Upon its release, Alien presented a radically different take on what a possible encounter with an alien civilization might look like. The movie ditched the antiseptic environment of clean, brightly lit spaceships for dark corridors full of hissing steam, blood, and slime, while replacing utopian visions of intelligent beings with a gory morality tale of a corporate future. But Scott’s synthetic industrial Gothic didn’t just spring out of thin air. Its inspirations were many, from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Francis Bacon to laboratory experiments on parasitic organisms and forgotten genre films of the 1950s and 1960s, excerpts of which are included in the documentary. This intriguing cinematic essay also presents previously unseen materials from the family archives of screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and artist H. R. Giger.