Ridley Scott's 2012 film Prometheus, originally conceived as a direct prequel to Alien, ends with the birth of a creature noted for its similarity to those in the Alien franchise. Scott christened the creature the "Deacon" in reference to its pointed head, which resembles a bishop's mitre. Designer Neal Scanlan said that the Deacon's appearance had to reflect its complex genetic heritage: "It came from Shaw and Holloway, which then produced the Trilobite, which impregnated the Engineer, which then mixed its DNA with the Trilobite. We tried to hold on to some of Shaw, some femininity since it was born of a female before being born of a male." According to Scanlan, the Deacon "represented the beginning of Giger's Alien, although it did not directly resemble that creature." The designers based the Deacon's skin on horse placenta, in an effort to give it an iridescent quality "between horrific and beautiful". Its pharyngeal jaw was inspired by that of the goblin shark.
When discussing the film's connection to Alien, co-writer Damon Lindelof asked: "Do you need to see a xenomorph bursting out of the human body? And how do we do it in a way that you haven't seen before?" Lindelof stated that whether the creature is a queen Alien, or the progenitor of the eggs found by the crew in the original Alien, is open to interpretation, but said, "I felt that the punchline of Prometheus was going to be that there is human DNA in what we have come to know as the human xenomorph."