Aliens: Horror Show: Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: October to December 1992, in Dark Horse Comics #3, #4, and #5
Script: Sarah Byam
Art: David Roach
Colors: Alex Wald
Lettering: Phil Owen
Title Illustration: Dave Dorman
Cover, Dark Horse Comics #3: David Roach, with colors by Sean Tierney
Editor: Jerry Prosser
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Format: Three-part color short story, eight pages each
Setting: Luna City, after Earth was abandoned in the infestation

Aliens: Horror Show was a three-part short story first published by Dark Horse in Dark Horse Comics #3 through #5, from October to December 1992. Sarah Byam wrote the script, and David Roach drew the interior art, with colors by Alex Wald and lettering by Phil Owen. The story was set on Luna after Earth was abandoned in the infestation, where Orson Masch Entertainment Industries turned recorded nightmares of Xenomorphs into a virtual-reality product called the Genre. A patient named Robyn Miles was one of the people whose dreams were taken for that product, and those survivors later turned the same machine on the doctor who had built it.

Plot Summary

Luna City After The Infestation

Luna City had once been a roaring place, the home of Orson Masch Entertainment Industries and a citywide theme park for adults, until the infestation. Now it was a sleepy town, and the people felt guilty about that old frivolous history, with the entire human race perishing downside. They no longer took transits from the surface, and no one would even think of shuttling down for a look. Quietly, they terraformed Luna one mile at a time, and if possible they did not talk about the creatures that had taken Earth.

A man in an orange coat walked those streets and remembered seeing them just before he squeezed onto the last outbound shuttle, when he was six. He still did not talk about them, but he dreamed. He worked for OMEI, testing a new vid-line, a cheap thrill that somebody had to try. Orson Masch ruled the world now, and what entertainment was left was the only challenge they would be able to risk in the next generation or two.

The Sensory Deprivation Test

A Xenomorph looms toward a screaming test subject in a virtual-reality nightmare

In a lab, techs gave him mild hallucinogens and told him to lie back and enjoy the ride. The boy, as the testers called him, was put through a sensory deprivation test on downers, and at first the warm water seemed a piece of cake. Then a shark came at him in the vision, and he fought it until the nightmare changed again. He called out for Robyn, and her face came to him underwater, close enough to touch, before the water and the shark both gave way to something worse.

A Xenomorph rose out of that dream, all teeth and dripping claws, and he shouted that he was glad it was the thing he already knew. Then he woke screaming in the lab, the subject in overload, and a tech named Ray was told to hurry with a sedative. This, the testers said, was the problem with the new virtual reality project. Without explanation, a small but consistent percentage of the audience just went stark, raving mad.

The Genre

A clinic patient is wired to recording machines as Facehuggers and an Alien head fill her nightmare

The inventor of that project was a man named Lackster, and Orson Masch called him brilliant. Masch said he had managed to control the colony by giving people the most bang for their buck, and that sensible people ran from what they feared unless you told them they could not handle it. Then they would pay double for the privilege of proving you wrong. Lackster wanted more testing, but Masch was already talking about a promo campaign, and he named the product the Genre, starting with a horror line, then skin feelies and adventures for the kids. He wanted six features by February.

Lackster went to Dr. Kaf for help, because he needed more nightmare features or the old man would feed him to the aliens. Kaf already had other victims of those experiments, including a young man named Fred Preston. Lackster reminded him that the clinic would lose the support of OMEI, and then Kaf took him through the Kaf Primal Fear Clinic. There, a sophisticated process stimulated and recorded a patient's nightmares so they could be faced later as catharsis. One woman was left wired to the machines as eggs opened and Facehuggers crawled toward her, her inner life captured for someone else's product.

Robyn Miles, Alien Impersonator

A Xenomorph is caught in a blast of fire in Robyn Miles's recorded nightmare

In those recorded dreams, Robyn Miles was left among the monsters to be cured of her irrational fears. Crying for her father did not help. She spent five years, in that vision, trapped in limestone mines, hiding from the beasts, learning how to fight, how to run, and where to strike. She wore a Xenomorph carapace like a second skin, impersonated the enemy, and told herself she would reclaim Earth for her own race.

Her most ambitious plan was a borrowed-time game, sneaking in as one of them and planting a bomb under a Queen. Robyn pulled a wagon of explosives through a nest, and on the continent below she counted primary nests that had already been reduced from seven to three. The strategy was simple, but the execution would kill her every time. In the end, she said, they always won. Almost always. When this run failed, a Xenomorph caught Robyn and drove its inner jaw into her as she begged it not to penetrate.

Five Years In The Clinic

Xenomorphs attack a lunar escape shuttle as a young Hicks looks on

Lackster was furious that hundreds of nightmares, bought at a cost of millions of credits, had given him only more Alien features. Kaf told him auto suggestion only went so far, because the entire Earth had been abandoned after the infestation, and he asked what else people were supposed to dream about. He also claimed that some of those patients were more likely to survive a real Alien attack than either of them, something about the capacity for disbelief. Hicks, he said, had survived an Alien attack when he was only six. He has no known relation to Dwayne Hicks.

Hicks had been one of the last children to make it to the lunar escape shuttle, because he trusted his senses. He went mad in the virtual reality tests when those senses were lying to him. The cynicism needed to survive in modern society, Kaf told Lackster, would be death in the jungle, and that was the price of civilization. Later, Robyn's father confronted Kaf after five years in the clinic had left his daughter catatonic. He knew the doctor had been selling their brain scans to OMEI, and he threatened to close the house of horrors, but Kaf said the Luna City Council supported the work.

Live Or The Genre

Robyn seemed to break out of the ward, smash a window, and flee into a city already overrun by Xenomorphs, then to fall into water with one of them on her. That flight was still the nightmare. Her father and others took control of the lab, woke her with suction as she coughed like a drowning woman, and told her it was over. Kaf had retreated to the top cube of the east wing, in his sensory lab, and they had trapped him in the nightmare room.

Armed in suits, Robyn and her allies cut a corridor, crossed the outside of the station, and found Kaf on his knees. They forced him into his own device and gave him a psyche test of his own. If what he saw in the box was not real, he could stay calm on life support until the police brought him back to Luna. If it was real, he might live by disconnecting and fighting it. An egg opened in front of him, and they left him to decide whether it was live or the Genre. They were going to reclaim the birthright he would never see, the planet Earth.

Key Characters

Hicks, also called Mr. Hicks, was a man who had seen Xenomorphs at the age of six, on the last outbound shuttle from Earth, and who later worked for OMEI testing the new vid-line. He went mad in a virtual reality session when his senses were lied to. He is not identified in the story as Dwayne Hicks.
Robyn Miles was a patient at the Kaf Primal Fear Clinic. Her recorded nightmares showed her spending years among Xenomorphs, wearing their hides, and trying to bomb a Queen. After five years in the clinic she was left catatonic, until her father and others took the lab and woke her. She then helped turn Kaf's own machine against him.
Lackster invented the virtual reality project that became the Genre. He pressed Orson Masch for more testing, then pressed Dr. Kaf for more recorded nightmares when Masch demanded six features.
Orson Masch headed Orson Masch Entertainment Industries, also called OMEI. He ruled the remaining world of entertainment from Luna, named the product the Genre, and funded Kaf's clinic in return for usable nightmare material.
Dr. Kaf ran the Kaf Primal Fear Clinic, a supposedly non-profit institution that stimulated and recorded patients' nightmares. He sold those brain scans to OMEI. At the end he was locked into his own device and left with an opening egg.
Other named figures included Ray, a lab technician told to sedate Hicks when a test went into overload, Fred Preston, a prior victim of the experiments whom Kaf had already taken off Lackster's hands, and Robyn's father, who confronted Kaf after five years and helped seize the lab. Her father is not given a name of his own in the story.

Editions

Aliens: Horror Show was first published by Dark Horse in three parts in Dark Horse Comics #3, #4, and #5, from October to December 1992. David Roach drew the Aliens cover for issue #3, with cover colors by Sean Tierney, and Dave Dorman painted an Aliens cover for issue #5. The story was later reprinted in the United Kingdom in Aliens magazine, Volume 2 numbers 12 through 14, from June to August 1993.

It was collected in Aliens Omnibus Volume 3 in March 2008, immediately after Aliens: Reapers, as the last comic in that volume, alongside Aliens: Advent/Terminus, Aliens: Salvation, Aliens: Sacrifice, Aliens: Rogue, and Aliens: Labyrinth. Dark Horse released a digital edition on 10 April 2013, using a piece of Dave Dorman artwork from Aliens: Tribes as its cover. Marvel reprinted the story in Aliens: The Original Years Volume 2 in January 2022.

Behind The Scenes

Sarah Byam wrote the script, and David Roach penciled and inked the interior art. Alex Wald colored the story, Phil Owen lettered it, and Jerry Prosser edited the original Dark Horse Comics issues. The title illustration used in later collections is by Dave Dorman. Roach also drew the cover of Dark Horse Comics #3, the issue that opened the serial, with colors on that cover by Sean Tierney. Dorman later painted the cover of Dark Horse Comics #5, which closed the three-part story.

The three parts ran eight pages each in a monthly anthology, not as a standalone miniseries, and they shared those issues with other Dark Horse features. In Aliens Omnibus Volume 3 the story stands last, immediately after Reapers, among other early 1990s Dark Horse shorts and miniseries from the same period. In the wider Dark Horse Aliens line it was preceded by Aliens: Renegade and followed by Aliens: Colonial Marines and Aliens: Earth Angel. The Genre in the story is a virtual-reality product built from real recorded nightmares, and the last page leaves Kaf with an egg that may be either that product or a live Xenomorph egg.

Conclusion

Aliens: Horror Show was Sarah Byam and David Roach's 1992 story of a Luna that had survived the loss of Earth by selling its fear back to itself. Orson Masch wanted a product called the Genre, and Dr. Kaf's clinic supplied the nightmares that made it. Robyn Miles and the others who had been run through that machine turned it on Kaf in the end, and they left him with an opening egg and a question he could not answer from outside the box. They were going back for Earth.