Daniel Thomas O'Bannon (September 30, 1946 – December 17, 2009) was an American film screenwriter, director and visual effects supervisor, most closely associated with the science fiction and horror genres.

O'Bannon moved home briefly after Washington University and attended Florissant Valley Junior College where he wrote and directed a short science fiction satire titled "The Attack of the 50-foot Chicken."

According to O'Bannon, he was reading an issue of Playboy when he found an article discussing the best film schools, which led him to the University of Southern California (USC).

It was at USC that he met John Carpenter and collaborated with him on a student film, which they eventually expanded into the feature-length science fiction movie Dark Star.

O'Bannon served in a number of capacities, including scripting, acting in one of the leading roles ("Sergeant Pinback") and editing, for which he used a 1940s Moviola.

[7][8] That project fell apart in 1976 and the movie was never made, reportedly because the major Hollywood studios were wary of financing the picture with Jodorowsky as director.

[10] According to The Guardian, "George Lucas was impressed enough with his hand-animated, faux computer screen graphics to hire him to do similar work on Star Wars, but otherwise this was an incredibly lean period for him.

While living with his friend Ronald Shusett, they came up with the story for O'Bannon's career-making film Alien (1979), for which he wrote the screenplay and supervised visuals.

O'Bannon voiced his displeasure with his next big-budget outing, John Badham's Blue Thunder (1983), an action film about a Los Angeles helicopter surveillance team.

[15] In 1990, O'Bannon and Shusett again teamed up as writers on Total Recall, an adaptation of the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale by Philip K.

In 1995, O'Bannon received a co-writing credit for the sci-fi film Screamers adapted from the Philip K. Dick story "Second Variety", having written the initial version of the screenplay with Michael Campus in the early 1980s.