It’s not easy to create an alien that can compete for your interest with a Xenomorph — which is arguably the greatest cinematic monster of all time.
But Alien: Earth writer-director-producer Noah Hawley hit a home run with at least one of his four original alien creations for his FX series with The Eye — an highly intelligent ever-starring eyeball with sucker-tipped tentacles that burrow’s into a victim’s head and then uses its body like a puppet.
And in the fourth episode of the show’s first season, “Observation,” Hawley managed to make the creature even more unsettling by having a scene where Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) conduct an experiment by letting The Eye infect a sheep — which now has a highly creepy all-knowing stare.
The sheep, by the way, was partly played by an actual sheep (which, of course, was not harmed).
We asked Hawley about his inspiration for the creature and the sequence.
“It’s one of the more disturbing things you’ll watch all year, I think,” he says of the sheep attack. “Every 5 percent improvement in visual effects made that sequence a 100 percent ‘worse’ in terms of its effectiveness — and by ‘worse,’ I mean better. I told director Ugla Hauksdóttir in London, ‘For me, the fact that you got the live sheep to back away from the camera [in seeming fear of The Eye], that made the whole sequence right. Because if that had been a CG sheep, there’s something about sheep — being like — us going ‘uh-huh!’ and backing away from camera really sold the gag.”
As for the creature’s design, The Eye was originally just the eye with little legs, until a visual effects supervisor suggested adding these suckers that it could shoot out and pull itself across a room.
“To me, there’s a relentlessness to this that is similar to the face hugger,” he says. “Certainly in James Cameron’s movie [Aliens] where Ripley [Sigourney Weaver] and Newt [Rebecca Jorden] are trying to get away from these things, and they just keep coming, and they’re fast, and they’re scrambling, and they’re spider like a crab. [The suckers] was a really great upgrade for the original conceit where before, it just had to run as fast as it could at you. Now it can fly. And here in Austin, we have the Palmetto bugs fly. A giant roach that flies is always worse than a giant roach that doesn’t. So the fact that it can propel itself, that it can stick to you, and you’re basically trying to fight it off, and it has all these arms and it’s relentlessly trying to get in.”
“Plus, it enters your face,” he adds. “The face hugger literally goes into your mouth, and there’s something really disturbing about that. But everyone has issues with eyeballs. It just felt like it’s designed just to play into that genetic revulsion.”
Speaking of Cameron, while Hawley has communicated with Alien director Ridley Scott about his project, the Aliens director hasn’t weighed in, even though Alien: Earth includes plenty of inspiration from the 1986 sequel, as well as the 1979 original. (Cameron called the franchise “trampled ground at this point” during an interview last year — though clearly the box office success of Alien: Romulus, and now the critical acclaim of Alien: Earth, has suggested a lot more life is still left.)
“I did not have any contact with James Cameron,” Hawley says. “Not because I didn’t want to, but I don’t know where James Cameron is or what he’s doing. And there’s certainly no obligation for him to talk to me about a movie he made 40 years ago.” (Cameron is likely jamming to finish post production on the upcoming release of Avatar: Fire and Ash, which is released Dec. 19.)
Alien: Earth airs Tuesdays on FX and streams on Hulu. Next week’s episode, titled In “Space, No One…” is directed by Hawley and one you won’t want to miss.
