Writing and playing tabletop RPG horror one gets a real sense of what horror is just a little too personal to be fun. There's a whole lot of safety tools the community has developed (actually crossing over a bit with the BDSM community's tools for safe consent when acting out a fiction). It's really common to survey all players with an exhaustive list of all the potential horrors one could potentially bring to a table. The top five that are people's no gos are sexual violence, harm to animals, reproductive horror, harm to children and body horror.

A lot of horror movie fans are not prepared for how you having agency in the situation of tabletop storytelling can make something you can easily handle watching suddenly effect you even when it's just being described and can misjudge their level of chill and need to tap out mid game. Typical advice on reproductive horror a'la Alien is don't even bother writing a reproductive horror that directly effects a player character. Damn near every table taps out for that, if not the player targeted then someone else at the table.

Alien de-gendering that horror was definitely a masterstroke. There's good reason the chestburster reached cultural saturation.

Also the original screenplay only listed the characters’ last names, so that any actor could play any role, regardless of gender.

It should also be noted that the alien was designed to resemble a sexualized androgyny while also being sufficiently alien to be unsettling, it’s a huge part of the art of the designer of it

I saw this movie at the cinema in 1979 when it was released. I was 14, therefore 4 years too young to see it (UK, "X Certificate), but a member of friend group with a gruff voice went to the ticket office).

Large cinema, packed out, lots of excited mumbling until the film started.

After the face-hugger jump shot, total and absolute silence. And the at the chest-burster scene... absolute chaos. Screams. Real screams, not happy roller coaster screams. A few people leaving, unable to take it.

And it got me. It hit me hard. I had deliberately avoided any description of the movie so had no expectations, and then this happened, ,right there in front of me. The gore, the realistic acting, the pain of John Hurt...oh my...

That set the scene for the rest of the movie and you knew they weren't fucking about.

It traumatized me for weeks. Superb movie.

Edited on request.

I mean, conceptually, sure that's a very scary thing that happens within the movie. I don't think that's the scariest thing about the movie though. Nor do I think it's the scariest thing the creators of ALIEN came up with for that movie.

It may just be me, but the original comment just comes off as smug rather than trying to honestly add observations.

I really wish I saw alien before it became a cultural phenomenon. Everything was spoiled the second I knew the movie existed.

https://screenrant.com/alien-movie-chestburster-sexual-assault-meaning/

There's the link in the image. Interesting stuff.

Well, now I love this movie even more.

Time for a rewatch.

Reproduction has always been horror. Life IS body horror: sex, childbearing, puberty, eating, aging, the micro-biome, the human virome. All very pretty disgusting when we pay attention.

Human DNA is 8-10% virus DNA. And there are 39 trillion bacterias, of about 10,000 species, virions outnumber them 10 to 1 in the human body. Viruses infect bacteria inside us. Then there is the Mycobiome. And while the amount of fungus in the human body is comparably low, certain sites are rather high. Like the ear for example. Do not read the “Human” section on the Mycobiome on Wikipedia.

Dang I thought the whole "vaginas mouth raping people" of facehuggers and all the sexual horror stuff and all that was just an H. R. Giger thing. All this just made one of my all time favorite movies even better.

so, the horror of alien is just mpreg? isn't that also the horror of "junior"?

that explains a lot of what I feel about the alien

Image Transcription: Tumblr

funnytwittertweets

A screenshot of a Twitter tweet by Olivia Campbell (@liviecampbell) stating

I mean, the SCARIEST thing the men who wrote ALIEN (1979) could think of was a living thing taking up residence in your torso then bursting out of you.

wahbegan

i mean i know you're taking the piss, but Dan O'Bannon has talked at length about how he did very much deliberately write the movie to attack a male character in a way that invoked oral rape and violent childbirth because he wanted the film to create sexual anxiety and fear in the men in the audience, which he felt was an untapped potential in horror

tempest-of-set

"Dan O'Bannon specifically wrote this scene with the male's fear of penetration in mind and wanted the scene to operate as a payback of sorts for all of the times horror films have subjected weak women to male predatory monsters. His goal was to reverse the stigma associated with the sexualized violence against women in horror and turn the idea back on itself. It's no coincidence that the chestburster's birth involves a forceful invasion of male bodied victims and concludes with a phallic entity being born out of a male's chest."

Would recommend reading Men, Women, and Chainsaws.

Reminds me of Barbarian

I get it. The Xenomorph's head kinda looks like a dick. Giger is a perve yada yada yada.

But jeez. I am honestly so tired of reading about how phallic the Xenomorph is. They're beautiful hungry guys, and they've been done so dirty by time and freshman film studies essays.