New Alien: Covenant Promo Videos Turn to Found Footage For Scares

Alien: Covenant is really exhausting all its options in the advertising department.

Following the film’s car commercial-esque promo featuring Michael Fassbender’s new and improved android Walter, as well as a number of more conventional trailers and TV spots, 20th Century Fox has decided to draw from the other end of the aesthetic spectrum in the latest series of promo videos, which eschew corporate sterility in favor of found footage rawness.

There are two videos, one of which purports to contain footage of a transmission that Katherine Waterston’s Daniels is sending home to her dad. The tone of this video begins pleasantly enough, with Daniels expressing hopefulness and excitement at the Covenant’s colonizing mission, but as shots of her speaking are repeatedly interrupted by ominous, Blair Witch Project-style footage of the Covenant’s crew maneuvering through catacomb-esque spaces and being preyed upon by unseen dangers, the dread starts setting in big-time.

The other video stars Billy Crudup’s first mate Christopher Oram, reading from a script in his hand. As he speaks about the “majesty of creation” and how it is “ours to discover,” the same kind of freaky found footage interrupts his reading, generating dramatic irony through having us know that the “majesty” won’t seem so majestic once the killing begins.