Alien concepts

My friend Fartacus mentioned the similarity between the tripods in Spielbergs 'War of the Worlds' and the alien queen in 'Aliens' and I thought this would be a good idea for a rambling post. Its one of those problems concept artists face. Just how do you make something appear alien? Or even just unusual and non terrestrial? Thanks to HR Geiger, there is a common perception of what a serious alien head should look like, it should be elongated, and preferably very dark. You can even find an online, step by step guide as to how to re-create this head:


The other popular type of alien head is of course the grey skinned, Roswell type, with a tiny nose and mouth and huge big black eyes, but these are not as scary so they only get used in cheaper sci fi aspiring to be 'realistic'. For the full, scare-your-pants-off experience, the common perception requires the elongated, phallic, head, preferably with a lot of teeth.

But say you want to design an alien being and you want to avoid the classic look. What do you do? It has to be recognisable in some way, but you want to make it look as 'alien' as possible. Easy, you look at the animal kingdom, find the animal which best suits your needs and then you add in the required anthropomorphic features which you wish to retain. Thats essentially how most aliens get designed. HR Geiger's first alien looked totally alien to the 1979 crowd, but if you look at it, then you see its still just a man in a suit. It has two arms and two legs, a head at the top and a fingers and toes. Yes it has a tail and spiny ridges all over, but essentially its just a scary humanoid. Its a spiky version of ET. HR Geiger used a snake skeleton as his template and then just added all the extra humanoid features. The only aliens that avoid this process of design are those which are described as being 'energy or gaseous beings' and almost every alien in the Sci fi TV universe which are actors in make up (or 'fore head of the week' as I've heard them aptly described)



In the original book 'War of the Worlds', HG Wells went the other way, he attempted to describe his Martians as being evolved humanoids. He took away many of the anthropomorphic features and left the bare essentials because his alien concept had the Martians wearing machines as bodies. An utterly cool concept for a Victorian author and one not really improved upon since. HG Wells might not have had the most 'alien' aliens, but he did have the most compelling concept I've ever seen for what an alien might actually look like, and he did it without recourse to an animal. Most of the science fiction I've ever read (and I've read a lot) has used animals or humanoids as the basis for alien concept, with spiders and insects being a firm favourite for the really unusual and HR Geiger's design being a sort of gold standard for the commercial exploitation of the whole idea. HG Wells used machines that moved with the unconsious grace and animation of bodies. He gave the 'fighting machines' three legs for stability and the 'handling machines' multiple limbs for practicality. "The Martians made and used different bodies according to their needs".


Getting back to the tripods in Spielbergs 'War of the Worlds', looking at the concept art I think they were originally meant to be closer to HG Wells vision of the machine body but some where along the way the humanoid meme crept back in. Spielbergs actual aliens became men in suits again. The fact that they are three legged doesn't change their humanoid appearance. HG Wells had described the Martians as being evolved into big heads with tentacle fingers and huge dark eyes in the front. Mollusc like. That description is echoed by the Spielberg tripods, but not by the actual aliens themselves who became pantomime variants of their own machines. Curious. I have no doubt that a scene where Tom Cruise hides from several large heads was not deemed 'cinematic' enough...