It has never been a secret that the original Alien drew from the world of insects. Both the writer Dan O’Bannon and director Ridley Scott had been very open about it since the movie came out. But just how much of an influence the world of insects had on the original Alien, and more so, if the Alien itself is a space insect, had been one of the two more controversial topics among Alien Purists. What’s an Alien Purist? It’s a small group of fans who recognizes only the first film, which of course, is everyone’s right and there’s nothing wrong with it. After all, I only accept the Alien Trilogy - the story, rise and death of Ellen Ripley. For me it's the best trilogy ever made, made by three A-list legendary directors. It’s of course, fine not to accept or like certain films, however since the dawn of the internet some of those detractors of all the sequels spread misinformation and false facts as their ammo against the sequels. In many cases, the reason behind it is subconscious disappointment in being wrong - before there was an easy access to information for those who liked to dig a little more on the subject, some had their own ideas and interpretations of the original film which appeared to be wrong.
So let's look at some of those misconceptions. Sequels did not make aliens into insects, did not change their nature, and were only being faithful and extrapolating from what the first movie was. Alien in the first film is never shown taking a single step, it is all cheated with editing that places it without it visibly moving or just by showing its upper body. It was a shock to me when I started reading everything on the series (I was always a very avid reader and loved to read everything ever printed on my favorite subjects) and find out Ridley Scott always wanted the Alien to hang off the ceiling upside down and run around leaping on the walls.
Ridley Scott: “What I wanted was to have really huge air ducts — taller, in fact, than the corridors in the ship — so that when Dallas first sees it in there, it’s standing on the roof of this giant wind tunnel suspended upside down. Then I was going to have it roar down the tunnel toward him, running and jumping full-circle around the walls.” (Cinefex nagazine 1979)
Nick Allder (Special Effects Supervisor) also agreed, telling Cinefex: “We were really quite limited with what we could do with the Alien. At one point, the script called for it to run up and down the corridors like a human being; but when we finally got the finished costume, we stayed late one night -at the end of a day’s shooting- just to see what it looked like in the sets and to shoot a few tests. And of course, we found it would look ridiculous to see this thing running around – it would give the whole thing away immediately.”(Cinefex)
Below, Ridley Scott's Storyboard from that scene
So the original Alien wasn't slow because of its grace or because of being a silent stalking killer. It was a by product of the rubber costume proving too restrictive. Alien however, must be fast as well, and so they did manage to have one quick move from the Alien when he swiftly attacks the threat, which was Parker, and the shot was done showing just upper body in a quick cut
The second film actually achieved what Ridley Scott wanted and tried, and was the only Alien sequel that Ridley Scott, Dan O'Bannon and H.R. Giger liked. Alien wasn't some sort of mysterious creature that acted with no apparent logic and raped Lambert (another myth dispelled by both Ridley Scott and Dan O’Bannon who explained she died of a heart attack and was violently shoved into an airshaft, hence losing some of her clothes as a result. See HERE). Alien’s design wasn’t changed into that of an insect in the second film (and actually the second film used molds of the original and is nearly identical to the original like no other sequel’s design. See HERE). The second film didn't place insectal traits on the alien. It was always based on an insect that collected hosts when possible but killed the bigger threat. There was no mystery to what it was doing, it was never the intention. After all, the deleted scene was suppose to explain what it was doing with its victims. Ron Shusset, the co-writer of the original, said it best
Ron Shusset: "People have read all kinds of things into it that we didn’t intend, not even subconsciously." (Cinefantastiqueonline.com interview 2008)
But the misconception that the second film turned the aliens into space insects gets picked up from time to time by some fans that don’t really read extensively or visit diehard websites like StrangeShapes or AvPGalaxy (I'm not saying they should or that there's anything wrong with it. Just noting not everyone fact checks). Insects are actually very violent and terrifying, while graceful and weirdly beautiful. And that’s the qualities both O’Bannon and then even more so Ridley Scott recognized. Scott decided to go full on insect with the alien, and always referred to him as either insect or, more often, an ant.
But lets start from the beginning. Yeah, there was a point during the development of the story where it was considered that the Alien would've been a race of sophisticated society. There was a point where it was considered it would be curious and fascinated by humans. There was also a point where it was considered to be an energy beast. And then there were ideas floating that maybe he's just a military experiment. But eventually those things went away even before the film was greenlit, and its creator and writer of the original script, Dan O'Bannon, decided it was a natural, space animal (a fact retconned decades later)
Dan O'Bannon: "I wanted the thing to be, in every respect, a natural animal," (Alien Quadrilogy)
While he referred to it as animal here (because if we strictly stick to the definition of insect, it doesn't fit physiologically), the Alien and everything about him would draw entirely from the world of insects and O'Bannon also very clearly stated that the final Alien is basically an enlarged parasite
Dan O'Bannon “I modelled [the Alien] after microscopic parasites that moved from one animal to the next and have complex life-cycles. I just enlarged the parasite." (quote via StrangeShapes)
Calling or making the Alien an insect is not derogatory, as purist may feel. The world of insects is the world of horror, and it was clearly a perfect inspiration for the Alien. Dan O'bannon on the inspiration behind the final Alien and its lifecycle
Dan O'Bannon: “Works of fiction weren’t my only sources. I also patterned the Alien’s life cycle on real-life parasites (...) parasitic wasps treat caterpillars in an altogether revolting manner, the study of which I recommend to anyone tired of having good dreams” ("Something Perfectly Disguisting" essay on Alien Quadrilogy DVD set)
Ron Shusset: “It was our idea that it would be the life cycle of an insect. The way a wasp will sting a spider, paralyse it, and lay its eggs in the spider … that we did want it to be …. We thought people might pick up on it and say, ‘yeah, an alien life cycle can be an insect life cycle.'”(Quote via StrangeShapes)
In the 1999 DVD commentary, Ridley Scott explains: “The whole notion of this [creature] was taken off a certain kind of insect that will find a host, lay its eggs, and then in that host it will bury its eggs, and then of course the eggs will grow and consume the host. So that’s the logic of it all. Probably what makes a lot of nature go around.”
There's mass of quotes on the subject of copying the wasp's lifecycle to Alien. So just for visuals, here's a graph of a Wasp lifecycle and how it translated into Alien's
So ok, you may say, I get it. The Alien has a lifecycle of an insect. But the stubborn ones may say, well, he just have a lifecycle of an insect, did anyone actually referred to him as an insect? The answer is oh yes. Many times, throughout decades, Mr Ridley Scott himself
Ridley Scott: 'It's like a rather beautiful, humanoid, biomechanoid insect.' (Making of Alien Documentary 2003)
Ridley Scott: 'There are insects like that [androgynous, asexual], so we based that on a little bit of good old Mother Nature.' (...) He [Skerret] is really the host for the insect, which is the Alien.' (Alien Laserdisc 1992 Interview)
Ridley Scott: I thought the creature was a large, giant, beautiful insect (Alien: Romulus Bluray extra "Conversation With Ridley Scott" 2024)
Ridley Scott: "I wanted him to be insect-like. Like an ant" (The Alien Saga Documentary 2002)
He actually studied insects in preparation for Alien. And Even the idea that the Alien would look different if it comes out of a different host comes from the insects
Ridley Scott: 'There's a fundamental connection in nature because we actually watched, in preparation for this, Oxford Scientific had this interesting piece of footage where they'd watched a slice of bark - which, in our terms, to a human being, would be about 12 feet thick - and there's a grub underneath the bark, between the bark and the tree. There's always a space between the bark and the tree. Across the top of the bark was this insect, which passes over the grub, stops, backs up, and "feels" the grub is there let's say, the equivalent of 8 foot below you. It goes up on its hind legs, produces a needle from between its legs, and drills through the bark and bulls-eyes right into the grub and lays its seed, so that the grub becomes the host of the insect. And does what comes out of the union between the grub and the insect, does that become a version of both? That's what we basically went along with.' (2003 Audio Commentary)
Ridley Scott: 'Whether he [the Alien] could see, or simply sense like an insect, I didn't need ever have to answer that question' (Audio Commentary)
Ridley Scott: “[The Alien’s acid blood] reminded [Dan O'Bannon] of these ants that spray jets of acid to combat enemy ants … At the time of Alien, he had to consult books, watch documentaries, and it took time, but today you just have to explore the web for videos or amazing photographs that make you exclaim, ‘but who designed this?’ before you remember that it is the work of Nature.” (L’Ecran Fantastique, 2012.)
Ridley Scott: Right after that they start hunting the Beast. By this time in my work on the storyboard, the landing roller had turned into a claw. I wanted a huge claw room down in the bilge, where the ship’s feet would be retracted during flight, like the anchor cable tier on an ocean liner. Massive, gigantic room with all this horrible old gear around it.
Brett somehow gets separated. And while he is standing in the claw room, the thing swings down acrobatically and they are suddenly face to face. I thought that would be quite a spooky image, actually. With the thing hanging there with these arms like a mantis. Almost independent suspension, seeming to move on their own. (Fantastic Films 011 October 1979)
H.R. Giger: ‘We decided to make a very elegant creature, quick and like an insect.’(Cinefex 1979)
Ivor Powell (Associate Producer): Ridley had this idea that it would be like a sort of praying mantis, and the way when you crouch down, the knees are impossibly high like a grasshopper.”(Alien Makers II documentary)
So what does the Alien want? Is he a creepy space psycho toying with his victims? Nope, an insect with an instinct (note yet another comparison with an ant)
Ridley Scott: Gordon Carrol and I talked about this many times. You know, should we indicate the Alien has intelligence? Or great intelligence? (…) Ants have, I think, no sense of beginning or end. They just are born, run around doing this thing like everybody else in the community, and die. And I think that may have been the Alien. So, maybe the Alien had no intelligence except pure intuition about survival. Right?”(Alien Evolution documentary, 2001)
In the 1979 novelization of the first movie, Ash describes alien's intelligence as being "at least that of a dog, and probably more than a chimpanzee"
After all, two of the original Alien’s victims basically walked into him and two others made so much noise they attracted him. And I think that's part of the success of the mythology, is that thing being a giant monstrosity based purely on an instinct. A kind of prehistoric (originally, retconned by latter prequels) insectoid creature with no conscience, no morality. There's no reasoning with it like there would be no reasoning with a man-sized wasp or spider who would want to incubate his larvas in you.
So what insectoid traits does the original Alien itself exhibit?
It hides and moves in the ductwork. It hangs near the ceilings in wet places. It nests in corners. According to Ridley Scott, does poses like a Praying Mantis
It cocoons its victims. In the deleted scene, which was reinstated in 2001's Director's Cut, we can see coccooned Dallas and Brett. Originally the cocoons were suppose to be basically identical to Earth's insects'. Below, concept art of the cocooned victims by Ron Cobb, published in The Making of Alien book
It was eventually redesigned in Giger's style of course. If you want to argue those are not cocoons, here are a few examples where they are called just that
H.R. Giger: For the fresher cocoon, only partly enveloped, he takes a plaster impression of the crouching actor (Tom Skerrit), who of course has got to be recognizable. The other victim (Harry Dean Stanton) of the murderous Alien [adult version] is almost completely cocooned, so Voysey can use the invaluable rubber latex for the figure. ( Source: Giger's Alien, p50)
H.R. Giger: On Monday, they want to film the burning of the cocoon (Giger Diaries)
H R Giger: Like the way a spider wraps its victim and sticks it to the wall. (Giger's Alien Diaries p545)
The novelization also clearly states that Brett and Dallas are in cocoons, althought to be fair, the novelization features the early Ron Cobb’s spiderweb version
The victims are cocooned in what appears to be the Alien's hive/nest which he started to build. He builds secreted structure for the upcoming eggs. The script describes it as "Bones, shreds of flesh. Pieces of clothing, shoes. Bizarre extrusions on the wall." The second film follows that structure design-wise exactly
Roger Christian (Set Decorator): It is seen clearly in action in the deleted scene when she fries Dallas, cocooned by the alien as food. She has no choice but to kill him, and fires the flamethrower at the alien's large wasp-nest-like cocoon covering the entire wall (Cinema Alchemist)
Scott himself called it an actual hive
Ridley Scott: “When she stumbles upon into that room, which is a landing leg room and finds this, you know, hive, she finds the bodies basically” (Alien 1992 Laserdisc interview)
Depending on who do you listen to, the egg chamber where Kane descends into is actually hive, at least according to Giger. There were many version of the location that would house the eggs. It was suppose to be Egyptian-like pyramid first, then simple cone-shaped US Military Installation, then at some point it was suppose to be a structure built by aliens themselves, called egg-silo. For budgetary reasons, it was cut and the inside of the silo was moved under the derelict, suggesting the aliens dug their hive like termites
H.R. Giger: Next to the seat of the pilot, there's a hole that leads into depths of the silo (The whole thing has been changed because the exterior views of the silo would have been too expensive!) So the silo was placed under the spacecraft, as if a mini UFO had landed on an anthill, and the ants had eaten their way through the spacecraft, like parasites, in order to use the pilot as a host (Giger's Alien Diaries book)
H.R Giger: We decided that it would be a good idea to have these eggs inside the derelict like termites within the wall of a house (Cinefantastique magazine vol 9, no 1)
H.R Giger: '[W]e had to combine the derelict ship and the hatchery silo. I thought we could place the egg silo under the ship, a bit like termites do.
H.R.Giger sketched how the hive would sit right below the derelict
The egg silo had made its way into Aliens Comic Series published by Dark Horse for nearly 3 decades. It was aliens’ external hive with the same design style inside as what we see in the movie. So it was adapted into the mythology as aliens’ hive indeed
There was also a scripted scene which also made it into novelization, where alien gets lured into the air lock trap because it was attracted by blinking light, as insects do. The scene was omitted due to budgetary and scheduling reasons, but part of it was shot. Ripley's nose bleed is a direct aftereffect of the omitted scene.
Low servo whine.
Door opens.
Slowly.
Green light throbbing inside air lock.
Creature looks curiously at it.
Moves onto the threshold.
INT. PASSAGEWAY - "B" LEVEL
Parker watches...
INT. AIR LOCK
Creature move further into air lock.
Fascinated by green light.
So yes, the Alien, space insect, is getting fascinated by a light
And Ridley Scott went full-insect with the Alien - just like some insects, Scott wanted the Alien to have a very short lifespan, like Mayflies.
Ridley Scott: "Like a butterfly or an insect, it has a limited lifespan in which to reproduce itself. It also helped explain why it didn't attack Ripley in the Narcissus; its days were over. (...)It had found a protective corner in that ship and was working itself in there to die (Fantastic Films magazine 1979)
Since it wasn't communicated clearly enough, the idea of a short lifespan was dropped by the sequel, which I think was a great call. Looking back at it all I'm amazed I didn't see it before. It's so obvious and so clear - the copy/paste lifecycle of an insect, with larva hatching and all that, moving in air ducts, hives, coccoons etc. How could anyone claim the insect traits (or the alien being straight up extraterrestrial insect) started in the second film, not first? It's 90% there in the original.The only element added in Aliens was the egg laying Queen
The chestbursting itself, or rather headbursting, actually exists in antomology. Fire Ants have a natural enemy in the Phorid fly that lays eggs in the thorax of the ant and the creature inside moves to the head and then bursts out.
To summarize:
Influences cited by Obannon and Shusset: Parasitic Wasp
Influences cited by Scott: Ants, Parasitic wasps, butterflies, mayflies, praying mantis
Influences cited by Giger: ants, spiders, termites
The alien:
-builds nests from secreted material,
-cocoons victims as hosts,
-is fascinated by light,
-builds "anthill" on the planetoid,
-sticks to wet and dark corners
Ridley Scott outright says its an insect more than once throughout the decades
Continuing, in the original film, a deleted scene showed the hive/nest that the Alien already started building and showed how he creates eggs - he turns his victims into eggs (or, the eggs consume protein from the victim to grow). The scene was cut due to pacing and not looking satisfactory to Ridley Scott (although I think it looks amazing),
H.R Giger: In the morning, Ridley Scott and his crew showed up at the leg room and cursed. He doesn't like the nest with the two cocoons at all. I don't particularly like it either. It would have been better if I had taken a look at it on Sunday. A lot could have been changed. (Giger's Alien Diaries, Monday, 18th September , 1978)
Also, some involved in the original film just didn't like the idea, which was overtly B.
Ron Shusset : "When we took out that scene, the whole thing worked great, and nobody missed it.. The only reason we later put it in was we had the luxury twenty-five years later, and everybody knew and were fans of the movie by then, so we could do it. But it’s good we all came to the same conclusion, because we could have made a terrible mistake: ‘Oh, look at that great idea we had, where he says, “Kill me!” and he’s growing the egg!"(Executing Alien" interview)
David Giler (Uncredited writer, Producer): ' It looked terrible, awful. So instead of redoing it, we decided to write it off as a bad idea.' (Cinefantastique magazine)
James Cameron decided to draw from the same source that O'Bannon and Scott had, the world of insects.
James Cameron: Extrapolating from entomology (ants, termites, etc.), an immature female, one of the first to emerge from hosts, grows to become a new queen, while males become drones or warriors (Starlog magazine 1987)
James Cameron: The Alien grabbed Harry Dean Stanton and presumably put him into a cocoon. It’s certainly no great logical detour to assume that it might have used him as another host, but I think it would be a bit odd that he turned into an egg. That’s something that would have been hard for the audience to swallow because it involved the transformation of the human host and although one can assume the Alien can metamorphose, to have its biological properties take up residence in a human being and change it, [egg-morphing] was going beyond the ground rules they set themselves. One of Alien‘s great attributes was that it set up a very weird biological process but it has a basis in science fact all the way through, like the [life] cycle of a digger wasp, which paralyses its prey and injects an egg into the living body to mature. (Starburst Magazine '96)
James Cameron: It's not a contradiction, it's merely an alternative explanation. And a more plausible one, really. (lofficier 2001)
Alien 3 novelization explains co-existence of the two lifecycles
Ripley: "The one that got loose on my first ship Nostromo was making preparations to reproduce itself, but it wasnt a queen either. At least some of them must be hermaphroditic. Self fertilizing, so that even one isolated individual can perpetuate the species. A warrior-worker is capable of producing eggs, but only slowly, one at a time, until it can develop a queen to take over the job." (pg 192)
James Cameron: "For me, the Queen is really a blend of what Giger does with what I wanted to do, which was to create something that was big and powerful and terrifying and fast and very female - hideous and beautiful at the same time, like a black widow spider." (quotes from Don Shay interview, Cinefex).
Don Shay (Renowned behind-the-scenes film writer): Cameron's concept was both fresh and visually dramatic, and yet still a clear and logical extrapolation from the basic Warrior design originated by H.R. Giger.
H.R. Giger absolutely loved the Queen, something he reiterated throughout decades
H.R. Giger: "It's all beautifully done, everything, the designs and the way they're executed. The Alien Queen is also nice. She's a bit smaller in the face than my alien but my basic design was very well studied. She was frighteningly well animated. ( Cinemafantastique Magazine May 1988)
H.R. Giger: The Alien Queen is very complicated, like the way I would have done. I like how she moves - (Sci-Fi Invasion! 1998)
H.R. Giger: When I heard James Cameron himself designed the Alien Queen I was even more impressed by the talents of this versatile director ( Cinefantastique 1992)
Ridley Scott also applauded the addition
Ridley Scott: Mother Alien, which, by the way, I thought was a very good idea. (Introduction to ALiens Illustrated Screenplay 2001)
Aliens is also an allegory for Vietnam war. The Marines mirror the young, forced draftees of the 60's while the Aliens mirror the underdog, outgunned guerilla army thats far more determined to destroy the enemy and does not care for its own life. The army that uses its field and guerilla tacts to it advantage. That's why the Aliens are such military tacticians in the movie. While cameron agreed they're animals, he gave them a collective tactical thinking and understanding of basic things such as how lights or simple machinery works, such an elevators.
James Cameron: I never got the sense in the first film that the alien actually had an intelligence that would allow it to manipulate their technology. But I didn’t see that necessarily as a barrier here because certainly these creatures have been around longer. The alien in the first film had only been alive for 24 hours. It was still an infant, even thought it’d grown full size. These aliens have had weeks or months to figure things out. (...) I’m not saying they’re technological but I think they’re rudimentary stuff. So the implication here is that they’re actually pretty clever. And I think at the end of the film its clear when the alien queen knows how to operate an elevator if nothing else (Starlog 1987)
Novelization: (The Queen choose) to incubate her eggs in the one spot in the colony where we couldn't destroy her without destroying ourselves. beneath the heat exchangers at the processing plant.
From the script:
RIPLEY
Could it be intelligent?
BISHOP
Hard to say. It may have been
blind instinct...attraction to
the heat of whatever...but she
did choose to incubate her eggs
in the one spot where we couldn't
destroy her without destroying
ourselves.
We first see the aliens successfully sneaking up on the marines from all directions and meshing in with the environment making themselves invisible, like the camouflaged commandos. In considering the Vietnam conflict, the authors of Living Through History: the Twentieth Century World described a war in which the Americans brought the latest, high-tech equipment (such as helicopter gunships and rocket launchers) but were met by an enemy, the Viet Cong, who "did not fight open battles, where these weapons could be used." (Heinemann Educational, 1988, page 77.) Furthermore, after their attacks, the Viet Cong "melted back into the jungle where the Americans could not find them."
Then, the aliens cut the Marines' escape route and supplies. According to James Cameron in his Starlog interview from 1987, the lone alien that took care of the dropship killed Ferro to crash the dropship and leave the marines on LV-426 and cut their ammo and gun supply.
James Cameron: If we assume the Aliens have intelligence, at least in the central guiding authority of the Queen, then it is possible that these decisions may have a tactical basis. For example, Ferro was a greater threat, piloting the heavily armed dropship, than she was a desirable host for reproduction. Newt, and most of the colonists, were unarmed and relatively helpless, therefore easily captured for hosting. (Starlog 1987)
We then see their efforts to exhaust the ammo of the sentry guns and overwhelm the defenses, something seen in modern wars today as well. When that doesn't work the aliens are retreating to make new plans. If they would stick around for few more seconds, their plan would work. Only few aliens were sacrificed in the sentry gun rush as evidenced onscreen. There's no pile of dead Alien bodies visible on the screens after they pull back, and aliens are known to successfully and very quickly maneuver all over the place. There are couple of shots which suggest they do, since we see shots of them from different position and poses, as oppose to them running into the guns. And while there's a lot of smoke, there doesn't appear to be massive acid induced damage either. Dozens of Alien deaths from the guns would leave that part of the colony falling to bits. There are also only about 30 confirmed deaths onscreen, including the sentry gun scene. The sentry guns waste ammo just like any other machine gun, it would've been a feat if they got more than some twenty aliens with those guns burning off ammo. The whole sequence was based on Battle of Alamo
Once retreated, they form new plan. They then approached the parameter undetected, crawled on the ceiling pipes like special ops or commandos. Typically for warfare operations, they cut the power to blind their enemy, split into groups/squads and quietly sneak in on them from above, below and the back - the lone alien that Burke encounters was a part of the ambushing team, trying to cut the marines off from the other side.
So where did that thought of Aliens actually being the one adding insectal traits to the Alien came from?Perhaps seeing a fresh hive full of Warriors with an egg laying Queen seemed like a more obvious insect analogy than one single Alien outside of its zone, and glimpses of old, dried up hive with nothing else other than dormant eggs in it. Perhaps the fact that the warriors seem less humanoid and move unlike human beings leaping from wall to wall also adds to that false perception (which again, was something planned for the original, but impossible to achieve at the time). Perhaps a misunderstanding of the term "bug hunt" used in the movie (Aliens are only referred to as 'animals' in the film by Hudson, jut like the original was by Ash. The term 'bug hunt' meant a bogus mission, as the Marines never encountered Xenomorphs before)
Interestingly enough, it's Alien 3 that dials up the insect influence. It's ironic because Alien 3 had been referred to as back to basics, even thought its similarities to the original are only in the very, very bride strokes (one Alien, no weapons), but in fact is completely unlike in style, structure and approach. And it is indeed Alien 3 that gives more insectal abilities to the alien. Oh and Alien 3 was never intentionally a slap in the face to Aliens. David Fincher said in 2014 that Aliens is one of the 20 best movies ever made.
Funny enough, it is indeed Alien 3 that changes the design of the alien, strips it of Giger's signature biomechanicality (but thats another topic covered HERE), adds more insectal traits to the creature itself and has been referred to as "bug" in the movie and by its director. I love Alien 3, it was my entry to the series, it has been my favorite Alien movie for decades. But I could always objectively admit that in fact, the first two films are much better, even if Alien 3 was my favorite (As of lately that changed as you can read HERE).
Alien Runner, or Dog Alien as some call it, was the first Alien that was actually able to walk on the ceiling upside down. The Warriors in Aliens were holding on to pipes and beams, always needed support, but the Runner could indeed walk on flat surfaces upside down like insects
David Fincher: 'We wanted the creature to walk on the ceilings and really sell the idea that this thing is a bug from outer space.' (Cinefex)
The Runner wasn't very clever either, as it was actually caught in a trap twice, and that was intentional since Fincher referred to him as "big dumb bug".
The puppeteers also confirmed that Fincher also requested that the Alien moved even more like insects
Laine Liska, Alien 3 puppeteer: 'He [Fincher] wanted it to move more spidery, almost like an insect.' (Cinefex magazine)
One more ability from ants had been given to the Runner - spitting acid. Few types of ants spray jets of acid to combat enemy ants
From the fears and morbid interests of Dan O'Bannon, through Ridley Scott's research into insects, and Ron Shusset's declaration that an insect life-cycle was the intention, it cannot be denied that the Alien is an amalgamation of horrific sexual aesthetics and insectal traits, which both contributed not only to the nightmare inducing nature of the Alien, be it the creature's abilities, its visage, its growth cycle, but to its integrity as a space dwelling avatar of death as well. Strip the Alien of all insectal traits and nothing reminiscent of the series' Xenomorph is left. Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3 managed to equilibrate the sexual and insectal overtones to create a startling, original beast, an equilibrium upset after the third installment, which saw dilution of the creature's sexual elements, and diminishing returns.