I know where the idea of alien came from

[melanie2]

While trying to sweep up the various mangled body parts of these huge mutant crickets that somehow get in our home..well..sometimes the vacuum spits them back out again..these suckers are big...thank goodness they are dead...but of course they have to be dead, since they are in mangled parts...well anyway...when the vacuum sometimes spits them back out...they resemble that horrible alien creature in the movie, Alien...so i just bet any money that the director or the special effect team must have had a cat at home who left them various gifts of these huge ass mutant mangled cricket body parts...whoohooo i'm so lucky...grr

 

[kopfhorer1]

I thinkthe Swiss artist H.R. Giger was the artistic brains behind the Alien series.

Maybe he had a cat who liked to disembowel mutant crickets.

Speaking of which...

 

[jts963]

The basic plot of the original Alien (1979) was based on a science fiction story (the name and author escapes me) which was sort of like The Thing movie transported from the arctic to outer space. In the story, an intelligent predator which sort of resembled a jungle cat with six limbs climbed on board a human space exploration ship and began hunting the crew. What made stopping the monster so hard is that it could pass through walls. In the movie they went for a creature with an acidic bloodstream that would let it eat through walls, and as kopfhorer pointed out, Giger was the main creator of the Alien look.

 

[Rox_My_Sox1]

I heard a story that the two movie producers of the movie "Alien" got the idea when they made a fake movie scene set which portrayed two astronauts looking in horror at a beach ball covered in fake puke/shit while in the cockpit of their ship. According to the story, people were actually scared by this.