Composer Jeff Russo Merged ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’ to Craft the Score for ‘Alien: Earth’ — Watch

Since 1979, the “Alien” franchise has flipped between two different genres, alternatively offering audiences sci-fi horror and sci-fi action. Ridley Scott’s first film and James Cameron’s 1986 sequel “Aliens” are in particular considered seminal works in the respective genres, which makes following them up a daunting question of what the project will look like in the first place.

“Alien: Earth” opts for an approach that does both, incorporating both horror and action into its story of cyborgs contending with Xenomorphs. For series composer Jeff Russo, that introduced a challenge: making a coherent score that could work for both horror and action.

“That first movie was one of the great horror movies, and the second one is one of the great action movie, and we kind of needed to do both of those things,” Russo said during IndieWire’s Craft Roundtables.

Russo was joined by a variety of different composers from some of the biggest shows of the past year at the IndieWire composer roundtable. Also present were “The Madison” composer Brenton Vivian, “The Boroughs” composer John Paesano, “Spider-Noir” composer Kris Bowers, “Murderbot” composer Amanda Jones, and “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” composer Mac Quayle to discuss their shows and how they created scores that matched the material onscreen.

Speaking about the “Alien: Earth” score, Russo said he incorporated elements from both of the first two films into his work, so he could pay homage to both forms of the “Alien” franchise. The orchestral sound overall is mostly indebted to the more traditional blockbuster sound of “Alien.” However, Russo also explained that he used tape delay, an audio effect that creates an “echo” in the score, as a way to pay homage to the first film.

“There’s big percussion and this big orchestral sound, but we went with tape for tape delays which is what they used in that first movie, and giving a tip of the hat to that kind of stuff was really really important,” Russo. “That was how I was able to nod to that score, was the tape delay on the horns, which was a lot of fun. Once we found it, it was like ‘Oh yeah, there it is, that’s the thing, let’s do that!”

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