I've said it couple of times on here before, and I'll say it again: Alien is my favorite pure horror movie ever. It's a perfect movie: a fantastic cast, impeccable atmosphere, stunning visuals (both on Nostromo and the alien planet), it works both as a straight-up fright fest and as a psychological nightmare, it's still genuinely effective and creepy after all these years, and it stars the greatest movie monster of all time.

Aw yeaaaaaah.

- Co-writer Dan O'Bannon (who went on to write Total Recall and direct The Return of the Living Dead) was homeless and sleeping on other co-writer Ronald Shusett's couch when they wrote the film.

- The characters were all written to be unisex, meaning that each character could have just as easily been a man or a woman, which by extension means Ripley could have been a guy.

- Actor Joe Finch was originally cast as the seriously unfortunate Kane, but he became extremely ill right a the production began. He was barely able to do one take before he practically collapsed. Thus, John Hurt was quickly cast over the following weekend, and flew in to work on the set on only a few hours sleep.

- For the scene where the ground team investigates the main room of the derelict ship (the one with the "space jockey" corpse), director Ridley Scott and cinematographer Derek Vanlint's children stood in for the adults in the spacesuits, in order to make the ship look larger.

- A total of 130 eggs were made for the derelict ship scenes.

- Technicians had to keep repainting the set because all the slime was doing a number on the paint job.

- German surrealist H. R. Giger designed all the derelict ship and the xenomorph itself, though he had to keep toning it down because they appeared too sexual in nature (seeing what the ship's openings and the xenomorph's head looks like in the final film, that's saying something). Not all his designs were used, though; the original chestburster looked like a skinned chicken.

- The specimen seen in the egg when light is shown through it is Ridley Scott's gloved hands.

- The POV shot where the facehugger leaps at Kane's face is actually composed of three separate shots, each one done in reverse and drastically sped up in post.

- The idea for the acid blood was thought up by concept artist Ron Cobb as a reason as to why the crew couldn't just shoot the damn thing.

- Every handheld shot in the movie was done by Ridley Scott himself.

- Composer Jerry Goldsmith hated the changes made to his score without his permission.

- While plugging the movie on CBS, a man named Bob Burns asked the producer's blessing for his idea to base his annual Halloween haunted house on Alien. The producers were impressed with his past haunted houses and not only gave him their blessing, but they actually allowed him to use actual sets from the movie, including the xenomorph suit(!). After the show, he tried to return the props to the studio, but they decided to be super-awesome and actually let him keep it all. In fact, they actually gave him even more props, such as the model for Nostromo. Since then, Burns went on to add several more awesome movie props to his collection (most of them given to him by the studios filmmakers themselves). Among the collection are various tools, animatronics and costumes from each Alien movie (including the still functioning head for the Alien Queen puppet, which he lent back to the studio to use in Resurrection), several full scale cyborgs and head maquettes from the Terminator series, the Brundlefly makeup prosthetics and conceptual busts from The Fly, some of the transformation puppets from An American Werewolf in London, and the crown jewel: one of the stop-motion puppet armatures used for the titular beast in the original King Kong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=uSzgNNaOukk

- The white milky stuff that came out of Ash the Android was...milk.

- Actor Yaphet Kotto picked fights with the man inside the xenomorph suit to keep in character.

- Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbaca, almost played the xenomorph.

- The xenomorph originally had visible eyes, but Ridley Scott dropped them because it looked scarier without them.

- No, the alien was never called an xenomorph in this one; that's in the sequel. I just feel like being a nerd today.

- Someday, some presumptuous nerd is gonna try and tell you that the actors didn't know what was going to happen during the chestburster scene, and that their shock is genuine. This myth is almost completely false. It's impossible for the actors to not have known how the scene was gonna play out; the scene required puppeteers and a fake chest and a hole in the table and everything, and that required the full collaboration and acknowledgement of what was suppose to happen from everyone. Actress Veronica Cartwright even recalls going down to the effects team and seeing the little chestburster puppet before the shoot. That said, the shock on their faces during the scene wasn't completely acting, because they didn't know it was going to be that aggressive. They thought the thing was just going to rip out of the chest, not violently pound its way out in an explosion of blood. When Cartwright falls backwards with a look of utter horror on her face, that's quite real; she didn't expect the blood pump to hit her right in her face.

- In order to make sure the filmmakers knew what a real horror movie was like, Dan O'Bannon had them watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yeah, more on that movie later.

- The movie originally ended a lot more disturbingly, and a lot more ridiculous. After Ripley escapes the Nostromo explosion, the xenomorph bites her head off, calmly sits down in her chair, and then sends a message to Earth in her voice.

It's a good thing that ending wasn't used, not because it sound hilarious, but because Ripley would have been dead, and we wouldn't have gotten the sequel we have now. A sequel I not only consider to be the greatest movie sequel of all time, but just flat-out my favorite movie ever.

Gosh, I'm so excited, I need to get started writing the next one! I'm off!