Dissecting the Derelict
a) In the silo, below the jockey's chamber, there are thousands of spores that must be as old as the Jockey's remains. They are covered over by a film of blue light, Scott added.
Scott:"the sheet as I call it of the laser beam, this is a laser beam spread thin like a thin sheet, but it worked great here and I never thought it would photograph because it's pretty low key, but you know, with the wizardry of, of Derek, we got it. So this is all just handheld lay the sound on as you go through the laser beam, you can here, there's a sound to the laser beam, you can here it now, like a seal. I always thought of the laser beam as the placenta wall for the, erm ,eggs."(Alien 30th Anniversary Edition DVD)
b) We are to find out from one of the cut scenes from Alien that the way these things are created are by the aliens themselves with the aid of victim's bodies.
Scott:"loose on the ship, this new alien, begins to lay eggs in the bowels of the ship. It lives to propagate and must find food for it's offspring - in this case, the crew members of the Nostromo upon whom the young aliens can feed in their eggs until a new host comes along prodding the eggs. The the cycle begins all over again" (S&S v48.n.1 Winter 78/79, p26)
Without this scene, the information within it isn't recognised as part of the alien mythos anymore, and instead we have spores layed as eggs by an egg laying queen seen in Cameron's 'Aliens' film, that's another stage of the alien's life cycle, that might have layed enough eggs to fill the derelict's egg silo. James Cameron wanted an egg layer because he was not convinced by the idea that human victims could genetically transform into spores, where he actually got the idea that victims were doing this, I have not found. He saw no evidence in this regarding Kane's corpse for instance. Cameron must have jumped on this just as a vague assumption that was too hard for him to find further information about, or maybe the producers mislead him.
c) Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett actually suggest in their original script that the victim Standard (later to be renamed Dallas) by his own experience is being eaten, the online version has the cocooned character Standard's actual reason in words for not wanting to be saved as "It's eaten too much of me" and in the DVD version "Too much gone". O'Bannon's words on the matter in an interview (Starburst 15, p41) when Parker too was taken away by the Alien after being killed by it "Ripley finds Captain Dallas spun into a web in the hold of the Earthship. Brett and Parker have also been spun into cocoons which are in the process of metamorphosing into the very same type of egg found in the pyramid". His reference to a metamorphosis only relates to the cocoon and not the victims inside
So it does seem to me that explanation behind the idea of the human to spore "transformation", even without Ridley Scott's explanation, the victim inside the cocoon was being eaten away and indeed the silk cocoon turns into the spore shell. And so following this, Scott actually went with the idea of showing human bodies being eaten away alive by the cocoon material putting Dallas in a state of agony, as the spore shell grew around the humans' remains.
a) In the silo, below the jockey's chamber, there are thousands of spores that must be as old as the Jockey's remains. They are covered over by a film of blue light, Scott added.
Scott:"the sheet as I call it of the laser beam, this is a laser beam spread thin like a thin sheet, but it worked great here and I never thought it would photograph because it's pretty low key, but you know, with the wizardry of, of Derek, we got it. So this is all just handheld lay the sound on as you go through the laser beam, you can here, there's a sound to the laser beam, you can here it now, like a seal. I always thought of the laser beam as the placenta wall for the, erm ,eggs."(Alien 30th Anniversary Edition DVD)
b) We are to find out from one of the cut scenes from Alien that the way these things are created are by the aliens themselves with the aid of victim's bodies.
Scott:"loose on the ship, this new alien, begins to lay eggs in the bowels of the ship. It lives to propagate and must find food for it's offspring - in this case, the crew members of the Nostromo upon whom the young aliens can feed in their eggs until a new host comes along prodding the eggs. The the cycle begins all over again" (S&S v48.n.1 Winter 78/79, p26)
Without this scene, the information within it isn't recognised as part of the alien mythos anymore, and instead we have spores layed as eggs by an egg laying queen seen in Cameron's 'Aliens' film, that's another stage of the alien's life cycle, that might have layed enough eggs to fill the derelict's egg silo. James Cameron wanted an egg layer because he was not convinced by the idea that human victims could genetically transform into spores, where he actually got the idea that victims were doing this, I have not found. He saw no evidence in this regarding Kane's corpse for instance. Cameron must have jumped on this just as a vague assumption that was too hard for him to find further information about, or maybe the producers mislead him.
c) Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett actually suggest in their original script that the victim Standard (later to be renamed Dallas) by his own experience is being eaten, the online version has the cocooned character Standard's actual reason in words for not wanting to be saved as "It's eaten too much of me" and in the DVD version "Too much gone". O'Bannon's words on the matter in an interview (Starburst 15, p41) when Parker too was taken away by the Alien after being killed by it "Ripley finds Captain Dallas spun into a web in the hold of the Earthship. Brett and Parker have also been spun into cocoons which are in the process of metamorphosing into the very same type of egg found in the pyramid". His reference to a metamorphosis only relates to the cocoon and not the victims inside
So it does seem to me that explanation behind the idea of the human to spore "transformation", even without Ridley Scott's explanation, the victim inside the cocoon was being eaten away and indeed the silk cocoon turns into the spore shell. And so following this, Scott actually went with the idea of showing human bodies being eaten away alive by the cocoon material putting Dallas in a state of agony, as the spore shell grew around the humans' remains.
This is helpful. I personally don't like the idea of "human to spore transformation", (I prefer an egg-laying queen) but it is good to know that that is what the filmmakers originally intended.
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