Alien exists because Dan O'Bannon was dissatisfied with this one. He co-wrote and shot Dark Star with John Carpenter, and its alien is a painted beach ball played for laughs; he has described wanting to do the same premise, a small crew alone with a creature, and make it genuinely frightening instead. Three things carry straight across:
- A bored, bickering blue-collar crew rather than officers, which is the tone Alien is famous for
- A confined ship as the whole world, with no rescue available
- A creature loose in the air ducts, staged in Dark Star as farce and in Alien as the hunt
This is also the route by which Jodorowsky's Dune reached Alien. O'Bannon did effects on that abandoned 1975 production and met H. R. Giger there, then brought Giger to Ridley Scott. That production was never finished, so the line to Alien runs through the people who worked on it rather than through the film itself.