Nightmare Fuel / Alien: Covenant

Run. Pray. Hide. And when all else fails, scream.

"All this... to start a new life."

— Daniels

As Ridley Scott is heading back to the origins of the Xenomorphs again, there will be moments of pure terror.

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Pre-Movie

• The very first poster, which depicts the snarling face of a Xenomorph surrounded by darkness. Fittingly, the tagline is "Run."
  • The third poster was no better, with the same dark background as the first, but with a Xenomorph egg instead. Instead of "Run", the tagline is "Hide".
• As to be expected the first trailer has a couple of moments that are bound to make you squirm. First off, we have the return of the face-huggers and egg sacs. Secondly, we see first hand that the Xenomorphs are back! In a possible reference to Psycho, one of the ugly bastards attacks a bathing couple in the showers, its body cloaked in darkness the entire time with the only really visible part being its tail. Finally, we get a glimpse of some of the new threats in the film; some poor soul having what appears to be a Chest-Burster like creature emerging from his spine!. And if a later shot in the trailer is anything to go by, it appears that all it takes to be infected is a single spore! Face-huggers are scary enough on their own but can be thwarted if you're quick enough: if even the very air you breathe can create more monstrosities, then what chance do you really have?
• The Last Supper prologue. They're have a good time, enjoying what would be their last meal in a while before one of the crew members start choking. Luckily for us, it was just food "down the wrong pipe" as Walter points out after slapping her on the back with precision. In addition, the ship captain is already under the weather with some illness, looking worse for wear. The overall creepiness hammers in on the fact this is the last time the shipmates will be happy together before the Xenomorphic shit hits the fan.
• The second trailer has this in spades. While the first half of the trailer, like the Last Supper prologue, establishes the True Companions status of the Covenant's crew... it also sets up an atmosphere in that Nothing Is Scarier when they hear absolutely nothing when they arrive on the planet and find crops already growing on the surface as the sound completely cuts out over the lush landscape. Then, the second half starts and, while showing a hell of a lot more, it's no less scary as more horrifying things happen to the crew both around the planet and on the ship as the trailer builds up to the reveal of the Xenomorph as it lunges at the camera.
  • The tagline alone is pretty chilling: "The path to paradise begins in Hell."
• A shot◊ from the movie shows an Engineer corpse that has been skinned and placed in the same pose as Michaelangelo's Statue of David in some twisted mockery (likely by David).
• The extended version of the Country Roads TV spot, which features a disturbing hologram of Shaw singing along to said tune as she pilots the ship.
• The second prologue, "The Crossing", shows David dropping the Chemical A0-3959X.91 – 15 canisters seen in Prometheus onto the Engineers who are gathered around to see the Engineer Juggernaught arriving at the Engineer homeworld, showing us how the Engineers were destroyed there.

Post Movie

• Branson's death. Being burned alive in your own stasis pod is really not a nice way to go. The fact that you can see him moving as the stasis pod begins to fill with smoke means he was awake when he burned.
• The revelation of Shaw's fate. Especially the state of the body after David spent ten years experimenting on and dissecting it. Even worse, there's the implication that he had genuinely grown to love her, and yet he did that to her anyway.
  • A Freeze-Frame Bonus, early in the film, just when the crew finished repairing the Covenant, Tennessee suddenly received a mysterious transmission hologram from his helmet. If paused at the right time, we can see Shaw's extremely scary and disturbing ghostly face, which can be seen here. It seems to still have long hair on it, implying that David has not yet finished experimenting on her, since the version we later see of her does not have long hair, with it being replaced by... things.
  • David then tells Daniels he'll give her the same treatment he gave Shaw, implanting her with his creation, and forcefully kisses her.
  • The reams of experiments and illustrations that David has created, the latter reflective of the Xeno's original designers and being utterly nightmarish.
• Chestbursters are bad enough. Having an alien pop out of the back and throat? Nightmare fuel indeed.
• By film's end, David has usurped the place of Walter and now has two Xenomorph embryos and two thousand sleeping, defenceless colonists to experiment on. A horrified Daniels is forced into stasis knowing she'll either never wake up, or wake up to a Fate Worse than Death.
  "Don't let the bed-bugs bite."
  • The reveal of how David hid the Xeno embryos is suitably grotesque and unnerving, too; he's revealed to have smuggled them aboard inside himself, and heaves them back up.
• The entire Medbay sequence. Faris seals Karine — terrified, swearing madly and demanding to be let out — inside the medbay with the infected Ledward, who has the Neomorph burst out of his back which tears his spine out in the process. The newborn creature then mauls Karine to death and chases Faris through the ship, where she accidentally blows up the ship and burns to death when she shoots a gas canister in her panic.
  • This 'delightful' 360 Virtual Reality video where the viewer gradually realises their POV is the Neomorph inside Ledward's spine. You can hear Ledward's heart speed up, hear the muffled sounds of Karine screaming and begging to be let out of the medbay, and once you rip yourself out of Ledward, you go to attack Karine...
  • The music that goes with it is also a genuinely ominous track that really ramps up the tension of the scene even though, given that this is an Alien film, after all, you probably already know exactly what's about to happen.
• Rosenthal's death. Briefly separating from the others to tend to her wounds from the wheat field attack, the Neomorph sneaks into David's lair and finds her in the bathroom. We see the Neomorph's almost human like stance before it lunges at Rosenthal, tearing into her neck. And when Oram goes looking for her, we are treated to a delightful shot of the Neomorph crouching over Rosenthal's mutilated body while her decapitated head lies bobbing in water nearby.
  • The Neomorph's featureless face itself prior to and after this is pretty horrifying in itself. At least the xenomorph has a mouth, this thing has no indication of what's going through its head.
• The wheat field attack. The expedition crew arrive at the medbay just in time to see it explode killing Faris. As Oram freaks out about Karine being on board, a neomorph bursts out of Hallet's throat before running off with the other Neomorph. Then the creatures come back and attack the crew; hiding in the wheat. One of the creatures tears off security officer Ankor's jaw off with a tail swipe and injures Rosenthal while another bites off Walter's arm as he rushes to save Daniels. The crew would have been massacred if David hadn't turned up with a flare scaring the creatures off.
• Lope's gross facial wound after being facehugged.
• David sends a fake signal from Walter to Earth, saying that while some crewmembers were tragically killed in a solar flare accident, he's proceeding with the mission to the colony world. Does he hope to lure other Earth vessels there, perhaps with the intention of infecting ships returning to Earth, thus destroying humanity as he destroyed the Engineers?
• The shower scene near the end of the film. In addition to being a serious case of Mood Whiplash, what can be more horrifying than witnessing the sudden death of your loved one while they are standing two feet in front of you, and then finding yourself cornered by a hideous monster while naked and defenseless?
• The Xenomorph itself. One could argue it's even more aggressive than it was in past movies, and it will never stop trying to kill you this time around. It will follow you to the very end, breaking down doors, slaughtering everyone you've ever known in minutes, and when it finally dies... there will always be several more ready to deploy. Furthermore, the director's commentary reveals that killing it in the first place is nigh impossible due to its ability to reconstitute itself.
• The Blu-ray extra "Advent" contains Nightmare Fuel in spades, relying simultaneously on Gorn and Nothing Is Scarier. We see hints of David's experiments on Shaw's corpse, together with his desire to create a Queen for his new creations (via Daniels), all in what amounts to an open invitation to Weyland-Yutani to come seek out his perfect organisms.
• Even worse is that it's also been revealed that David experimented on live Engineer infants in his attempts to create the perfect organism with sketches of the results showing the infants with elongated Xenomorph-like heads, legs, feet and even the dorsal tubes coming out of their backs.
• One deleted scene has David slaughtering the Engineers on the planet with their own chemical weapon. Okay, given that the Engineers tried to kill humanity in the previous film, you would think that in this instance, we should side with David. Except the scene shows that these are civilians and when they first see the ship, they are actually waving up at the ship thinking it is their own kin, and when David starts dropping the chemical in the pods, the civilians realize what really is happening and run. David litters the area so badly that the chemical starts to sweep through the crowd like a mist and you see civilians screaming, vomiting, and disintegrating.