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The craziest thing about the "Alien" franchise is just how much of its success seems to have come about at least partially by accident, or by improvisation. By the second movie, Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley had been firmly established as the face of the franchise, as well as one of the most beloved sci-fi leads of all time, but in the original script for "Alien" her character wasn't even supposed to be a woman. Even after Ripley's gender was flipped, the decision to let her survive had little to do with feminism or making Ripley into a franchise lead, but just with subverting expectations. "No one on that film was a feminist," Sigourney Weaver said in a 2006 interview. "Everyone thought, 'Who will ever think the woman is gonna be the survivor?' So it was just one big gag."

There's a common fun fact thrown around about "Alien...

Ridley Scott's "Alien" is a science fiction masterpiece that mixes haunted house horror with the cold vastness of space, and it took a whole team of creatives to imagine the distinct future screenwriter Dan O'Bannon had envisioned. In his BFI Film Classics book "Alien," author Roger Luckhurst contrasts concept artists Ron Cobb and H.R. Giger, who each contributed to the look and feel of the film's dystopian, corporate-run version of the year 2122. While Cobb helped make the sterile corporate side of things feel appropriately grounded, Swiss biomechanical artist Giger designed the more out-of-this-world elements. It seems like Giger himself is rather out-of-this-world, too, as Luckhurst reveals a story from the movie's set where the artist simply decided, one day, that he needed bones. Lots of bones. Truckloads of bones.

If there was ever a movie where that kind of thing might be appropriate, it's probably "Alien." While some crew...