Skull-Faced Alien Master

Skull-Faced Alien Master
The Leader
Movie Information
Movie Title	They Live (1988)
Monster Information
Size	Human-sized Alien
Type	Alien Ruler
Species	Ondramedonians
Abilities	Advanced Technology

Skull-Faced Alien Masters are the antagonists in the 1988 film, They Live.

Nada, a wanderer without meaning in his life, discovers a pair of sunglasses capable of showing the world the way it truly is. As he walks the streets of Los Angeles, Nada notices that both the media and the government are comprised of subliminal messages meant to keep the population subdued and that most of the social elite are skull-faced aliens bent on world domination. With this shocking discovery, Nada fights to free humanity from the mind-controlling aliens.

Appearance

Skull-Faced Alien Masters are the size and shape of humans but have faces from a nightmare (Walking Corpses). Their skin has a blueish hue with dark orange spots. Heads topped with human-like hair may or may not be wigs. Their bulbous mirrored eyes set deep within dark sockets. There is a hole where their noses should be. There are no lips revealing distorted human-like teeth but far too many of them. Their chin bones are bare of flesh.

Powers and Abilities

Skull-Faced Alien Masters possess the following powers and abilities:

• Stealth and deception
• Infiltration to society
• Subliminal mind control
• Technology supported instant transporter
• Subterrainian infrastucture including a space port and tunnels
• Creates human support clades and societies
• Advanced technology
• Wrist communicators/multifunctional devices

Fate

Skull-Faced Alien Masters are not killed but 'revealed' to the world when their mind control signal transmitter is destroyed.

Trivia

• The line "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum" was ad-libbed by Roddy Piper.
• This film was originally a short story in the 60s and then a graphic novel in the 90s. Roddy Piper's character never gives his name nor is he referred to by name throughout the entire movie. He is simply listed as "Nada" in the credits, a reference to the character George Nada in Ray Faraday Nelson's short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning", from which the film was adapted. The film was made and released about twenty-five years after its source short story by Ray Nelson had been first published in 1963. According to John Carpenter, this movie was also based on an Eclipse Comics comic-book adaptation of this story.
• Many movie posters for the film featured a long blurb that read: "You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they're people just like you. You're wrong. Dead wrong."
• Vince McMahon didn't want Piper to do the film. "Yeah, I figured," says Carpenter. McMahon told Piper that he would find him a different film at the same pay rate within four weeks, but Piper passed and ended up splitting with the WWF. Carpenter asks why, and Piper states plainly that McMahon is a control freak.
• The communicators used by the guards near the end is also the PKE meter used in Ghostbusters (1984).
• On an episode of Monstervision (1991) in 1997, Roddy Piper mentioned that John Carpenter had wanted him to discuss the film's political subtext (which was critical of Reaganomics) while doing promotions for the film. However, due to being in the United States on a green card, Piper felt it wasn't his place to discuss American politics.
• Writer-director John Carpenter has said of this movie that it was a critique of Reaganomics, a "vehicle to take on Reaganism". However, over the years, several neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups co-opted the movie for their own purpose, spreading rumors that it is really an allegory for Jews controlling the world. This forced Carpenter to respond on Twitter in 2017 by stating "They Live is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie".
• "Life's a bitch and she's back in heat" is Randy 'The Macho Man' Savage's favorite line in the film.
• The film references climate change, which was known to scientists by the time although it was nowhere near as well-understood by the general public as it became in the following century. The mention of climate change is on the hacker's television broadcast shown during the meeting of the alien resistance. Within the plot of the film, climate change is being deliberately caused by the aliens to make Earth's climate more conducive to their species. Similarly, increasing concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a few people and organisations - another real-life occurrence since the 1980s - is attributed within the film's plot to the alien conspiracy. The speaker at the black-tie event says this is due to the alliance between the aliens and the audience, "the human power elite."
• Alec Baldwin, Michael Biehn, Brian Bosworth, Jeff Bridges, Bruce Campbell, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Tommy Lee Jones, Michael Keaton, Christopher Lambert, Stephen Lang, Dolph Lundgren, Michael Madsen, Bill Paxton, Ron Perlman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Patrick Swayze, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Bruce Willis were considered to play Nada.
• In this story the aliens are only seen by people wearing special sunglasses. This however is not the first time this basic plot line was used. The first was in a TV movie called The Love War (1970) shown in the 1970s.
• The aliens superficially resemble walking, rotting corpses. John Carpenter didn't want the aliens to look like the "high-tech" creatures of other science fiction films. He decided that since these beings were corrupting humanity, they themselves should resemble corruptions of human beings.
• All the various aliens throughout the movie, both male and female, were portrayed by stunt coordinator Jeff Imada but the credits lists a female ghoul as played by Michelle Costello and obviously there are a few scenes with multiple ghouls onscreen. Imada played the ghouls who had close-ups/speaking parts.
• Ondramedon was the name of the planet They were from.
• The picture's premise is that the 'Reagan Revolution' is run by aliens from another galaxy. Free enterprisers from outer space have taken over the world, and are exploiting Earth as if it's a third world planet. As soon as they exhaust all our resources, they'll move on to another world.

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