Alien: Romulus Includes An Easter Egg For This Popular Video Game

Alien: Romulus will contain a nod to the 2014 survival-horror game Alien: Isolation. Director Fede Alvarez said recently that the Creative Assembly game taught him a lot about horror, and he is honoring the game with a little Easter egg in Alien: Romulus.

“The movie is set up in a way [that] every time something bad is about to happen, you will see a phone,” he said on the Inside Total Film podcast. “In the game, every time you knew there’s a phone you’d go, ‘Fuck, I’m about to go into some bad set-piece.’ It’s the same thing here. You’ll see they’re planted strategically throughout the film. When you see the phone, it’s like: Brace for impact.”

Alvarez went on to say Alien: Isolation was an experience that “made me see that Alien could truly be terrifying and done well [today].”

“I was like, ‘Fuck, if I could do anything, I would love to do Alien and scare the audience again with that creature and those environments.’ I was playing, and realizing how terrifying Alien could be if you take it back to that tone,” he said.

Alien: Romulus releases on August 16. It bills itself as a film that takes the series “back to its roots.” A team of space colonizers are scavenging from a derelict space station when they encounter the big, bad Xenomorph. The movie stars Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu.

Ridley Scott, who directed the original Alien, is a producer on Alien: Romulus.