Spoilers follow for Alien: Earth.
One of the most controversial – or thrilling, depending on how you look at it – aspects of FX and Hulu’s Alien: Earth is that, for the first time on film, at least… The Xenomorphs are talking. Specifically, Wendy (Sydney Chandler), the synth-with-a-human-consciousness at the center of the show, has been somehow hearing the Xenomorphs since the premiere. And once the scientists at the Prodigy Corporation realized that, they began to wonder if she could communicate with them as well.
Indeed: She can. Wendy isn’t just hearing the xenomorphs; she’s conversing with them. And like Ripley-8 (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien: Resurrection, this raises a lot of questions about how much the iconic movie monsters are unstoppable, drone-like killers, versus independent, thinking beings. But the follow-up question there is, if Wendy can speak Xenomorph, is there a whole alien language associated? Is speaking Xeno going to be the next hot thing on Duolingo?
Well… No. Not exactly. When IGN reached out to FX for some answers, we were told plainly that there was no Xenomorph linguist on set, nor is there one credited in the show. But that doesn’t mean Chandler spontaneously created a new alien language on her own, nor is she making exactly the clicking and trilling you hear on screen when Wendy is doing her deadly Dr. Dolittle impression. Instead, crafting the Xenomorph “language” on Alien: Earth was a team effort.
How to Create an Alien Language
Before we get to the specifics of how the Xenomorph language was put together, though, thanks to commentary from Chandler herself as well as Alien: Earth supervising sound editor and sound designer Lee Gilmore, it’s important to understand how an alien language comes together on screen – and why it’s difficult to create one for the Xenomorphs. Paul R. Frommer is a Professor Emeritus of Business Communication at USC, at the Marshall School of Business. But, probably more to the point, he created the Na’vi language for James Cameron’s Avatar movies in 2009.
“Linguistics is a little bit like math,” Frommer explained, recalling that before he was hired for the Avatar gig, he was giving grammatical problem sets to his classes in Klingon. The first part of the equation is how the creatures you’re crafting a language for communicate. For the Na’vi, Cameron told Frommer that the aliens were roughly similar in vocal production to humans, and he didn’t want any electronic manipulation of the speech – as you’ll see, almost the opposite of how Alien: Earth tackled the Xenomorphs.
What Frommer did next was come up with the base sounds the Na’vi would use. “English, for example,” said Frommer, “has about between 40 and 45 different basic sounds, consonants and vowels. I'm not talking about letters of the alphabet. I'm talking about sounds.”
Once you have the sounds, you need to figure out how they interact, which can take the form of words or other common elements… As an example, Frommer mentioned how “Water,” which is all one thing, is different from “Singer,” which is both the “sing” element and the “er” element. And expanding further, Frommer explained that most well-versed English speakers will have 40,000 words in rotation or so, while the English language itself contains nearly half a million words. With the Na’vi language, Frommer started slightly smaller, making sure he was able to “translate” all the words in the script. But since the success of the movie, he’s become the main contact for fans looking to expand their vocabulary, not to mention the additional movies in the franchise, all the way through Avatar 5 (which is “on the books” according to Frommer).
That’s all well and good for human-style speech, but what about Xenomorphs, which are far more insectoid? “As long as you have a sufficient number of these distinct sounds for it to be practical, then it's very possible that the structure of that language could be somewhat similar to the structure of a human language, [a] language here on Earth,” Frommer explained.
There’s a problem, though, which is what the Xenomorphs are actually saying. Back in the ’70s at Cal State Fullerton, Frommer ended up picking up a course on animal linguistics… And while animals ranging from birds to whales can and do communicate, their vocabulary is exponentially simpler.
“A bird can say, ‘I am a red-throated warbler, or something like that,’” Frommer explained. “It can identify itself as a particular kind of bird. It can also say, ‘This is my territory, you other guys leave.’ Or it can say, ‘I'm really horny and I'm looking for a mate.’ But beyond that, it can't construct new messages.”
As for bugs? Probably not even that level of communication. “If they're going to go the route of real language,” Frommer said, referring to the production of Alien: Earth, “what I hope is they're going to hire a linguist who's going to be able to put together these elements… Are there different kinds of screeches, different kinds of squeals and rubbings and whatever? And if so, can they be combined in new ways, the way we can combine words into different orders?”
It’s a good question, of course. So then, that groundwork out of the way…
Making Alien: Earth’s Xenomorphs Talk
As Gilmore told IGN, there were actually three pieces to figure out: “You've got the sounds that Wendy originally hears when she starts hearing the Xenos talking to her. Then you have her language, where she starts speaking back to the Xenos. And you have the actual Xenos vocalizing themselves. So you have three different things going on that all need to sound different from each other, but also need a common throughline to where… it feels like it's from the same creature.”
In fact, one of the first things Gilmore and showrunner Noah Hawley discussed was what they came to call “Wendy echoes,” aka the Xenomorph’s voice in her head. One idea they kept coming back to was ASMR, having it “tickle your eardrums and almost be painful at times.” And as they discussed further, they struck on the idea that the Xenomorphs’ communication might be similar to echolocation, as they don’t have eyes.
It’s an idea that has been explored before, just not specifically on screen in the Alien movies themselves. The Weyland-Yutani Archives, a bonus feature on the Alien vs. Predator: Requiem Blu-Ray release, speculates about how the Xenomorphs might communicate. The Alien Queen seems to be able to direct and control the Xenomorph “drones” in Aliens. And in the 1989 comic Aliens: Nightmare Asylum and 1990 comic Aliens: Earth War, writer Mark Verheiden posited the aliens might communicate through dreams – or rather, nightmares.
But when approaching Alien: Earth, in terms of how it all works, the production wanted to start with a clean slate. “With the script, it just said, ‘Wendy opens her mouth and she speaks to aliens,’ which was quite daunting, because what does that look like?” Chandler recalled, in an interview conducted by FX PR on behalf of IGN.
That start-from-scratch approach also applied to Gilmore, who had previously worked on sound design for Alien: Romulus. “Noah really wanted to make this his own thing,” Gilmore said. “He wanted to have its own sonic language while still honoring the legacy sounds of ’79… It was really important to me, personally, not to reuse anything from Romulus.”
Gilmore added that, while having the “palette in my head” from working on the theatrical feature certainly helped, simply reusing the Romulus Xenomorph sounds would have “felt cheap.” Instead, they started from scratch. Mostly. Before she even left her home in Texas, Chandler was already spending time thinking about the alien sounds. And she took inspiration from an appropriate place: bugs.
“We have a lot of cicadas out here, so I left my phone outside for an hour at nighttime and just recorded the sounds of the cicadas and crickets, and found this really beautiful fluctuation from the sounds, [they] rise and fall really beautifully and eerily,” Chandler explained. “And so I would listen to that a few times before I found my groove with my alien language. But that was helpful too. There's a melody to the language of insects, which I felt very much coalesces with the sounds of the aliens. There's an insectile chirping, trilling that is obviously inhuman, so that was helpful, too.”
Gilmore struck on the same general idea, also before even a “lick” of picture had been shot of the show. “We really focused on chittery, insect-type sounds. When I worked on Romulus, I started messing with the idea of, what if these Xenos had insect layers to their vocals? Because I always loved in Aliens ’86, you establish a queen and drones, and they have this hive mentality. And so let's start throwing some cicadas in there and crickets that have been manipulated, slowed down, sped up, all that kind of thing. So we started messing with that, crickets, frogs, anything that had that tickly sound to your ears.”
While both Chandler and Gilmore were able to draw inspiration from cicadas and crickets, the next challenge was to figure out the physicality of what that would actually look like on film. “I started playing with the constriction of my throat, and found this sound where I was rolling my Rs a bit and whistling, inhaling and exhaling quite rapidly,” Chandler said. “And that gave me this weird sound that the entire cast had to listen to throughout all of filming, but it gave me a sense of life and authenticity to the communication.”
As Chandler grew more comfortable with the process, she would “open my mouth a little bit wider, and the sound would heighten or bring it down lower, or do more of sounds instead of the full trill. And so I created different layers to the communication of something to calm, something to heighten.”
Chandler clarified that these sounds were not used in the final piece, but they did help her in terms of “communicating” with the aliens. In fact, the sounds Chandler made don’t sound anything like what was in the final cut, though “it did have the nuances of clicking, of trilling, breath work as well.”
What a Xenomorph Sounds Like When It’s Sad, Confused, or ‘Really Angry’
That said, there is a long history of Xenomorph sounds, stretching back to the original 1979 feature film, and there were sounds played on set before the cameras started rolling to help “get an idea” of what to expect – even as Gilmore was heading in a different direction, mostly in terms of paring things down.
“With this whole Alien universe, it always goes back to less is more when it comes to the sound, because it's really cool when you don't spoon-feed your audience too much, and they can fill in the blanks with their own mind and their own imagination,” said Gilmore. “It makes things a lot scarier a lot of the times… Then we started getting picture turnover where we saw [Chandler] speaking back to [the xenomorphs]. And then we started experimenting with those ideas as well.”
Similarly, once the production moved to the ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) stage, Chandler continued to play with the sound with “more breath work, more different sounds to try and bring to life the authenticity that this is coming out of her. So it's not just an open jaw and radio frequency, that was my biggest fear. I wanted it to really look like she was emanating a sound and communicating in a language.”
So given all that, how did they end up with the final product you see on Alien: Earth? Chandler recalled, “they worked off of the sounds that I created, or at least the cadence, which was really cool, because that bit of believability that it's not just one tone. When I open my mouth a little wider, the sound shifts and there's a cadence and melody to it. So it was really fun.”
Gilmore agreed, noting that once they brought in Chandler for ADR, “it was like, oh my gosh, this is totally attaching to the screen now, because at times it can just kind of sound like sound effects. And once you add in that breath element, it really adds a layer of believability to it, even when it comes to the Xeno vocals themselves.”
A lot of the work Gilmore and his team focused on then was honing in from the “swelling bed” of the Wendy echoes to the language of the Xenomorphs, which becomes clearer as Wendy becomes better at communicating with them. They couldn’t use the source recordings from Aliens – which were "baboons and stuff,” by the way – because they’re “so old sounding,” but also wanted to create something new anyway. So they ended up with the “insect chirpy sound” that’s “almost like this kettle that's boiling over, and then it finally will go into a hero scream.”
Though this particular revelation might drive Frommer up a wall, Gilmore noted that a lot of what they’re calling language is actually more about emotion. Once they had the “palette of sounds” set, they could then focus on how to make the Xenomorph sound sad, or confused, or “really angry.”
And then there’s an extra challenge. For the first time in the franchise, we’re really seeing Xenomorphs at different stages of development beyond the egg to facehugger to Xenomorph pipeline. There’s also what seems to be toddler and teenage Xenos as well. So do they have different voices? Do they get angry and run to their room, slamming the door and yelling, “You’re not my real dad?” They sure do. Except that last part.
“We wanted to make sure that when we see the baby Xeno, when he comes out for the first time and she's talking to him, there's almost a cute element to it,” Gilmore said. “And it was great, because it kind of lulls the audience into… This is a cool little pet, you know. And then he totally rages out and slams himself against the window, and you realize, oh, this thing's a killing machine. So you had to find a balance between cute, chirpy things that signify that he's still a baby, and then you slowly start integrating more aggressive sounds. And when he's full-grown, he has a much deeper body to him… We really were very specific in what kind of low elements we added to it. But once he's like a full-grown adult Xeno, he's got a lot more weight, a lot more body to him, his growls, and he’s seething.”
Continued Gilmore, “Out of all the sounds in the show, I would say that the whole Xeno language was the one thing that almost everyone had a hand [in] and everybody hammered on it just a little bit… There wasn't just one person that could say, well, it is what I came up with. It was a lot of collaboration.”
Once the “language” is in place, it’s all about how Wendy relates to the Xenomorph. It helps that there’s – sorry to ruin it for you – a real person inside the Xenomorph costumes (“we don't have a person that tiny to play little babies,” Chandler clarified), but Chandler credits director Ugla Hauksdóttir (who worked on Episodes 4 and 6) in particular for creating “a safe space for me to just really enter my imagination and play.”
Said Chandler, “We spoke of, I'm going to try and move close, and maybe it comes at me a little bit, and so I might hesitate and step away… I wanted to make sure that you feel a hesitancy on her end. This isn't a puppy dog. This is a lion that can hurt you, but it's not, and it is communicating. And so what do you do with that? So I wanted to create that dissonance there as well.”
And that’s Wendy too, of course.
“All of the Xenos, there's a level of it's like a mirror,” Chandler said. “She's seeing something that is alone and alien to its landscape, just like her. And so I really wanted to lean into this mutual respect. I mean, I don't know if the alien’s respecting her or not, but it seems to be. But there's this huge question mark between the two of, yeah, either one could kill the other if they got into it, but they're not so they are working together.
“But I didn't want it to feel like she has complete command over this thing, or that she's domesticated it in any way. That is absolutely not the case. In the jungle, when it's coming at her and her brother, after it's done its murdering, she's trying to protect Joe because she doesn't know, maybe it's going to go after him. So I wanted to keep that raw fear and respect because I also feel like in the franchise as a whole, that's what the Xeno stands for and deserves. It is a very scary apex predator. But now we're seeing, especially towards the end, that Wendy is also a very strong apex predator. And so what will the two do together? It's a very scary notion, or which one's stronger. There could be a power play there.”
Hey, at least they’re speaking the same language.
EU reportedly considers move to bypass Hungary's veto on Russia sanctions