Early footage from Alien: Covenant was screened to a completely freaked out SXSW audience

We're still a couple of months out from Alien: Covenant arriving in Irish cinemas, but a lucky few got a sneak peak of early footage of the movie this weekend in the SXSW festival.

While it can be easy to impress fan-boys with well-cut-together footage that might not represent the finished product, the reaction from what folks have seen so far has been nothing short of staggering. Oh, and terrifying. Absolutely terrifying.

15 minutes of #AlienCovenant footage was screened at #SXSW! Consensus was as expected - this film will be terrifying! @20thcenturyfox pic.twitter.com/onzM0sZwUB

— Scified.com (@scifiedcom) March 11, 2017

The 12 minutes of #AlienCovenant shown at #sxsw2017 was absolutely terrifying, in the best possible way. pic.twitter.com/wc0yr8nHYO

— Ramin Setoodeh (@RaminSetoodeh) March 11, 2017

Meanwhile, the peeps at The Verge wrote a long (and slightly spoiler-y, so beware) review-of-the-preview, but the choice line has got to be: "If the footage screened was any indication, the tone of Alien: Covenant is full-on, breakneck horror, taking what the original film did and amping it up by a factor of 10." While we try to calm ourselves down at the thoughts of how great/scary this movie is going to be and how we're not sure we can wait til 12 May for it come out, here's a very unnerving look at how Michael Fassbender's new character is made, with Walter coming with a very different accent to the android David from Prometheus, and what looks like an even glassier, more sinister blank stare. Clip via 20th Century Fox