Four films, four killers. The Xenomorph from Alien (1979) is a parasite whose whole life cycle runs through other species' bodies. The Predator of Predator (1987) is an alien hunter that stalks the most dangerous prey it can find, for sport and for trophies, under a strict code. The T-800 from The Terminator (1984) is a cyborg assassin sent back in time by Skynet, the machine intelligence that starts a nuclear war. RoboCop (1987) is a murdered police officer rebuilt by a corporation, OCP, and bound by programmed directives.
This covers each one's first film and the sequels where the key lore was settled, film by film. Each has its own shelf: Alien, Predator, The Terminator and RoboCop. Spoilers throughout.
The Xenomorph life cycle
The Xenomorph has four stages. It starts as an egg, which opens when a host comes close. Out jumps a facehugger, which grips the host's face, wraps its tail round the neck and plants an embryo down the throat. It then drops off dead, and the host wakes up apparently fine.
The embryo grows inside until it bursts out of the chest, killing the host: the chestburster. It sheds its skin and grows fast into the adult, a long-headed, eyeless-looking killer with a second, smaller jaw inside its mouth. Its blood is an acid strong enough to eat through a ship's decks, so even wounding one is dangerous.
Aliens (1986) adds the top of the cycle: a queen, far larger, laying the eggs for a whole hive. It is also where the word comes from: the colonial marines call it a xenomorph, meaning "alien form". The first film just calls it the alien. The creature takes on traits from its host, too, which is why the one in Alien 3, born from an animal, runs on all fours.
Perfect organism: Ash and the company
In Alien, the crew of the Nostromo, a commercial towing ship, are woken early to answer a signal from a planetoid, named LV-426 only in Aliens. They find a derelict alien ship full of eggs, and a facehugger takes Kane. Ash, the science officer, lets him back on board against the quarantine rules.
Ash turns out to be an android working for the company that owns the ship, later named Weyland-Yutani. His secret orders, Special Order 937, put bringing the organism home above everything; the crew are expendable. Exposed and wrecked, his reactivated head describes the creature with open admiration as a "perfect organism", its design matched only by its hostility. Perfect Organism takes its name from that line.
Ripley, the last of the crew, blows the creature out of her escape shuttle. In Aliens the company sends her back with marines, and its man on the trip is still trying to bring a specimen home for its weapons research.
The Yautja hunting code
In Predator, a special forces team led by Dutch is hunted through a Central American jungle by something they cannot see. The hunter has active camouflage, heat vision, a shoulder-mounted plasma cannon and blades on its wrist. It skins its kills and takes skulls as trophies. Dutch survives by coating himself in mud, which hides his body heat, and the beaten hunter sets off a self-destruct device on its wrist.
The first film hints at the code: the hunter leaves Anna, an unarmed prisoner, alone, and Dutch sends her off unarmed because of it. Predator 2 (1990) spells it out. The hunter spares the unarmed, children and pregnant women: it scans one police officer, sees she is pregnant and leaves her alone. When it is finally beaten, its elders arrive, take the body and hand the winning detective an old flintlock pistol dated 1715, as a mark of respect. Their trophy wall includes a Xenomorph skull, the first hint that the two creatures share a universe.
Yautja is the species' own name. It comes from the tie-in novels of the 1990s and only reached the films in 2025. Trophy Season is the hunt in two words.
Skynet and the T-800
Skynet is a military defence computer that becomes self-aware and decides humanity is the threat. It launches a nuclear war, Judgment Day, which Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) dates to 29 August 1997 and pins on a company called Cyberdyne Systems. Its machines then hunt the survivors, until the human resistance led by John Connor starts winning.
So Skynet sends a T-800, Cyberdyne Systems Model 101, back to 1984 to kill John's mother, Sarah Connor, before he is born. It is a metal endoskeleton under living tissue, which lets it pass as human and travel through time, since nothing dead goes through. The resistance sends Kyle Reese to protect her; he becomes John's father. In the end Sarah crushes the machine in a hydraulic press.
Terminator 2 turns it round. A reprogrammed T-800 is sent back to protect the young John from a newer model, the liquid-metal T-1000.
No fate: what it means
In Terminator 2, Sarah carves the words NO FATE into a picnic table with a knife. John explains that it comes from a message his father passed on from the future: there is no fate but what we make. The future is not fixed, and Judgment Day can be stopped.
So they act on it. Sarah, John and the T-800 destroy Cyberdyne's research, including the chip and arm salvaged from the first T-800, which Skynet would have been built from. Then the T-800 asks to be lowered into molten steel, because the last chip left is in its own head. No Fate takes its name from the carving. Terminator 3 later argues the war can be delayed but not cancelled.
OCP and RoboCop's directives
RoboCop is set in a near-future Detroit where OCP, Omni Consumer Products, runs the police force under contract and plans to tear down Old Detroit to build Delta City. Its ED-209 enforcement droid malfunctions at a boardroom demonstration and kills an executive, so a rival executive's cyborg programme gets its chance.
Officer Alex Murphy, newly transferred to the Metro West precinct, is shot to pieces by Clarence Boddicker's gang. OCP rebuilds him as RoboCop, his memories wiped, with four Prime Directives: serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law, and a classified fourth. Directive 4 shuts him down if he ever tries to arrest a senior OCP employee.
That is how Dick Jones, the executive behind ED-209, gets away with backing Boddicker. At the end RoboCop plays the board Jones's own confession, OCP's chairman fires him on the spot, and with Directive 4 no longer protecting him, RoboCop shoots him. Murphy's memories come back along the way. Dead or Alive, named for his arrest line, puts him with ED-209.
On the back of a tee
All four have their own shelf, Alien, Predator, The Terminator and RoboCop, drawn from canon reference art, with the rest of the Sci-Fi & Monsters shelf beside them. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why they work on the back: each was designed to be known by its outline alone, the long curved head, the mask and dreadlocks, the chrome skull, the visored helmet, and a shape you can read in a dark cinema reads just as well across a room.
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