Alien: Romulus

Facehuggers 

We created 73 puppets and hugger props consisting of “running huggers” that could be driven around like a remote-control car and “rotten huggers” in various stages of decay. Some “attack huggers” were mounted on a pole and had animatronic legs and tails that could be controlled by multiple puppeteers to simulate a frantic attack. Others had spring-loaded legs and a retractable proboscis.

“Comfort huggers” were worn around actors’ faces, with cables hidden in their costume that could inflate the Facehugger’s breathing bladder to simulate breathing for their victim. On set, our puppeteers rehearsed with the cast to keep everything in sync: as a hugger inhaled, an actor exhaled. Out of shot, another puppeteer would gently pull on the hugger’s tail to simulate tightening around the victim’s neck.

To make these creepy crawlies, we took the scripted action and broke this down into puppet builds, individually designing each Facehugger sequence and strike. Then we worked with the film’s set designers to plan where exactly we would hide the puppeteers. One scene, shot in an eerie corridor, used as many as 40 puppets.  

In another, a Facehugger needed to swim through water, starting beneath the surface and emerging partway through a shot. Because puppeteers would cause ripples in the water, we created a speed-controlled, winch-operated Facehugger on a submerged track so that it could reveal itself at just the right moment. Our engineering team even devised a side-to-side motion from the base of the tail to the winch. The result was a terrifying snake-like creature that slowly came out of the water and accelerated into a final leaping attack on its victim. 

“We grew up with these films terrifying and delighting us with all of the puppets,” says Ben Price, projects director of manufacture at Wētā Workshop. “To have the opportunity to dissect how all the original scenes were achieved and to refine our builds with new technology while still maintaining the essence of the original films was a rare privilege.”

Cryo-frames 

Aboard the Romulus space station is a chamber of cryo-frames. We built them — and the endoparasite species inside them — with a simple clamshell design. Several of the cryo-frames were configured with a “breathable” membrane for when the Facehuggers started to defrost, while other iterations were puppeteerable for when the Facehuggers began to wake up, or had a “melted” membrane for when the creatures used their “acid” to devise their way out.  

F44AA Pulse Rifles 

In addition to making a veritable army of parasitic puppets, we also manufactured six Pulse Rifles. Of these, two were working hero versions built with a heavy mechanical recoil, a glowing barrel, smoke effects and an ammunition counter display, among other things.  

Called F44AA Pulse Rifles, they were as much a nod to the franchise’s iconic science-fiction weapons (think multiple rates of fire and a lengthy magazine size) as they were a version that comes before them. In fact, at this point in the Alien timeline, set between the events of 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens, the iconic M41A Pulse Rifle hadn’t been invented yet.  

“Managed by Lans Hansen and Ben Fairless, I believe this is one of the coolest and most interactive guns Wētā Workshop has ever built,” says Price. “We completely reinvented our recoil system into its most streamlined version ever. Incredible work from the whole team.”