ALIEN: EARTH Isn’t Just Another Creature Feature - Creator Noah Hawley Is Asking Bigger, Scarier Questions

Noah Hawley wants you to know Alien: Earth isn’t just another run-and-scream from the Xenomorph series. Sure, something terrifying is hiding in the shadows, but Hawley’s new FX series digs into something more unsettling than a razor-toothed alien. He’s after the horror of us.

Hawley tells SFX Magazine in a recent interview:

"If you have a story about monsters coming to Earth, the question is, will humanity survive? Then the next question is, does humanity deserve to survive?"

That question, about whether we're even worth saving, drives the entire show. Set two years before Alien, the series explores a world on the edge of major corporate domination, staring down both an extraterrestrial threat and its own worst impulses.

“This idea about humanity and the terrible things that we do to each other, it really opened my mind as to the types of horror that would populate the show. Not just body horror or creature horror, but also the moral horror of what people do.”

In other words, it's not just facehuggers that should keep you up at night, and I love the concepts that he’s looking to explore.

Hawley’s journey to get Alien: Earth made wasn’t smooth. He originally pitched a very different idea:

“I came up with this Lost Boy/Peter Pan transhuman story. But it was pre-Disney [merger] and the film studio 20th [Century Fox] was not, in the end, willing to share the IP. It took a few more years before they were willing.”

That long development process gave him time to dig deeper.

“But the good thing about taking all that time is that you stress-test it and you really workshop it and you earn it. It’s like that first album, you have your whole life to write those songs and then it’s the second album that’s the hard one.”

Alien: Earth premieres on FX and Hulu in the U.S. on August 12. Get ready for something that goes beyond Xenomorphs, and straight into humanity’s rotten core.