The Woman Behind the Legendary ‘Alien’ Tagline Has Died

Barbara Gips, who was responsible for Alien‘s brilliant tagline—â€In space, no one can hear you screamâ€â€”among dozens of other famous pieces of movie marketing copy in her career, has passed away.

Deadline reports that Gips died October 16. A prolific copywriter, Gips, born Barbara Solinger, was an actress before marrying graphic designer Phillip Gips, whom she would go on to work with multiple times as he moved into the field of movie poster design. Gips provided marketing copy for dozens of films from the 1970s to the 1990s, including Postcards From the Edge, Desperately Seeking Susan, Fatal Attraction, and more, but will be remembered for her most iconic collaboration with her husband (who passed away in 2019) when he designed the poster for Ridley Scott’s Alien.

The poster itself is iconic enough as a piece of design, but it’s made into one of the most famous and beloved movie posters of all time by that simple, stark tag. It’s haunting and invitingly mysterious in equal measure, deceptively simple and yet incredibly evocative of the terror that encapsulated Alien, and yet irresistible in grabbing your attention. And yet, for generations of seeing it homaged and parodied, Gips’ work on Alien and countless other movies has long gone unsung.

Gips is survived by her children and grandchildren, and our thoughts go to her family in this unfortunate time.

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