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.
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”. 🥹
He was the first one to pop into my mind while reading about that. That looks…
I don’t 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 you’ve correctly pointed out as way off all but the most extreme table.
I’m 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 don’t blame them. I don’t think most people who just play realize how far TTRPGs can go.
I’m 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.
Not sure how much it fits online but I’ve never played a horror TTRPG and I’d love to try it! I like extreme stuff!
Dungeon master and Dungeon Mommy is 100% the exact same job
Wow is that ever insightful. And interesting.
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.
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.
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.
It got me hard.
ಠ_ಠ
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.
Indeed. “Oh males thinking childbirth is horrific lel!”
I mean for 1979? A lot of males probably DID think it was horrific. I don’t 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.
Alien is one of my favorite movies ever, so I’m not dismissing anything.
I was responding to OP who observed that the comment about childbirth in the post felt dismissive, and I summarized it to make fun of it.
I’m sorry, I completely misinterpreted your comment 😭
I’m really bad at tongue-in-cheek humour on the internet, I’m one of the dummies that needs the /s
No worries, friend!
https://screenrant.com/alien-movie-chestburster-sexual-assault-meaning/
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
Don’t forget the acid blood.
It is the horror of Junior though.
More rape and forced birth than just mpreg
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
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 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®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.
