Sensual and Deadly: How Giger Designed Species ‘ Sil

Actor Michael Madsen died earlier this month, and while his passing has prompted many to look back at his unforgettable roles in films like Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, I haven’t seen many tribute pieces honoring his turn in the 1995 alien thriller Species. This year marks the film’s 30th anniversary, so let’s remember it as a small and strange, and surprisingly gonzo Hollywood throwback.

Species was a science fiction creature feature released at the peak of a boom in monster movies and alien conspiracy theories. Films in those genres were so frequent that they often began to take more creative risks in their storytelling and character design than later decades would allow. Directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty) and written by Paul Kristof, Species was part horror, part action movie, and part soft science fiction. The story opens when the U.S. government receives a pair of transmissions from outer space: one is a document on a new form of high-energy fuel, and the other is a set of highly specific instructions for splicing alien DNA with human DNA. So, of course, they do it.

Under the guidance of Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), a half-human, half-alien hybrid named Sil is created (in her youth, she’s played by Michelle Williams). The expectation was that the organism would be placid and controllable. The reality is much different.

Sil is super smart, and she also matures rapidly, quickly developing into a teenager in appearance and attitude. She has violent dreams, and before long, signs begin to point to the fact that Sil is much less “controllable” than they all hoped. When Fitch decides to call it a day and terminate the experiment, he releases a poisonous cyanide gas into her holding cell. But she escapes, and that’s when the chase begins.

Agents are quickly assembled to track her down: they include Preston Lennox (Michael Madsen), a no-nonsense black ops mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a morose empath with the ability to sense what Sil is thinking and feeling. The team travels the country, eventually homing in on Los Angeles. Sil (now fully matured and played by Natasha Henstridge) is on the prowl, looking for a mate and to reproduce as much as possible, as quickly as possible. She’s self-aware, intelligent, and every bit as instinct-driven and dangerous as her DNA promises.

Human or Alien: There’s No In-Between

A key element of Species was the design of the half-human, half-alien hybrid herself. Legendary surrealist artist H.R. Giger, the man behind the xenomorph from Alien, worked with Donaldson to design Sil’s look. Giger was inspired by the vagina dentata myth; the half-alien, half-human Sil was “designed to seduce and kill.”

Sil in her later stages was distinctly Gigeresque, described as having “transparent” skin, like “a glass body but with carbon inside.” Giger, who’d also contributed to the production design of the film, had originally hoped to have several phases of alien evolution for Sil, but production complications limited him to a transformation cocoon and one final maternal alien body.

Giger was also unsatisfied with the final film, which he felt was too close to his earlier Alien work—specifically in elements like the character’s “punching tongue” and the infamous scene in which Sil gives birth in a hot tub, which Giger believed too closely mirrored the chestburster scene from Alien. Giger intervened during production to make sure Sil was killed by a bullet to the head, rather than the film’s original ending, which used flame-throwers—a touch he felt too closely echoed Alien 3 and Terminator 2.

Species wasn’t a critical success, with dialogue that often lagged and characters that were either forgettable or one-note. Fitch was amoral, Kingsley’s performance was just kind of there, and Whitaker’s empath spent most of his time in the corner screaming about what was obvious to everyone else. The human condition, bioethics, alien contact, maternal instinct—these are the things that Species dances around, but never really addresses. And yet. For all its ambition, for every half-written scene, there’s an undeniable charge to Species, an attractor formed of its messy combination of science fiction tropes and erotic horror. Screenwriter Paul Kristof told The Guardian that his inspiration came from a 1967 piece by Arthur C. Clarke called “All Our Bones to Ashes,” in which Clarke hypothesized that aliens would likely never visit Earth because of the nearly impossible constraints of faster-than-light travel. “What if,” Feldman wondered, “extraterrestrials were to contact us, not through sound waves or images but via some kind of blueprint, designed to create an organic, living creature, right here on Earth?”

Species is the result. The film simultaneously serves as a thinly veiled cautionary tale and creature feature. It will never find the success of Alien or The Terminator, but it carved out a space of its own, and there are reasons why it still has a cult following. Henstridge’s performance is magnetic, Michael Madsen is always a highlight, and Giger’s design work is unforgettable. It’s an overlooked ’90s sci-fi curiosity, and it’s worth a revisit.