A Fatal Headshot and Sewer Birth: Species’ Wild Climax

The actor, best known for his work in classic gangster films and the Tarantino joint Reservoir Dogs, was remembered for his early work last month following his passing earlier this month. A man of few words on and off the screen, Madsen will be remembered for fan-favorites, particularly Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco. Fewer have paid tribute to one of Madsen’s stranger roles, as a black ops mercenary hunting a half-human, half-alien hybrid in the 1995 sci-fi thriller Species. The film turns 30 this year and is ripe for a revisit.

Species was a monster flick, a creature feature—a strange hybrid of horror, action, and soft sci-fi. Directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), the movie came to theaters just as the “alien invasion” genre was at its height. The idea of man-made “hybrids” was in vogue, from Star Trek: The Next Generation to Ghost in the Shell, and the alien-invasion paranoia that had defined much of 1990s culture had found its way into cinema.

Species hit theaters in 1995. In the quiet outside of Los Angeles, the U.S. government has received two transmissions from outer space. The first describes a revolutionary fuel source. The second? Exact instructions on how to splice human and alien DNA. The government, naturally, follows through.

Directed by the inhumanely handsome Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), a hybrid is created. She’s called Sil, and in her early years is played by Michelle Williams. Dr. Fitch had been expecting something docile, something controllable. He had not been expecting a…well, monster.

Sil rapidly develops at an unnatural rate, appearing after only three months as a fully grown 12-year-old. There are problems from the start. She has violent nightmares, and before long, the signs that she may not be as “controllable” as hoped become harder to ignore. When Fitch attempts to kill the experiment by pumping cyanide gas into her containment cell, Sil escapes, and the manhunt begins.

To track her down, Fitch recruits a team of specialists to find and kill her: Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a no-nonsense mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a brooding empath who can somehow sense what Sil is feeling. The chase across the country and into the city brings them to Los Angeles, where Sil, now fully grown and played by Natasha Henstridge, begins her primal search to mate and reproduce.

Intelligent, adaptive, and animalistic in her instincts, Sil tears through victims as she hunts for a mate. A train tramp is killed. A nightclub victim. Eventually, the boyfriend she’s picked out, and that’s when Dr. Fitch and his team realize they may have a problem. Sil’s DNA allows her to reproduce just as quickly as she can create it, and the team races against the clock to find her before she gives birth to more of her kind.

A Monster Designed to Seduce—and Kill

To create Sil, director Roger Donaldson turned to legendary surrealist artist H.R. Giger, best known to audiences of the time for his work on Ridley Scott’s Alien and Aliens. Giger’s creature for Species had to be both human and alien. “Sil,” he wrote, “is an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.”

The result was unlike anything seen before: sleek, chitinous, and at times, remarkably organic. Sil’s human form, in her final iteration, featured translucent skin. Giger described the body as “a glass body but with carbon inside.” Giger had envisioned a far more elaborate, alien life cycle for Sil, featuring four or five different stages of alien-human hybrid evolution. Budget and production limits kept that vision small, and Sil is eventually transformed by way of cocoon before emerging in a final maternal alien form.

Despite the commercial success of Species and its visual design, Giger later expressed displeasure with what the movie had become. In 1996, he wrote that the film was “too close to the first Alien film, in my opinion,” too close to scenes, such as the “punching tongue” and the infamous birth scene, which felt like an imitation of Alien’s “chestburster” moment. Giger even took it upon himself to alter production by eliminating a fiery death by flamethrowers that would have been, in his opinion, too similar to both Alien 3 and Terminator 2.

The Reception Was Mixed, but It Was Magnetic

Species was not well-received by critics upon its release in 1995. Much of the dialogue and characterization fell flat, and many of the characters lacked depth or nuance. Dr. Fitch, played by Kingsley, is soulless and surprisingly unconvincing in his morality-free quest for more Sil DNA. Whitaker’s empath, for his part, exists mostly to wander around muttering the obvious. The themes of the story, of bioethics and alien contact and maternal instinct, are present but largely unexplored.

For all that, Species has a magnetic charm. The script was inspired by an article written by Arthur C. Clarke for the journal Physics Today, in which he speculated that aliens may never have visited or made contact with Earth because of the unfathomable distances between galaxies and the near impossibility of faster-than-light travel. What if, screenwriter Feldman asked, aliens did make contact with Earth, but rather than visit by way of an interstellar mothership, they sent down blueprints instead—blueprints to create something organic? Something invasive? A sentient species built with the Earth’s DNA?

Species is the resultant movie. It is, in equal parts, both a cautionary tale and a creature feature, a warning about the potential of bioengineering to run amok and a strange erotic horror film. It may never stand on the shoulders of Alien or The Terminator, but Species did cultivate its cult following—and for good reason. Between Henstridge’s uncanny performance, Madsen’s grizzled, rugged charm, and H.R. Giger’s indelible design, the film remains a 1990s sci-fi oddity worth exploring.

Species endures, 30 years later, as a time capsule of what genre looked like when style could—and did—trump substance—and as an example of some of the strange, unforgettable roles that made actors like Madsen who they were.