Nightmares and Dreamscapes: The Fear Factor of Alien Covenant

I am going to assume it will be more psychological horror. Similar to Alien, but with an uptick in gore as well. I can't be sure how it will work out or how balanced it will be, but I think one of the goals with Covenant is to merge Alien and Prometheus. 

But I do not necessarily think that Covenant can be that close to Alien horror wise because it is retaining too much of that large scope, shock and awe Prometheus atmosphere. So the gore may trump psychological terror by a bit.

DAVID007 - I am hoping for an even mix of psychological and visceral horror. Mind you, I do not want over-the-top gore; violence can be terrifying without being gory! :)

Gore is fine but I don't think that it should be over done. Maybe scenes like this could be effective: if someone would be dragged down through a hole in the floor by a monster but you don't see the monster or what is happening but you hear some nasty sounds and screams, that could be a good thing. A mix of gore and where you don't really see what is happening so you got to use your imagination. By not explaining everything they could make the Engineers more creepy also even though you could explain what they are about in general.

cuponator3000: 

I hope that they will keep what was actually good about Prometheus. The goo was interesting and also that Engineers and their agenda is something that is potentially interesting. Unfortunately they said that the Engineers had a DNA-match to the humans but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be small differences. Hopefully they will make the Engineers more different to humans in this movie which could add to the movie since the unknown is more scary than what we know. What if Shaw mis-read the DNA-match that they were given?

The good things from Prometheus are something that they can expand on but I hope that we will not be given the whole answer about it. It is important that they will keep a bit of mystery after the Alien prequels are done.

The Alien franchise has always been about the biological goo.  They seem to hit you in the face with it.  Lots of fluids and KY jelly.  Then some seem to get their jollies from the deconstruction of same.  The gore is just an aspect to the nature of violence.  I don't like it or dislike it.  It just is.  I really don't understand some people's fascination with it, but there it is. 

These days I don't think it has the same shock effect because the over-exposure of many folks to it, so they keep pushing the envelope.

So yeah, you want to make money, you're gonna go for the lowest common denominator, which means lots of goo.

You push through it, try not to get distracted by it.  I certainly don't enjoy it, but obviously some do.

Sometimes I feel that some elements in our culture, especially the atheists, revel in showing the human body as nothing but biological tissue, as in see, here's all the guts, no soul or anything spiritual inside there.

Sorry to get off-topic.  Just a pet peeve of mine. 

I think they are going to try and continue to answer some of the Mystery movie aspect of Prometheus.. but they are also trying to give us a Alien movie again in a way.

It depends what Ridley thinks made Alien so good... and scary and if they can remake that...

The Thing 1982 was like Alien, somewhat unique... The Thing had a unknown Horror but it was more in your face, but it had suspense because you could connect with the Characters more you saw the Psychological Horror from their point of view, the fear of not knowing who is Human and who is not.

The movie had a great use of Characters and Buckets of Gore....

But the 2011 version, seemed to be even more in your face and the semi CGI never looked as creepy as the Original... but maybe its because you cant replicate the Original.... maybe if The Thing 1982 was never released... until after the 2011 movie then it would not have the same effect.

I think Alien Covenant faces the same problems...

*How can you improve the Chest Buster, its been done many times before... more Gore will not change it

*How can we have Aliens bursting out of people and chasing them, when Alien worked because it was the first time we saw this Monster and it was the fear of what we did not see that made it effective.

So i think they have to set up the Characters Plight in a way we can connect to,  they have to at first not clearly show us the Monsters like we saw in Aliens and Alien R

So its going to be interesting to see how they can make this Scary

Yeah hard to top the original shock value of Giger's creepy vision.  No doubt the THE best monster to date.  The combo of Giger's artwork with Ridley's story work was a stroke of genius. 

Personally I think there's plenty to explore to the story without going back to all the goo and gore.  But I get it.  It sells.  Rock on.