I never knew the creature as the "xenomorph", despite having seen Aliens--the movie where the term xenomorph was first used--before seeing Alien. My friends and I were far more informed by the titles of the film franchise than by the scientific designation tossed out by everyone's least favorite space marine, Lieutenant Gorman. We knew that the scariest creature to ever crawl across a movie screen needed no fancy descriptor. It simply was the Alien.