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Ridley Scott’s latest alien franchise could have looked more like a direct prequel to his last one, according to the original screenwriter for Prometheus Jon Spaihts. In a surprise-laden interview with Empire ,  Spaihts says he had written facehuggers and chestbursters into early versions of the storyline before Scott and script doctor Damon Lindelof  decided to move in a more original direction. Spaihts explained that he originally envisioned facehuggers being used to implant the alien seed in both Holloway and Shaw. “David, as he began to get fascinated by the science of the Engineers, doesn’t deliberately contaminate Holloway with a drop of black liquid. Instead, Holloway hubristically removes his helmet in the chamber” — a version of which happens in the finished Prometheus — is knocked unconscious, facehugged and wakes up not knowing what had been done to him, and stumbles back into the ship,” Spaihts told Empire . Enter the chestburster. In what Spaihts described as a “messy” scene, Holloway returns to his cabin and is “embraced by Shaw, who is delighted to see him having feared that he had died, and the two of them make love,” he goes on to say. “And it’s while they’re making love that he bursts and dies.” Nice. Spaihts says that his idea was originally to have Shaw impregnated by a facehugger, courtesy of David. In what sounds like an extremely creepy sequence,  he says an early script called for David to tie up Shaw and deliberately expose her to the spidery egg sack. “He caresses an egg open and out comes a facehugger,” Spaihts explains, but since David doesn’t smell like a living being,  “he can handle the the thing like a kitten.”  And he does. “He toys with her for a bit and then lets it take her. That, in my draft, was how Shaw was implanted with the parasite that she had to remove with the medpod sequence.” He also notes in Empire that in his version of the script, the baby alien is ejected from the medpod while a dazed Shaw remains inside as she’s stitched up and watches the creature grow and dispatch other members of the crew. Shaw would have remained in the medpod for eight hours in Spaihts telling of the story, which would have made her post-Caesarean scenes avoiding the crashing Engineer’s spaceship and escaping the grown tentacled alien slightly more plausible. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.

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There Were Supposed To Be Facehuggers! ‘Prometheus’ Screenwriter Spills Secrets Of Early Scripts