How YouTube Enriches My “Alien” Fandom

Happy (early) birthday, YouTube. To celebrate the site’s 20th anniversary, we present: The InsideHook Guide to YouTube, a series of creator profiles, channel recommendations and deep dives about the viral, controversial, unstoppable video-sharing giant.

To start discussing Alien, let’s go back well before YouTube to the early 1980s. I first saw Alien when I was about 9 or 10. Letting a pre-teen watch a film filled with chestbursters, H.R. Giger nightmares and an underwear-clad Sigourney Weaver — that’s on my parents. Their mistake.

For me? It was life-changing. That Ridley Scott space classic changed how I viewed both sci-fi (it didn’t have to be Star Wars or 2001) and horror films, which I certainly hadn’t been exposed to much by 1981 when a bootleg Betamax copy of Alien landed in our home. Fast-forward to 1986, and I’m sneaking into Aliens, a movie that jump-started my love of action films and quippy dialogue (“Game over, man!”) as a teenager.

But films weren’t enough. I owned an Alien board game. I read the Alan Dean Foster novelization of the first film, particularly re-reading the two pages that suggested Dallas survived and was cocooned by the xenomorph — one of several edited or deleted scenes that I later studied on DVD and Blu-ray special editions of the films.

I defended Alien3 and Alien: Resurrection, films I saw on opening weekend despite middling reviews and uninterested girlfriends. I tolerated Aliens vs. Predator, mainly because I was obsessed with an early home video game match-up where I could play the xenomorph. I read the Dark Horse comic spinoffs, the strange Superman/Aliens and Batman/Aliens crossovers and any sci-fi magazine that offered interviews and behind-the-scenes photos. Even after the disappointment of Prometheus — gorgeous film, stupid screenplay — I devoured Alien: Out of the Shadows, a spinoff book series that was supposedly canonical and took place right after the first Alien flick. Spoiler alert: If you’ve read that book, many things in the recent Alien: Romulus film won’t come as a surprise (hello, Ash).

That said, my passionate interest in all things Alien only intensified in the past few years when I started consuming YouTube channels dedicated to the film franchise. The two-minute Alien: Romulus teaser trailer released early this summer led me down a rabbit hole: Alien Theory spent 10 minutes dissecting the trailer and timeline. The genre-based Looper channel did a 10-minute “what you missed” video. Another sci-fi YouTube portal, New Rockstars, spent nearly 20 minutes on a frame-by-frame analysis, while the equally obsessive Entertain the Dude suggested a possible timeline that theorized how Big Chap — the original beast on board the Nostromo from Alien — could end up on an abandoned Weyland-Yutani satellite 20 years later.

Does it matter that some of the theories weren’t 100% correct (see: Ripley’s spear gun did not have a tracking device)? Not in the least. Did consuming an hour’s worth of videos based on a two-minute teaser lessen my surprise at the final film? Perhaps a bit, but I also felt more prepared for the eventual twists. And post-Romulus viewing, it was again YouTube that reshaped and codified my opinion of the new film (I’d give it a B on its own and a B+ after watching this 29-minute film analysis and Easter egg discussion).

The best and most complete YouTube xenomorph channel is Alien Theory, which breaks down every Alien comic book into visual read-alongs, offers up multiple discussions on alien biology and features a whopping 35 videos alone on the original film that cover fan theories (“The Debate Over Lambert’s Gender”), deleted scenes and even amusing Alien tangents (“Alien: 1-Star User Reviews from IMDb” is worth the 44 minutes and 28 seconds).

The InsideHook Guide to YouTube

For YouTube’s 20th anniversary, we’re profiling creators, recommending channels and dissecting the viral, controversial, unstoppable video-sharing giant

There are other Alien-focused channels, including Aliens vs. Predator Galaxy (slightly more game-centric and inclusive of the Predator franchise) and Alien Anthology (which is official and hosted several original Alien short films a few years back). But the algorithm has me figured out — plenty of suggested sci-fi channels and random user YouTube pages have filled me in on other Alien/Aliens minutiae. I certainly wouldn’t have discovered Movie Balls Deep (groan) and their dissection of 31 xenomorph variants without a little Google-assisted prompt. Add in IGN, Heavy Spoilers, WhatCulture, Nerdist, Screen Culture, et al, and I can happily relive and reexamine my favorite films ad infinitum.

“You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else,” Ripley noted in Alien3. And with YouTube, that’s a life that’ll keep growing — and a space where I can happily spend 18 minutes uncovering that third film’s unsung brilliance.