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.
It got me hard.
ಠ_ಠ
You gotta change that to “it got me bad” or “it fucked me up”
It took seeing someone else’s reaction to figure out that this isn’t you saying it sparked an interest in guro in you
Done!
Also the original screenplay only listed the characters’ last names, so that any actor could play any role, regardless of gender.
This is how fiction should be written imo
I think it’s a good general rule, but any story regarding gender is going to need specifically gendered characters to tell that story. Writing that kind of story off completely is needlessly prohibitive.
Even when gender is not the focus of the story, I feel that this risks “male default-ism” and sometimes erases femininity out of female protagonists. Not that women have to be feminine, but I find that fiction often defaults on that “girl boss™” trope to make women fit in the tropes of the genre they are in where male protagonists have traditionally solved all their problems with violence and kicking ass (I remember Lindsay Ellis complaining about that girl boss trope in a video essay but it’s been a while).
I guess it comes back around to what you’re saying, women in most times and places don’t have the luxury of being able to ignore their gender. In such a setting, if you make your protagonist a woman, she’s either going to have to be so much “one of the boys” that no-one acknowledges her as a woman… or the story is going to have to deal with gender in some way.
I disagree. There are too many challenges unique to being male/female to be able to write a convincing story without specifying the characters’ genders. There are exceptions, of course.
Case in point, by having Ripley be a woman, there is an additional layer of depth in Aliens as to why Ripley’s warnings of just how dangerous the creatures are mostly ignored by Burke/whoever it was, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
That’s not saying it wouldn’t have worked with Ripley being a man, it would just be a slightly different story, because it would lack many subliminal themes of patriarchy, sexism, female hysteria, etc that having a woman as the protagonist allowed the story to more fully explore.
That said, there is a place for both gendered writing and genderless writing. It’s all about the story you want to tell. Besides, without the concept or idea to try genderless writing, we may never have gotten Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, and that would have sucked.
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.
Well, now I love this movie even more.
Time for a rewatch.
I really wish I saw alien before it became a cultural phenomenon. Everything was spoiled the second I knew the movie existed.
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.”
What the fuck did I just type
Words for the visually impaired. Thank you for your service.
Would recommend reading Men, Women, and Chainsaws.
Reminds me of Barbarian
This is one of the movies that made me super thankful for the fact that I intentionally go into movies with as little information as possible.
I got so sick of trailers leaving me with virtually all major plot points and locales. Now I just check ratings and occasionally the genre before watching.
Barbarian and Cohesion are the two movies I think are best enjoyed with no prior knowledge
Malignant
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.
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.
I don’t doubt this is true but I feel like you couldn’t have a worse source than a Valnet site
wtf did I just read?
Actual artistic insight into the decision making that went on during the production of Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece Alien. Back when people actually put thought and effort into movies.
Alien trilogy is must-watch yearly for me, but the whole thing reads like insane tumblr fan fiction! I don’t know if the director actually said that, but If you follow any scifi or fantasy medium about cosmic or demonic monsters that scares the shit out of people, you’ll find similar horrific themes on how the monster preys on its victims. I can promise you no man or woman watched aliens and screamed payback!
Do you lack comprehension skills? It is literally spelt out for you what it means…
are you already, mate? bad day?
i was just about to write the same sentence.
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Haha, men bad amirite?
These folks have to try to ruin everything even the classics. If described like this Alien movies seem less scary and more dump. I have to forget this ASAP because i really liked the original movies.
Movies are actually just funny moving pictures and deriving meaning from them is BAD
Even if you try to derive meaning, it will slide right off my perfectly aerodynamic smooth brain
Yeah but there this thing called association and next one is shocking. Together they tend to create long term effect.
