A 1970s-style photo of four Xenomorphs at Coney Island: mom with fries, dad with a hotdog, and two kids enjoying ice cream, all set against a sunny beach and boardwalk.

From Childhood Terror to Alien: Earth - A Lifelong Journey Through the Xenomorph Universe

Some movies change you. Others break you completely, then slowly rebuild you into something different. Ridley Scott’s Alien did both when my uncle took me to see it on opening night in 1979. I was a small child, completely unprepared for what I was about to witness. Horror movies before Alien were pretty bland affairs—predictable monster movies with rubber suits and obvious scares. Nothing could have prepared audiences for how radically different this film would be, how it would fundamentally reshape horror cinema forever. ...