Older generations of film fans grew up with the Alien films, first in theaters and later on VHS and DVD. Today’s kids and young adults? Aside from a Xenomorph dancing on TikTok, they may have no reference points for the sci-fi horror franchise.

These are the moviegoers that 46-year-old co-writer and director Fede Alvarez says he “always” had in mind when he made the latest installment, “Alien: Romulus” (in theaters from Friday). “I want to make sure there’s no moment where the young audience thinks, ‘OK, I’m lost. I don’t understand what you’re doing.'”

Featuring a cast of rising Hollywood stars like Cailee Spaeny (“Civil War”), David Jonsson (“Rye Lane”) and Isabela Merced (“Turtles All the Way Down”), “Romulus” introduces a crew of twenty-something explorers trying to escape their mining colony, raid a disused space station and run afoul of facehuggers, chestbursters and, of course, xenomorphs. Alvarez promises that the film isn’t a must-see, but the movie definitely pays homage to the suffocating terror of Ridley Scott’s 1979 “Alien” and the action-packed nature of James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, “Aliens.”

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Director Fede Alvarez is making an “Alien” film for horror newbies

Alvarez didn’t have this “generational thing” in mind when he updated another horror classic for the modern world with 2013’s bloodthirsty reboot of “Evil Dead.”

“Even though the movie wasn’t rated for adults, there were a lot of 12-year-olds who wanted to see it, just like I watched the original Evil Dead when I was 12,” says Alvarez. The movie found a fan base, and now those kids are in their 20s: The filmmaker recently discovered an epic “Evil Dead” tattoo online that covered the entire chest and showed a blood-soaked Jane Levy holding a chainsaw. “It really made an impression on them,” he says.

Now he realizes that for some people, “Romulus” will be their first “Alien” movie. Last month at the pop culture convention Comic-Con, Alvarez told a story about auditioning for a young actor who had just seen the “original” two “Alien” films. And for this particular guy, that meant the prequels “Prometheus” in 2012 and “Alien: Covenant” in 2017. (“It was like, ‘OK, you’re not getting the part,’” the director joked.)

When Alvarez talks to actors in their twenties, he sometimes finds that the younger generation isn’t as into pop culture as he is. When he mentions a favorite band or movie, they don’t know what he’s talking about. “What do you want to do when someone says something like that? You wish you could transfer to them all the emotions that that thing made you feel,” Alvarez says.

But even if he plays an old sci-fi movie or Led Zeppelin album for a newbie, he finds that they might not understand why it’s cool. So Alvarez’s main goal with “Romulus” was to use today’s filmmaking techniques, animatronics and visual effects to “evoke in them the emotions that those movies evoked in us,” he says. “That’s really the exercise: Hey, let me do one and walk you through an experience that hopefully brings you close to what I felt when I watched the original movie.”

“Alien: Romulus” is dedicated to the “evil twin” of “Star Wars”

Alvarez grew up in Uruguay and first saw Aliens on VHS. He thought it was the “evil twin” of Star Wars. “People in space and guns? Here we go. And then the horror that hits you is so brutal and insane,” he says. “That’s the trauma: You thought you were watching a fun Star Wars adventure and then it becomes very adult and very dark and very scary. And as a kid, you’re always fascinated by that.”

When he finally got around to making the first Alien, Alvarez was drawn to the claustrophobic atmosphere of a spaceship in which an alien creature is hunting him.

“We all worry about dying in general, but the worst thing is dying alone,” says Alvarez. “That’s why in the horror genre, you isolate the characters. You put them in a cabin in the woods, because walking around in the woods alone is terrifying. Maybe the sheriff will come suddenly, or if you scream loud enough, someone will show up. In space, no one ever shows up.”

Good characters are just as important for “Alien: Romulus” as gnarled Xenomorphs

Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley was an iconic take on the “final girl” cliche in the early “Alien” films, so Alvarez created a narrative in which Spaeny and Merced play major roles over the course of “Romulus.” “For the audience, this young female character is the most precious thing. Even if we’re all dead, you want her to survive,” he says. But the filmmaker points out one thing in 1979’s “Alien” that probably wouldn’t work today: “Absolutely nothing” is known about the crew members who were killed off one by one in Scott’s space version of the “Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”

Because modern movies and horror kids understand “the power of good character,” Alvarez spends the first 40 minutes of “Romulus” fleshing out the young protagonists before a facehugger even shows up.

“You have to understand what they want in life and that’s what makes them real,” says the filmmaker. “Perhaps in a perverse way, I want you to connect with them so that when they potentially die, it affects you more. That’s my goal with this film: It has to hurt the audience emotionally.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why ‘Alien: Romulus’ is a good first film for franchise newbies