What Do Taylor Swift, Alien, Cadbury’s Eggs and Prince Have in Common

Let us begin, as all great horror stories do, with a Cream Egg. Remember those? A seasonal object of unshakeable trust, cloaked in foil, available only in the short window between New Year’s Day and the guilt-fraught hangover of Easter. They were perfect. Then, in 2015, Cadbury changed the chocolate. No warning. No note. Just the sudden feeling that someone had emptied your childhood into a skip and replaced it with a budget-brand brown wax.

Of course, in the years since, we’ve come to understand that this was simply one battle in a much wider war: the slow, industrialised betrayal of every cultural object we once loved. Nothing is sacred, and everything is rebootable. Including Alien—a franchise that began as a whisper in the dark and has now become a noisy, looping PowerPoint delivered by an android with a God complex and a questionable haircut.

The original Alien was pure dread. Cold, slow, and gloriously withholding. A giant fossilised pilot, never explained. A monster without motive. A ship full of working-class astronauts slowly realising they’re not paid enough to die. Perfect. Terrifying. Sublime.

Then Ridley Scott returned with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant—and like a man cornered on a talk show and forced to explain his metaphors, he explained everything. The alien? Not a mystery, but a wet laboratory project from an android named David, who appeared to be built in a facility run by Elon Musk and The Poetry Society. The Space Jockey? Just a very cross protein shake in a toga. Honestly, I preferred not knowing.

And now we have Alien: Romulus, the franchise’s latest attempt to shake the old bones for loose change. You’re not watching a movie. You’re watching a mood board with jump cuts. It’s Alien as curated by the Netflix homepage: something you click without meaning to, skip halfway through, and then let play while you scroll through someone else's engagement party on Instagram. The film isn’t scary. It’s familiar. And familiarity is the brand.

This isn’t a cinematic experience. It’s the cultural equivalent of being chased round IKEA by your own Spotify Wrapped. One banger. One ballad. One chill track. Repeat until you’re nostalgic for the feeling of nostalgia. Taylor Swift? Trim an 18-year career into “Shake It Off,” “Lover,” and “All Too Well.” Loop forever in a £600 million stadium that still can’t serve warm nachos.

You don’t get evolution anymore. You get eternal encores. Billie Eilish is trapped in a flickering TikTok loop, whispering “Happier Than Ever” into the algorithmic void. BTS are still performing “Dynamite,” their choreography tighter than NATO, their creativity shrink-wrapped for freshness. Prince? He’s down the algorithmic corridor, playing “Purple Rain” to an audience that’s never made it past track four on Sign o’ the Times.

And yes, this is about Alien. But it’s also about the wider sense that culture itself is trapped in a haunted house designed by Netflix and emotionally programmed by Meta. Why risk anything when you can just remix corridor chases and vaguely Nietzschean androids? Why vision, when you can have lore?

Some writers, it must be said, still try. Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Iain Banks, Nnedi Okorafor—they imagined aliens as encounters, not jump scares. Denis Villeneuve, astonishingly, let Dune be slow, strange, and—whisper it—smart. Even if Paul Atreides does come across like Lionel Shriver’s Kevin in space, plotting intergalactic revenge between breathy inner monologues.

And so we end up here: not with hope, but with a Xenomorph. A monster now mostly deployed as wish fulfilment for people who think competence is woke and who break into hives when someone with a degree sits near them at the canteen table.

Still, the alien deserves better. Let it kill. Let it remain a nightmare. But put it back in a universe that is vast, unknowable, and indifferent to your streaming preferences. Let it be an unhealable trauma, oozing through the air vents—not just acid, but meaning.

Because maybe—just maybe—if we’re still capable of being terrified by something we don’t already understand, then we’re still alive. And that, in the year of our Lord Alien: Romulus, might be the last truly radical idea left.