Let's not forget that no one on-screen in that specific scene other than the host (John Hurt) was aware that the character was swapped for a neck-down prosthetic, so every single reaction by each actor was genuinely horrific in that they each "saw" a prop explode out of a human body. IIRC, the director went on to pay for counseling for most (all?) of said actors after the fact.
Did not know this. That makes it way wilder, and also a much better movie. I do feel bad for the actors in this situation, but also no better method acting than watching your costar literally explode next to you as a chestburster comes out with zero knowledge that it was carefully planned by the special effects team. Also, big gamble. If someone broke character, they would have to redo the whole thing. Shock value is gone, all the special effects prep work has to be redone, everybody already wants to vomit, etc
While this is true, I want you to go back and rewatch that scene with special attention to Parker (Yaphet Kotto, also the first black Bond villain!) and tell me that guy didn't catch some serious trauma from that "gamble". š„¹
He was the first one to pop into my mind while reading about that. That looks..
I donāt often get a chance to talk about it, but Lover in the Ice is a fascinating, well regarded module that dives directly into the sort of sexual horror youāve correctly pointed out as way off all but the most extreme table.
Iām certain, to my bones, that I could run a life changing version of Lover in the Ice. It will never happen. Even my few players who have given me the green light on that sort of content would I suspect tap out pretty fast, and I donāt blame them. I donāt think most people who just play realize how far TTRPGs can go.
Iām okay with never running that story. I get a lot reading modules like that for perspective; when GMs recoil at the thought of running that content it shows them how much more vulnerable they, and their players, are to that sort of horror relative to a shoggoth in the basement. That should prompt them toward creativity in looking for or writing other scenarios.
I do wonder what proportion of people who buy modules like that play them.
I am usually just kind of unphased by the idea of reproductive or sexual horror when it's not directed at my PC's personally but being ace and with no history of sexual assault I find it doesn't affect me any different than any other kind of horror? Like I have read my share of true crime and awful shit and I can see how it just segments into something just genuinely horrific but my brain just treats it as a straight up no different than a torture theme. I can find other people's reactions to it waaay more unsettling though so I could never run it myself and I know a number of people in my cohort who have been in domestic violence and sexual assault scenarios irl and it would break my heart if any of them were triggered at a table I was at.
I've definitely been at tables which used sexual horror themes in lazy, trashy ways that made me think poorly of the GM but I have seen it used thematically well twice and only once where it didn't cause an X card tap out by someone who honestly thought they would be okay.
High risk TTRPGs can be ridiculously rewarding and some of the best games I've played were ones that danced really close to the wire of being not okay.
Dungeon master and Dungeon Mommy is 100% the exact same job
Why does anyone need to survey players on their tolerance for sexual violence in the first place? Like are there that many DMās trying to put that in their actual campaigns?
Yeah itās not that I find the idea of surveying player sensitivities a problem, so much as itās difficult for me to wrap my mind around the desire to inflict something like that on a playerās character in a roleplaying game thatās supposed to be for entertainment at the end of the day. I think of myself as an open minded person and Iām trying not to judge here, Iām just having a bit of trouble with this concept. In the context of an inherently erotic roleplaying game it doesnāt really bother me as I respect other peopleās kinks as long as everyone is consenting and comfortable, even if itās something Iām personally uncomfortable with, because youāre walking into something where you as a player know the subject of kinks and sexuality is inherently part of the game. But the idea of using it as a device in a roleplaying game simply for inflicting horror on a player through their character is a struggle for me to understand
Horror play is a different beast than your run of the mill ttrpg crowd. You are trying to ride a line where you get under someone's skin but not enough to actually cause them to tap out. Flirting with the darkness is the point. Sometimes themes of sexualized violence find their way into horror, particularly if you are aping off of old school horror tropes. It is a gold standard rule to never impose sexual violence on a player character generally and it is safer over all to just exclude it entirely from games that are not an excersise in giving you the actual chills.
Most gothic horror stuff D&D modules pass for horror is actually pretty calculated. It still follows the curve of a power fantasy but with a Halloween haunted house-y coat of paint. Curse of Straud for instance will give you all manner of tropes you would find from R. L Stien novels from Goosebumps to the stuff targeted towards young adults but it's still designed to be overcome. You gain more powers as you go and become more capable and expect to have a fair shot of surviving because you are heroes.
The hard core horror players look for a different curve. You are never more capable than you will be at the start of the story. Some things are designed to give you odds of survival where the question is not if someone will die but when. You might be fortunate to lose half the party... It is sort of a trust exercise. Going into a table that seeks to spook you properly you let people know your weaknesses because your DM is trying to hit you in a way that is disturbing but tolerable. Coming away from that kind of experience actually can make for pretty solid friendships because sharing a faux traumatic event allows circumstances for you all to be vulnerable together provided it is done in a space where everyone knows they are safe.
While I still find it odd, I suppose I was thinking of it more in the sense of a traditional D&D campaign than a horror driven one despite the original comment saying such. I still feel like even in most horror video games the threat of your player character actually being raped or sexually assaulted is extremely uncommon as opposed to a movie or book because you are playing the role of the character, and so even in the context of a horror rpg the idea of putting that into a campaign just seems strange to me. Iām not judging people who play that way as long as everyone consents and knows what theyāre getting intoā¦ I suppose I just donāt understand the desire to do so
This is a valid question, which could also be asked of Alien. Itās as simple as some people like to be scared, whether to explore personal feelings on a specific type of fear or purely to be scared. For some players, that a game addresses a fear they rarely explore is an enormous bonus.
Your confusion is understandable. Games that directly address the same themes of sexual violence as Alien are a minuscule niche inside an already small niche. But I can tell you as a horror GM that even a whiff of an exotic, earnestly held fear, as long as the player is willing to engage, cuts deeper than hours of classic slasher horror. It doesnāt have to go as far as even Alien, just a little taboo horror as seasoning, but even that needs consent.
D&D is very poorly weighted for hardcore horror. I don't think I mentioned D&D in my original comment but I could be wrong. Other ttrpgs are way better. Shadows of Esterun, Call of Cthulhu, SLA Industries and Dread would be better options if you want to dip your toes in.
It's way more common for aspects of sexual violence to be sort of more alluded to in the past tense and almost NEVER happen to a PC unless the player themselves makes it an aspect of their character that happened in the past. It's damn near never something graphically described at the table in real time.
Inclusion realistically often looks like small references made by the NPC living victims of serial killers being held captive who speak a little about the horrors they've experienced but trail off before they get graphic... A bit of somebody's backstory or allusions to the weird monster that kidnaps and beheads it's victims is doing it because it of weird reproductive purpose... but it is a rare table that actually will not call a FULL stop to play if someone starts full on beat for beat trying to describe a detailed rape scene in progress or a monster basically doing weird reproductive stuff to an NPC in present tense much less a player.
Most of the time with something like that you employ "veils" where something as an idea is introduced as a factor to make something more horrible but you don't really describe it in detail. You let the abstraction make it tolerable.
I personally might consider use of extremely mild themes of reproductive horror in a game but I personally draw the line at targeted sexual assault being any part of that. I neither want to risk triggering somebody's PTSD or anybody's weird anime porn related kink by accident so it's not something I would personally run. I am not personally triggered by their inclusion but with straight up rape it's easy for the way things play out to be in poor taste and only a few GMs I have played with actually used the themes for anything that felt thematically poignant and not just trashy. Most of the time the risks just outweigh the rewards by magnitudes and in a safety focused culture that shit flies like a chunk of lead.
Mind you old school tables were pretty brutal, even your average D and ;D campaign not billing itself as a horror might have had a rape situation thrown in as window dressing for a sacked town or female prisoners in a camp. I remember a couple of DMs I used to play with really thought nothing about chucking it in just to make stuff feel gritty and "realistic". The culture of tabletop has moved into a much kinder place in the past decade for which I am personally quite grateful. What was once the domain of horror gaming safety techniques have been adopted by regular players now.
They're dungeon masters not middle school chaperones
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 bossā¢" 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.
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.
It should also be noted that the alien was designed to resemble a sexualized androgyny while also being sufficiently alien to be unsettling, itās 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.
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!
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 mean for 1979? A lot of males probably DID think it was horrific. I donāt think males were allowed in the delivery room UNTIL the 70s, and choosing to actually exercise the option became more common in the late 90s/2000s.
I think your comment really dismisses the fact that Alien feels like a modern movie in a lot of ways BECAUSE of these types of deliberate choices made during the writing and filming. The movie is over 40 years old.
Iām sorry, I completely misinterpreted your comment š
Iām really bad at tongue-in-cheek humour on the internet, Iām one of the dummies that needs the /s
I read the graphic novel (published by Heavy Metal magazine) long before I saw the movie and it was great.
There's the link in the image. Interesting stuff.
All this discussion about this article? This is just one person's opinion piece. They say a lot about O'Bannon's intentions with absolutely no reference to interviews, quotes, or other evidence.
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 āHumanā 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.
Turns out it was the director telling Giger to go nuts.
Not sure how much more encouragement H.R. needed, given that his work from the 1960s was already pretty nuts, but he certainly didn't hold back for the movies!
No, that's one of the horrors of ALIEN. Another is a seemingly unstoppable force of nature with no discernable motivation beyond killing and reproducing. As well as the terror of extreme isolation in unknowable lands. There's a lot to get scared by.
It is the horror of Junior though.
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."
Words for the visually impaired. Thank you for your service.
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.
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
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...
i was just about to write the same sentence.
I must be one of the few who just didn't care for Alien. I still don't understand what makes this movie so well-received.
I don't like horror films. They do not scare me. Alien did, and that's why I like it. The other Alien-films? I don't care for them.
Other horror film that scar(r)ed me was Ringu (Nakata, 1998) and It Follows (Mitchell, 2014)
There's so much mediocre horror out there. Try Kill List, Hereditary, Green Room, High Tension aka Switchblade Romance, and if you're game, Irreversible. As a horror lover, it's appreciating the genius of tickling the scary bone and the deft way it's handled for maximal heart-grippage. I rewatched It Follows recently, the subtext in movies like that are really cool. Hope you check out any of the recs above and get something out of them.
I've seen Kill List and Irreversible, but didn't think of them as a horror film. The other titles are noted down, and I will try to check them out. Thanks!
A horror movie is well done when it able to instill fear and anguish.
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.
Man. It must suck to give birth if the baby bursts through your chest killing you in the process. And then going and doing it again for multiple children just goes to show that women are immortal or something.
I watched my wife give birth to our daughter. Take that scene, and have the aliens push down his dick and split it like a banana skin on the way out. That would match up with what women go through about right.
I'm particularly impressed how the women's body can pull itself back together after that experience. It also does so while keeping a large, hungry parasite alive at the same time. It makes it insane!
Child birth has been a big killer across all of human historyā¦
I mean, the chest burst is basically an unsupervised C section. It's not that far from reality.
Get used to the hand.
In fairness, the roles were all written as unisex roles with no specific gender in mind. I'm pretty sure they didn't have three sequels in mind when they were writing the original script...
I'm just saying if that was the original intention it would have been a lot more impactful with a male lead for the audience to attach a common fear with as they struggle to avoid the proverbial rape situation and completely avoid the issue brought up in the sequels. Not to take anything away from the cultural phenomenon that the original Alien was for having a strong female lead.
Subverting expectations means doing what isn't expected. Clearly you don't understand how it works.
That's.. not what subverting expectations means
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
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.
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