Barbara Gips, Who Wrote the Iconic Tagline for ‘Alien,’ Dies at 89

Barbara Gips, who helped sell Ridley Scott’s classic horror sci-fi thriller Alien to unsuspecting moviegoers with her now-legendary tagline “In space no one can hear you scream,” has died. She was 89.

Gips died Oct. 16 in the Bronx of complications from a stroke, a spokesperson for WME announced.

Gips, who worked as a copywriter, said the line for Alien (1979) popped into her head while she was washing dishes, and all the other words that had been previously considered for the poster were summarily discarded.

“In addition to being a downright genius piece of great writing, the tagline is factually correct for the vacuum of space,” Dave Addey noted in his 2021 book, Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies.

Her late husband, Philip Gips, who had created artwork for Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Downhill Racer (1969), co-designed the Alien poster, which features an egg cracking and emitting an eerie green glow as it hovers.