It’s the age-old argument: Alien or Aliens? The haunted-house horror movie, or the action-packed war film? The lean, dread-filled original, or the bigger, beefier sequel? Both Ridley Scott’s original Xenomorph outing and James Cameron’s exemplary sequel stand tall among the greatest sci-fi films of all time – each with a strong and valid claim for being the best of the bunch. But when deciding the direction in which to take his sequel, Alien: Romulus, filmmaker Fede Alvarez hit upon the ideal solution: why not a hybrid of the two?

“To ask an Alien fan to choose between them is a perverse question,” he tells Empire, in our world-exclusive new Beetlejuice Beetlejuice issue. “So I thought, ‘How do I do both?’” Get ready, then, for a film that aims to conjure the slow-build scares of Alien with the oh-god-they’re-everywhere assault of Aliens, set at a point between the...