The Small Detail That Makes Alien: Earth's Sheep So Damn Creepy

Horror on TV is tricky, as you not only have to build and sustain tension and horror for the length of the episode, but also do it weekly throughout a whole season. Still, some shows have managed to do it, like the excellent and underseen "The Exorcist" and "Evil." Now, Noah Hawley is trying to do the same with "Alien: Earth," the first TV spin-off in the history of this 46-year-old franchise. The show not only expands on the sci-fi concepts of past movies by placing an even bigger focus on various synthetic forms — even if the new technologies don't always make complete sense — but Hawley is so far really good at maintaining the tone, the feel of an "Alien" movie week after week.

One big way "Alien: Earth" is managing to sustain tension and keep things fresh is by relying on more than the Xenomorph to provide extraterrestrial horror. Whether it's the bloodsucking ticks or the acid-spewing flies, there's plenty to be scared of on this show. Still, nothing quite matches the sheer power of what is arguably the real star of the show. No, not the Xenomorph, but rather the T. Ocellus, the weird eye octopus creature. 

Though unnerving since the moment we first laid eyes on it, the T. Ocellus has continuously raised the stakes of creepiness, but nothing matches the sheep moment. The sheep comes in after the Prodigy Corporation recovers five alien specimens from the crash of the ship USCSS Maginot and brings them to a lab on a secret island. As part of an experiment, the T. Ocellus is given a sheep as prey, but rather than just killing it, the eye monster takes control of the animal's corpse via its eye socket. Then, the sheep stands on its hind legs as if the T. Ocellus was trying to determine what kind of creature this is. But that is not the creepiest thing about the sheep. Rather, it's the fact that it is looking straight into the camera and into the eyes of the scientists conducting the experiments.

Now, there is a very specific and scientifically backed reason why the sheep's eyes are so unsettling, and it has nothing to do with the alien octopus thing in its head. The location of eyes on an animal is an evolutionary trait that can tell us something about whether that animal is a predator or prey, as it determines how much they can see around them and what that says about their place in the food chain. Predators tend to have eyes located at the front of their skull, with eyeballs facing forward. Prey, on the other hand, have eyes located on the sides of the skull to have a larger field of vision to notice predators.

That's why the T. Ocellus is so unnerving despite doing practically nothing in its sheep form. We've seen how formidably strong and daring this little guy can be, as it even got a Xenomorph running away scared. As a sheep, though, the T. Ocellus just stands there, menacingly. "Alien: Earth" doesn't have to do anything with the creature, but just let our subconscious do the work for us in realizing something is very wrong. It doesn't matter that there is a massive patch of blood under the alien eye; just having the sheep looking straight at the camera is enough to make this the scariest creature on a show that already stars a Xenomorph.