‘Save Yourselves!’ is the alien apocalypse movie 2020 deserves

Welcome to Thanks, I Love It, our series highlighting something onscreen we’re obsessed with this week. 

Save Yourselves! centers on a Brooklyn couple caught unawares by an alien invasion. But in typical 2020 fashion, the end of the world looks nothing like you’d expect.

Unlike most other sci-fi movie monsters, the pouffes of Save Yourselves! are not towering giants or oddly proportioned humanoids. They don’t have beady eyes or razor fangs or slimy tentacles. Instead, they’re round and fuzzy, resembling nothing so much as plump little ottomans. Which is exactly what Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Reynolds) mistake them for at first, having been blissfully unaware of the extraterrestrial attack thanks to the digital detox they’ve undertaken on vacation.

“It is funny that in our movie, the world is destroyed by something so stupid. And then in real life, it’s the same.”

Of course, it’s not long before Su and Jack realize there’s much more to these cute little accent chairs than meets the eye. Those furry bodies hide a very long, very bendy tongue that can pierce glass, stick to a wall, or drain a bottle dry. The pouffes can glide, climb, even levitate. They kill quickly and with abandon, and have a way of taking over the entire planet if you’re not careful. 

They may not have the gravitas of a heptapod or the cunning of a Predator, but they make an impression — you may never look at the furry footstool in your living room the same way again. In their goofy absurdity, the pouffes turn out to be exactly the alien invaders that this very strange year deserves.

So with Save Yourselves! out on VOD this week, I spoke with writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer to get the rundown on everything you need to know about their unique addition to the movie-alien canon. 

1. They’re here by accident.

In the movie, Su and Jack never actually find out why the pouffes are here or where they came from, which Greenwood sees as “part of the charm.”

“This isn’t Independence Day, where it’s presidents and chiefs of staffs dealing with this problem,” he says. “It’s two completely unprepared people. And they have no idea where the pouffes came from. Hence, we have no idea.”

Still, as a viewer watching from the pouffe-free safety of my own home, it was hard not to wonder. So I took my questions to Fischer and Wilson, who, as the pouffe’s creators, know quite a bit more about them than Su and Jack do about what these creatures doing on our planet.

“You know, we can’t be sure,” jokes Fischer. But he thinks they’re “an ongoing, horrible accident,” akin to “a weird weapon or a weird infestation.” According to him, the pouffes were unleashed by another species of aliens, who feel “really bad” about the destruction they’ve unleashed, and follow the pouffes around trying and mostly failing to clean up their mess.

Whether those other aliens ever arrive on Earth is unclear in Save Yourselves!; if they do, we never see them. If the pouffes’ history is any indication, however, humanity is probably doomed: “Every time they get to a planet, they sort of destroy it,” says Fischer. 

2. They’re great balls of gas.

If the pouffes are here to stay, it probably behooves us to learn a bit more about what they actaully are. They’re more than just small balls of fur. In fact, their fur isn’t even really fur.

“That’s actually their antennae,” says Fischer. “They’re actually a ball of gas with just a gelatinous bulb inside.” 

That aspect of their physiology is hinted at in a scene late in the movie, when one of the pouffes is killed and deflates like a balloon. The fur — sorry, antennae — blows away “almost like a dandelion,” as Greenwood puts it.

Study the goopy mess left behind once the fluff disappears, and you may pick up other clues about their biology. “Alex and Eleanor imaged a creature almost like a crab with lots of little crab legs that would scurry, and that’s what justifies the [pouffes] zig-zagging,” says Greenwood. “So I did include very small crablike feet.”

Crab feet, a gelatinous brain, and a gas membrane holding together countless little antennae? Um… what is this thing, exactly?

3. … But they’re really made of fur boas and resistance bands.

In real life, those alien guts are made of totally mundane materials, up to and including cardboard, fishing line, and Tupperware lids sourced from Greenwood’s parents’ cabinets. 

An early challenge for the team was getting the texture of the pouffes right. Fischer and Wilson wanted fur that stuck straight out and moved slightly (like bonito flakes, he says), but found that most faux furs had hairs pointing in one direction. In the end, Wilson sewed together a bunch of fur boas to wrap around a dome-shaped skeleton.

Or rather, that is, a series of dome-shaped skeletons. Greenwood designed several different pouffes to perform several different tasks, including one that had a remote control car inside, and another hollowed out for a retractable tongue. (The tongue itself was made of resistance bands.)

One common tool the team didn’t use that much? CG. Save Yourselves! relies primarily on practical effects enhanced with just a touch of VFX, for what Fischer calls “that throwback creature movie look.”

Almost every shot you see of the pouffes in action, including a third-act levitation gag that Greenwood calls his favorite in the film, was done in-camera, with Greenwood and his team literally pulling the strings.

Not only do the practical effects make for a more grounded look, they were, apparently, a great time on set.

“Everyone loves the pouffes,” Fischer recalls.

“The pouffe days were really fun,” adds Wilson.

4. They’re inspired by other famous fictional aliens

Though Wilson came up with the basic design of the pouffes early in the screenwriting process, she and Fischer freely admit they were inspired by other famous furry aliens. “We like to joke that we just forced ourselves into the Critter-Tribble family,” he says. 

The long, flared tongues, meanwhile, were inspired by John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, which feature carnivorous plants with long, flexible stems that flare out at the end.

But the movement of the pouffes borrows a page from a surprising source: the facehuggers in James Cameron’s Aliens. 

“There’s a shot of the facehugger scurrying along the floor and then jumping at Ripley. If you look closely, it’s three different shots edited together,” Greenwood explains.

Rather than try and get the puppet to perform a complicated movement, the Aliens team captured it going “from A to B, B to C, and C to D,” and cut those shots together. When it came time for a pouffe to attempt a similarly complex maneuver, Greenwood convinced Fischer and Wilson to take a similar approach. 

Thus, there’s a bit of Aliens DNA in Save Yourselves! — even if the spindly facehuggers and squishy pouffes don’t much resemble each other.

5. They’re still out there somewhere

No matter what they look like, it’s rarely a good thing when an invasive alien species gets loose. When I ask Greenwood if any of the pouffes went home with him after the shoot, he is happy to assure me they did not. “All the pouffes were rounded up and put into safe containers so they wouldn’t escape into the world,” he jokes.

Although…

“I did keep some of the tongues, and I believe that on my parents’ fridge back home, they’ve got the magnetic tongue stuck to the fridge for the shot where it gets severed,” he admits. “So they’ve got a dangling half severed pouffe tongue stuck to the fridge.”

Wilson and Fischer, on the other hand, freely acknowledge they’ve got pouffes in their house. “They’re kind of annoying because they shed a lot,” says Wilson. “They’re in the closet.” 

They even have an actual furry footstool that bears a striking resemblance to their aliens, which they acquired on Craigslist. “We had already written the first draft of the movie,” she recalls. “We were like, well, we gotta buy that pouffe, obviously.” 

And should you, dear reader, want a pouffe of their own, you can make that happen thanks to 

And should you, dear reader, want a pouffe of their own, you can make that happen thanks to Legion M. Among the site’s collection of Save Yourselves! merch are some small pouffes, which are made here on Earth out of plain old plush and therefore won’t kill you. Probably.

6. They’re so 2020.

What’s most terrifying about the pouffes, however, isn’t their weird biology or their cryptic motives or even their taste for murder. It’s the fact that the world they force upon us in Save Yourselves! feels uncomfortably familiar. 

Like Palm Springs or She Dies Tomorrow, Save Yourselves! is a movie made before 2020 but filled with eerily prescient details — from Jack’s annoying fixation on his sourdough starter, to the panic that takes over Su and Jack as they shelter in place, to the basic fact that their entire world has been upended by an unexpected foe.

“When the pandemic started, people were definitely sending us a lot of pictures of [the coronavirus] and it does kind of look like a pouffe,” says Wilson.

As it happens, I myself saw the movie on the same night President Donald Trump announced he had tested positive for coronavirus — which is to say, on an evening when checking Twitter felt like a lot that moment in Save Yourselves! when Su turns on her phone to dozens of panicked messages about the alien invasion.

“It is funny that in our movie, the world is destroyed by something so stupid. And then in real life, it’s the same,” says Fischer.

These pouffes are landing on our screens at a time when it feels like anything could happen — maybe even an apocalypse brought about by footstools from outer space. Should that come to pass, Greenwood is ready. 

“I feel pretty well defended in my home,” he muses of a possible pouffe attack. “So I’d say about 50-50 chances, based solely on my hand-to-hand combat skills.”

In the meantime, the Save Yourselves! team is here to distract you from our real, ongoing existential threats with their fun fictional one. 

“It’s a really rough time,” says Fischer. “We’re at least glad the movie’s going to be out on VOD and we’ll be able to have a laugh at an alternate version of the apocalypse.”

Save Yourselves is available now on iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, and more.