother creature allowed more screen exposure than the Warriors. Some of the Queen sequences were shot at a quicker speed, at times with 12 to 16 frames per second. “In photographing the Warriors,” Cameron explained, “we tried to be circumspect so as not to make them look like men in suits. That was always a concern. With the Queen, however, we felt sure that it would hold up because it clearly isn’t a person. It has extra limbs and spines and other features that defy normal human geometry, and we, therefore, knew we could show it longer without blowing the game. All we had to do was make it look nonmechanical — which proved not to be a major problem, given Stan Winston’s handiwork and my own tendency to shoot action scenes in very quick cuts.”

The Queen is introduced in the Egg chamber, which was built both as a miniature set and as a full-scale portion of the environment. The scene, in fact, employed a combination of the full-scale Queen and the 1:4th scale, stunt puppet built by High and his crew. In this ambience, the Mother creature is secured in position by extensions of hive material, and is still attached to her Egg sac– which was built both as a partial, featureless extension of the full-size puppet, and as an animatronic extension of the 1:4th scale puppet. The miniature Egg sac was also filled with miniature Eggs, KY Jelly, and egg yolk. A miniature puppet of the Queen’s ovipositor was also built. All of the components of both versions of the Egg sac were cast in translucent foam latex. Dennis Skotak recalled: “it was a very difficult environment to work in, and as usual, Jim was very specific about how everything had to be. The egg sac had to operate in a certain manner, the eggs had to move in just such a way and the ovipositor had to deposit an egg precisely and with just the right amount of goo. To create a breathing effect, we had wood poles on the sac leading away from the camera and wires to move the Eggs inside. Then, to get the ovipositor to work, someone had to reach way over through an opening in the side of the set, slide his hand into the Egg sac from the rear and guide the Egg out. One of the biggest problems was that there was so much slime in there that we’d get an Egg all positioned and ready to go and it would keep popping out before we got to shoot it. So someone would have to climb back in and reposition it — and it got messier and more disgusting every time. In fact, everything about that set was unpleasant. There were KY jelly and ‘superslime’ dribbling all over the place and it was extremely hot. We had steam rising from below and smoke and all kinds of smelly things in there — even cans of freon spurting from both sides. It was like shooting in hell.”

Ripley sets the Egg chamber ablaze and shoots the Queen — also discharging her grenade launcher at the creature in the process. Skotak continues: “that was another messy one — especially since we found that the most dynamic way of shooting it was up close, with a fairly wide lens, so the sac exploded right into the camera. We0d get everything all set up and then blow the sac apart with charges and all of this goo would come splurting out and collect in a bucket down below so we could recycle it. For some reason, shooting that scene always drew an audience. We’d warn people to keep their distance, but invariably someone would wind up with a face full of slime.”

Lashing in a frenzy, the QUEEN DETACHES FROM THE EGG SAC, ripping away and dragging torn cartilage and tissue behind it. SEEN DIMLY THROUGH swirling smoke, it rises on its powerful legs and steps forward.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

When the Queen detaches from her Egg sac, “it wasn’t possible to do that in full-size, so we were faced with the difficulty of dealing with flame in scale. Bob came up with the idea of using mirrors. One of them was placed behind the Queen and positioned in such a way to reflect a flame bar we had set up about 15 feet away. At that distance, the flames — which were six or seven feet high — looked quite small in the mirror. It was a good scale. In the same shot, another flame bar was positioned similarly, but in such a way that when photographed through a beam-splitter, flames would also appear to be in front of the Queen. Obviously, we could have done the same effect optically, but this method allowed us to move the camera during the shot and also introduce mechanical effects and falling debris in front of the background flames — and do it all quite simply.”

Ripley sees a silhouette moving in the smoke… a glistening black shape which FILLS THE CORRIDOR TO THE CEILING… the QUEEN.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

The Alien Mother chases Ripley and Newt as they reach the lift at the end of a corridor — one of the last scenes to be filmed with the 1:4th scale Queen. “The idea was that the Queen was really too big to fit in the corridor very well,” Notaro said, “and that’s how Ripley gets ahead. For us, it was a difficult shot in that she had to be crushed down to much shorter than her usual height and then squeezed through a quarter-scale set representing the hallway. To make it work, I readjusted the support post so that rather than coming out of her back and up, it came out from the rear, away from the camera. Then I disconnected the joysticks and ran all the cables through slots I had cut in the post. She had to travel about six feet down the corridor, so I put the post with the cables on it on a camera dolly that I’d rented and then reconnected the joysticks. It was still a very tight squeeze. Even shortened to her minimum height, she just barely fit in the hallway.” As Notaro had to fly back home, the Queen was eventually maneuvered by other puppeteers at Pinewood — but according to him, “it came out real nice.”

During the film’s climax, the Queen’s acidic blood announces her presence in the Sulaco. Several different chemical combinations were tested, but ultimately the crew had to resort to the polystyrene approach. Richardson recalled: “we went back to the polystyrene approach but tried to give it a different look. Instead of acetone, we used carbon tetrachloride — which produces basically the same effect — and we mixed it with all sorts of dyes and soaps and other chemicals so that when it hit not only would it dissolve the polystyrene, but it would smoke and bubble while doing so — which was much better than just seeing something melt through. Also, I found that by adding metallic powder onto the surface of the polystyrene, as it dissolved the powder floated on top of the solution — and looked very much like molten metal.”

The Queen violently impales Bishop with the dagger-like tip of her tail — then lifts him up and rips him apart. Winston explained the complex effect: “the Bishop rip-apart was a multistep effect. At first he’s just standing there and he gives a little jolt and for an instant you think maybe he’s got a Chestburster inside him. Then the tail comes right through him from behind. The normal way to do that effect would be to put him on a slant board with a fake body, but we didn’t want to do that. We wanted him to be standing in plain view and then suddenly have this thing shoot out of his chest. To do it, we made a slightly built-up chest plate for Lance Henriksen that allowed a flexible rubberized tail to be inserted and take a bend. So in the start position, the tail piece was lying flat inside the chest plate. It was then pulled up and out through his shirt by a wire that you couldn’t see because of the way it was shot — wires can be hidden. Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis developed that part of the effect. Then we did a switch. The next shot was a variation of the old arrow-through-the-head trick. John Richardson’s crew built a harness that went through Lance’s back. On the front side, there was a rigid tail piece that was the length we had pulled out in the previous shot. The back side connected to the Queen’s actual tail. Lance’s feet weren’t in the frame, so we were able to put him on a teeterboard to lift him up. Jim set up the shot in such a way that it starts out tight on Lance with the tail sticking through his chest, then widens out to reveal that it is, in fact, an Alien tail that has come through from behind and finally follows that tail all the way up and into the drop-ship where the Queen is looming overhead. With her tail, the Queen lifts Bishop right up to where she is in the drop-ship. Her arms come out. One hand grabs the upper part of his body and the other hand grabs the lower half of his body and she literally rips him in two. Lance said they weren’t paying him enough to do that shot, so we had to come up with a dummy rig.” The two-part dummy that had to be ripped apart featured a spring-loaded armature that would “pop apart” and push the Queen’s hands (which were put into slots) along with it, creating the illusion that they were actually tearing the android apart.

After ripping Bishop apart, the Queen lowers herself down from the dropship; the full-scale Queen was used. Winston recalled: “for the scene where she lowers herself down from the dropship, we ran wires from the pivot point on her back up through the ship to the top of the stage. Our stuntmen were inside operating the arms and we had wire riggers off to the side lowering the Queen down onto the ramp. Other wires — connected to the knees  and to the ankles — allowed the legs to be controlled from above too. It was like a giant marionette. And so the moves wouldn’t look floppy, we ran additional wires from her ankles to specific landing points so she could step down firmly in a dynamic position. Her tail also had to uncurl, which meant other wires and other puppeteers. It was pretty rugged. Jim had multiple cameras going and we did it a multitude of times, but the shot was worth it.”

The Alien Mother chases Ripley when she runs towards the cargo hold door. This was actually the first scene to be filmed with the 1:4th scale Queen puppet. “We had everything working on that shot,” Notaro explained, “two guys supporting the Queen from above, two others walking her from below and five cable operators for the other functions. In all, the Queen was capable of about thirty movements, but Jim wanted one more when we got to shooting — a rotating move right at the top of the tail so that she’d be able to turn more quickly. So we added a tiny mechanism in her butt that allowed her whole body to turn around farther and faster. That was also helped along by turning the post she was mounted on. By turning the post, everything turned.” After several sessions of rehearsal, smoke and alarm lights were introduced into the set as the scene required. The sequence was shot at 36 frames per second, meaning that the puppeteers had to maneuver the creature faster than usual.

Cameron allegedly “showed no mercy” to the small-scale Queen puppet during filming, according to Notaro: “during our next shot, we had two puppeteers literally ramming the puppet into the sliding doors as hard as they could — over and over again. Then, after about ten takes, Jim would say, ‘here’s how I want you to do it.’ And he‘d it three times harder than anybody else had. Luckily, the Queen turned out to be very durable. We did have some slippages in the mechanisms, but that was to be expected since they had been built to fit into a very thin, small area and they were being abused very badly. I was constantly adjusting things to keep it operating correctly. We also had to keep it looking good because we might do a scene one day where she was completely battered and the next day do a scene where she had to look brand new. There was constant maintenance going on.”

The climactic fight with the power loader ensues. Special effects supervisor John Richardson explained: “during the fight, there were a lot of different things happening all at once. In fact, for the scenes where we had the Alien Queen and the power loader working together, the whole stage was full of special effects people pulling wires and pushing levers. It was quite a sight.” The sequence employed an orchestrated combination of footage with the full-size Queen and the 1:4th scale puppet. When the Power Loader violently smashes the Queen with its lifting arms, the dummy version was used. “We used the floppy Queen for a lot of the tumbling and falling sequences,” Notaro said. “It was just hard and soft foam pieces glued together. We’d throw the floppy Queen over a bunch of boxes, for example, then cut back to the articulated Queen for when she stood back up.”

Ripley realizes that the only way to defeat the creature is to eject it out of the Sulaco’s main airlock — a method familiar to her. “Where Ripley wallops the Queen with the Power Loader arms, then grabs her by the neck and lifts her into the air — that was all done live action,” Notaro explained. “We picked it up with the puppets at that point, just as Ripley is about to toss the Queen into the airlock. We had a couple shots of them fighting, then the Queen breaks one of the hydraulics on the right knee of the Power Loader and it buckles up, sending both of them crashing to the bottom of the airlock.” When the Queen falls into the airlock, the dummy Queen was used. To portray the Queen being ejected into outer space, the airlock portion of the set was bolted to the ceiling, with a starfield blanket below. Both the miniature and full-size Queen (which was adequately supported by wires) were used when the creature attempts to hold onto Ripley’s leg, before finally falling to her demise.

The final shot of the Queen writhing aimlessly as she falls towards the camera was again achieved with the 1:4th scale puppet — which was attached to a motion control system, and filmed against bluescreen. Visual effects supervisor, Brian Johnson (who had already worked on Alien) commented: “in addition to the rotation, the Queen had cable-operated head movements, cable-operated arms, and legs, plus a few exterior wires to jiggle the tail a bit — all of which were nonrepeatable. So that was another instance where we had to use bluescreen.”

Giger himself commented on the Mother Monster, asserting that “the Alien Queen is very complicated, like the way I would have done. I like how she moves.” He also said in an interview with Cinefantastique that “She’s a bit smaller in the face than my Alien, but my basic design was very well studied. She was frighteningly well animated.”

For more images of the Alien Queen, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Aliens
Next: Alien³, The Beginning

General note: the following article focuses on the six major alien species featured in Avatar, with deliberate excision of the Na’vis — which will not be analyzed on the site. No Neytiri here!

James Cameron first conceived Avatar in 1994, with an 80-page treatment of the story — which was to be produced into a film to be released in 1999, with the collaboration of Digital Domain. Cameron, however, felt that the digital effects technology available at the time had considerable restraints that inevitably needed to be resolved — due to the fact photorealistic computer-generated imagery was still a relatively new tool for filmmakers. The director decided to postpone the creation process for the film until his idea could effectively be convincingly brought to life.

Thanator concepts by Wayne Barlowe.

A decade afterwards, in early 2005, Cameron assembled a team of designers to conceive the various creatures, vehicles, and models for the project — then known under the working title of Project 880. The core team of creature designers for Avatar included Neville Page — the lead creature designer — Wayne Barlowe, Yuri Bartoli, and Jordu Schell. Stan Winston Studio also joined the project, bringing other key creature designers — Christopher Swift, Scott Patton, and Joseph Pepe — as well as other sculptors and painters. Cameron himself had produced the very first sketches of the fauna of Pandora and — in most cases — had very specific ideas about their configurations. Traditional drawings, digital art, and sculptures were all used to render the designs before the final configurations were devised.

Maquette of the Direhorse, sculpted by Christopher Swift.

Every single species seen in the film is the result of a long design process and collaboration of several artists. “We took a stab at everything,” Page told herocomplex.com. “We worked on the Na’vi, the plants, the environment.  The first people brought on board were to see what the planet would look like. Rather than drawing shapes, I tried to resolve it from a physics standpoint. If a creature was supposed to have six legs you can put those anywhere, but soon an animator will have to make it walk and run. You have to be careful. Jim, like few others, is so tuned into the plausibility of organisms. He wanted them to look as real as possible, and work organically as well.”

Bringing the actual Monsters to the screen was a task assigned to Weta Digital, which created the most character animation regarding the creatures. Industrial Light & Magic also collaborated in the character rigging and in a minor number of creature shots. Each alien from Pandora was created using zBrush and Maya, and rendered as an entirely digital character. In addition, practical models for some of the creatures were built to interact with the actors.

Many of the creature designs had to display common features, the most important of which is the “queue” — antennae-like structures that enable the Na’vi to connect with their steeds. “Jim had a solid idea for what he wanted when the queues connected,” explained Craig Shoji, a designer for the film, to io9.com, “and he would do this specific motion with his hands. Picture holding your hands out so your fingers were pointing at each other, then moving your hands closer and beginning to wiggle your fingers, then when your fingers meet, start interlocking your fingers and twisting your wrists so your hands are locked. So the concepts for that came from referencing a lot of different types of cilia and microscopic photos of hair, bugs, plants, etc. It resulted in a very purpose-driven cilia for connecting to the Pandoran world. Simple, yet kind of creepy.”

Other key characteristics included amphibian-like skin, and the signature “air intakes” (also called “operculums”) — the Pandoran fauna’s means of breathing. Barlowe explained: “from the inception of the ‘black-ops’ design phase back in ’05, Jim was interested in exploring vivid markings and almost amphibian-like body textures. Poison-dart frogs were mentioned as possible inspirations for the look he was seeking. The solutions we began to play around with all encompassed those early concepts. While the vibrant colour schemes of the terrestrial creatures fell by the wayside, the unique body textures were retained. Obviously, the aerial fauna remains intensely colourful. These were, I believe, choices Jim made answering his inner, artistic muse.”

Early Thanator concept by Jason Matthews.

The process of devising the configurations for each character encountered “a few blind alleys,” according to Bartoli. “Parameters such as six legs, an extra passive eye, four digits, threat displays, decoupled breath intakes, [and] body markings emerged or had already been laid out in the script,” he said. “So — as you can imagine — there are a lot of ideas that either weren’t right for this aesthetic or were held back due to the limitations of telling the story — suffice to say Pandora has many more creatures in it than you see on screen.” According to Tully Summers, one of the creature designers, the fauna was entirely devoid of hair to avoid a more direct resemblance to their Earthly counterparts. “[It was supposed to] accentuate the creatures’ other-worldliness. Putting fur on our mammal equivalents would have been redundant and too obvious.”

A HAMMERHEAD TITANOTHERE. Like a six-legged rhinoceros, but twice that size. Its massive, low-slung head has projections of bone giving it the look of a hammerhead shark.

-James Cameron, Avatar draft, 2007

During Jake’s first mission on the planet, he comes accross a herd of Hammerhead Titanotheres (Angtsìk in the Na’vi language), massive armoured herbivores with a characteristic fan-like crest used for display and a bony protrusion on their skulls used to threaten predators and for direct offense.

Early Hammerhead concept by Yuri Bartoli.

“Originally, the Hammerhead just had to be a huge creature, big enough that even a Thanator would think twice about attacking one,” said Bartoli. “But James Cameron came up with the idea of basing this creature on hammerhead sharks on Earth. That huge bony protrusion has two purposes: It’s good for attacking, obviously, but it’s probably also useful for mating displays, much the same way that rams smash their horns together to attract a female.”

Hammerhead colour concept by Yuri Bartoli.

Originally, the hammer-like protrusion and the crest were part of the same structure — a brightly-coloured hammer-horn. Eventually, however, the designers decided “to create a more delicate structure that would splay out,” explained Bartoli. “A threat display is meant to be seen — so it required bright colours that would stand out against its more muted body.” Page, Bartoli, and Schell were the key designers.

A THANATOR. The most awesome land predator the universe has ever conceived. This thing could eat a T.rex and have the Alien for dessert. It is a black six-limbed panther from Hell, with an armored head and massive distensible jaws.

-James Cameron, Avatar draft, 2007

The Hammerheads retreat when a Thanator (Palulukan in the Na’vi language) appears behind Jake. Originally called ‘Manticore’, the creature is one of the apex predators on Pandora. In another draft, Cameron described it as “a black, six-limbed panther, the size of a tractor trailer, with an armoured head, a venomous, striking tail, and a massive detensible, armoured jaw with nine-inch fangs.”

Concept art by Scott Patton. Notice the evidently Dunkleosteus-inspired head.

The Monster underwent one of the longest design processes among the film’s creatures, with several iterations exploring the most varied configurations. “The most challenging creature to design was what became the Thanator,” said Joe Pepe, one of the designers at Stan Winston Studio. “It was originally called a Manticore and everyone took a stab at the design. It was the only design that I know of where Jim didn’t have a complete vision in his head.” Early designs by Patton were influenced by placoderms — such as Dunkleosteus — reptiles, and arachnids. Barlowe’s renditions were initially sleeker in appearance, but Cameron directed the whole creature towards a more muscular, bulkier configuration.

Cameron’s original Skraith.

None of the proposed designs eventually satisfied Cameron, who decided late in the process to tackle the creature himself. In doing so, he resurrected an older design he had sketched over two decades before — the “Skraith” creature from his project called Mother.  Many concepts from that script were cannibalized for both Aliens and Avatar — but where the former inherited the idea of an Alien Mother-Queen, the latter implemented other plot points, as well as the original design for the “Skraith”.

Thanator elaboration by Dylan Cole.

Cameron’s old sketch served as a base for the final design, which applied only certain modifications — such as the movable crest and quills — and was sculpted directly in zBrush by Neville Page. The Thanator was labeled as “Jim’s baby” by the creature design team.

Behind him are several pairs of reflective green EYES. Another pair flanking him beside the trail. Black-on-black SHAPES which seem to flow like liquid.

He looks up — sees one cross a limb overhead. Another on his opposite flank.

Then a hideous sound, like a hyena’s psychotic LAUGH.

The VIPERWOLVES can run like a dog and climb like a monkey. They are hunting Jake from the ground and the trees.

-James Cameron, Avatar draft, 2007

During the design process for the Viperwolf, the creative team was inspired by illustrations by Francis Bacon, and by footage of minks. Opposable thumbs on the first two pairs of limbs rendered its climbing ability believable. Jason Matthews sculpted a clay maquette that served as reference to build the digital model — which was actually the first to be completed and thus be able to perform motion tests. “We didn’t know what to expect from those tests,” Page said, “but after seeing the Viperwolf in action we understood that we could go forward. It wasn’t just realistic — it was extraordinary.”

Viperwolf colour elaboration by Jim Charmatz.

A Viperwolf puppet was built for interaction with Sam Worthington for the scene where Jake fights with a pack of the creatures. The puppet was linked with calibrators and featured patterns that could be recognized by the motion capture system and serve as a base for the character animation.

SEVERAL NA’VI RIDERS thunder toward him. They are riding DIREHORSES — six-legged, armor-skinned alien Clydesdales.

James Cameron, Avatar draft, 2007

The Na’vi use the Direhorses (Pa’li in the Na’vi language) as common ground steeds. According to Wayne Barlowe, the creatures had to be literal horse substitutes, “which the audience would instantly ‘read’ as horse.” The six-legged configuration was a key element in “de-emphasizing the equine silhouette,” he said. Barlowe’s first renditions gravitated towards more otherwordly traits, but had to be toned down. Other inspirations came from the anteater, which served as the base for the Direhorse’s head.

“My influence in the head was clearly a giant anteater,” Wayne Barlowe explained, “but in my drawings I used more abstract lines to deconstruct the familiar mammals’ lines. The mane was a conscious effort to retain the look of a clipped or short mane — an echo of the erect manes on Przewalski’s horses or zebras melded to a cetacean fin – while creating an iconic line. And, the cuticle-like armor simply made sense as an evolutionary answer to moving through potentially dangerous underbrush and ever-present Viperwolves.”

Christopher Swift’s maquette, composited and painted.

Christopher Swift sculpted a maquette based on Barlowe’s renditions; the maquette was then photographed and digitally altered to obtain the final design of the Direhorse, which was then sculpted digitally in zBrush. In animating the creature, the artists at Weta Digital had to devise a gallop cycle that would believably employ all the limbs — resulting in the movement of the first two limbs being off-set by a number of degrees in respect to the middle pair.

This thing is taller than a Na’vi with a 10 meter wingspan. A leathery FWHOOP, like the crack of sails, as it alights on the branch right in front of her.

-James Cameron, Avatar draft, 2007

James Cameron purposefully introduced the concept of lower gravity on Pandora to realistically justify the presence of large flying animals — such as the Banshee (Ikran in the Na’vi language), the animal species most prominently featured in Avatar. “The Banshee is what I spent the most time on,” said Page. “We knew it was a flying creature. What made it so incredibly challenging [was that] with a bird you have to design it flying, perching — everything has to work. You can’t just draw it one view at a time. Jim and I were both fans of engineering. We spent a lot of time coming up with various concepts. The hardest thing of all was having a Na’vi on top of it and flying it. You had to backwards engineer it. It was like designing and engineering an aircraft. And that’s without the beauty and aesthetics of it.”

Illustration by Neville Page with notes from him and Cameron.

Cameron had several specific guidelines for the creatures, which were to be four-winged and feature “barracuda-teeth,” according to the script. The Banshees’ jaws had to be able to open wide. According to Cameron’s guidelines, the teeth also “would distend and actually rack forward.”

The silhouette and structural configuration of the Banshee was based on sports cars, as well as deep sea fauna like manta rays, skates, and the great white shark. “You just need to look at the tip of the chin and that single line that starting from the head goes down the neck and on the back. Then there’s the line that goes from the cheekbones to the teeth to the jugular and the ‘air intake’.” Modern studies on the movement of plesiosaurs and pterosaurs also influenced the design as well as the character animation.

Early rendering of the Banshee’s extending mouth by Scott Patton.

Although the base for the Banshee’s head was provided by reptile skulls, as well as angular industrial designs, the jaws needed an articulation that would properly enable the forward extension of the teeth. The creative team eventually found the needed inspiration in fish jaws. “There aren’t any lizard jaws that can do that, but the mechanics of fish jaws worked perfectly for this design challenge,” Bartoli explained. “It also got us away from it looking like a lizard and became something unique to itself.”

Neytiri’s Ikran…

…and Jake’s Ikran.

Finding the right colour scheme for the Banshee also proved to be particularly complex. “The colour passes on the Banshee alone took me several weeks to complete,” Bartoli added, “since including the necessary detail required multiple paintings 190 megapixels in size, as well as mapping them on the 3D model to judge how these markings would look from the camera when wrapped around the creature.” Several varied colour schemes were devised for at least one hundred different Banshees that appear in the film. A physical model of the Banshee was built by Stan Winston Studio to guide Weta Digital’s lighting and animation.

Like a banshee, only several times larger, it is the king predator of the air: the GREAT LEONOPTERYX. Striped scarlet, yellow and black, with a midnight blue crested head — it is both gorgeous and terrifying.

-James Cameron, Avatar draft, 2007

The Great Leonopteryx (Toruk in the Na’vi language, meaning “Last Shadow”) is the apex flying predator of Pandora. In conceiving the Monster, the team of artists applied some design cues that had already been devised for the Banshee, such as the multiple membranes on the wings — inspired by butterfly wings — and the fish-like extending jaws.

Concept art by Steven Messing.

Cameron, however, wanted a superficially different configuration for the Toruk’s head, with a protruding beak — which the designers eventually based on that of a parrot. The colour scheme was based on that of a Monarch Butterfly to make the Leonopteryx stand out in the sequences it stars in — most importantly the climactic fight scene. The creature’s vibrant colour scheme was devised by concept artist Daphne Yap.

Leonopteryx colour concept by Daphen Yap.

Yuri Bartoli commented on the experience: “the fact that so many people seem to genuinely respond to our work, and appreciate the ideas and subtexts, is a great reward for all the work we did putting fine detail into creating the movie.”

“It was a fantastic experience,” concluded Page, “with an even more fantastic outcome.”

For more images of the creatures from Pandora, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main article: Creatures of Pandora