We asked Hawley about his inspiration for the creature and the sequence.
“It’s one of the more disturbing things you’ll watch all year, I think,” he says of the sheep attack. “Every 5 percent improvement in visual effects made that sequence a 100 percent ‘worse’ in terms of its effectiveness — and by ‘worse,’ I mean better. I told director Ugla Hauksdóttir in London, ‘For me, the fact that you got the live sheep to back away from the camera [in seeming fear of The Eye], that made the whole sequence right. Because if that had been a CG sheep, there’s something about sheep — being like — us going ‘uh-huh!’ and backing away from camera really sold the gag.”
“To me, there’s a relentlessness to this that is similar to the face hugger,” he says. “Certainly in James Cameron’s movie [Aliens] where Ripley [Sigourney Weaver] and Newt [Rebecca Jorden] are trying to get away from these things, and they just keep coming, and they’re fast, and they’re scrambling, and they’re spider like a crab. [The suckers] was a really great upgrade for the original conceit where before, it just had to run as fast as it could at you. Now it can fly. And here in Austin, we have the Palmetto bugs fly. A giant roach that flies is always worse than a giant roach that doesn’t. So the fact that it can propel itself, that it can stick to you, and you’re basically trying to fight it off, and it has all these arms and it’s relentlessly trying to get in.”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/alien-earth-noah-hawley-eye-sheep-1236352958/