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
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.
Why does anyone need to survey players on their tolerance for sexual violence in the first place? Like are there that many DM’s trying to put that in their actual campaigns?
Fiction is a really good way to "safely" explore horrific things.
However, it's easy to accidentally overlook how important the "distance" between the storyteller and the person reading/viewing/experiencing it is. When you move from writing a story in text and putting it in a book to verbally narrating something to people in person, a storyteller can stumble if they didn't take into consideration how in-person context might make change power dynamics enough that something okay in other contexts can suddenly become bad.
Let me give you an example. Bestselling romance writer writes a best-selling novel about Hunky McShirt'sOff that all the fans adore. It subverts tropes, it turns ideas on their head, it uplifts men and women alike. Anyone who wants to read it can buy it off the shelf or gets it from the library. This is cool, because the one reading it has agency about being exposed to it. They choose to leave their home and use their time or money to go find it and bring it into their life. Because they have agency, they can engage, or stop engaging, with the content as they wish.
Now imagine the same writer cornering their teen son in their bedroom and breathlessly narrating their bestselling romance book to him, in a situation where he is physically prevented from leaving, and the person narrating has full control over his food, shelter, education, access to travel, etc.
Same story, same book. And, funnily enough, it's not actually the book that is wrong. It's the power dynamics between people that take the situation from fine into abusive. The second example is a case where the teenage son has things that affect his well-being in a pragmatic way potentially imperiled if he doesn't sit there and listen to his parent tell him a sexual story, because the balance of power is in the adult's favor, because of the parent relationship and the dynamics between them that puts the storyteller in direct control of the listener's basic survival needs.
That's a VERY different situation than a book sitting on a shelf in a bookstore where every reader is free to pick it up or put it down with no real consequences for choosing either way.
Tabletop RPG stuff is also in person, and that changes the storytelling dynamics to some extent. Most people are socially-aware enough to realize you aren't going to do a horror or erotic tabletop RPG role-play with your parents or your kids or siblings. But when you're among peers, it can get trickier to navigate what's okay and what's not, and what the dynamics are.
Directly surveying players on what they can handle in a really up-front way is a way of giving people agency to tap out of something. It restores agency, which makes it safer for everyone.
Sexual violence in storytelling is a tricky thing. But it's important to realize fiction is not reality. It can be influenced by real things, but the character on the page is not a real person and never will be. Nor will the reader magically transform into the characters on the page--even if they might see aspects of themselves reflected in them.
People distill discourse about these things into black and white terms where somehow a story involving a difficult topic is suddenly 100% equivalent to the thing in real life...but it's NOT. In reality, a reader/viewer's interaction with dark topics is much more complicated and nuanced, and there's just as much a spot for healing to come from telling stories that are dark as there is for anything else.
One of my favorite authors is Anne Bishop. Her breakout series was the Black Jewels Trilogy. Practically every character in the series, though, is a survivor of sexual abuse, and a bunch of that is described vividly on the page.
Despite that, the series overall is sort of a "cozy dark fantasy", if I had to give someone an idea of how it "feels".
Why?
Well, because the theme of the whole series is kind of unflinching acceptance that people live through HORRIFIC things...but can still obtain found family and peace afterwards.
Honestly, I've never quite found another series like it, that combines unflinching renditions of horrific violence, then turns around and gives a big chunk of those characters warm loving families with unicorns and loving spouses and dogs and kittens running about. Most cozy fantasy seems to think you only deserve cozy if nothing all that bad has happened to you. As if "survivor of terrible shit" is incompatible with "happy ending".
Anne Bishop is the only author I've read serving up stories that say, "Yeah, what you lived through is royally fucked up and we're going to look right at it and not gloss it over--but also, have some puppies and a unicorn, you've earned it." And being able to see those horrible things spelled out hits differently.
But the folks who have decided that "violence and sex in stories is always bad because--" seem to have missed the memo that storytelling is how REAL HUMAN BEINGS process and come to terms with fears and trauma. And conflate storytelling with the actual act, and conflate story characters who are given stories full of pain with real people who have actually been through pain. (Which I personally think is some mental scarring from the religions that tell you if you even THINK something you're going straight to hell and will burn forever.)
Anyway. My point is that when it comes to storytelling with dark elements, the actual in-person power dynamics between storyteller and reader/listener matter MUCH more than the content of the story. One's agency to partake or not partake in fiction has a bigger impact than the content of the story--especially since dark stories can help us kick around ideas and figure out how one wants to respond to them.
(Plenty of people read a story they don't like and say "Fuck that shit!" in the end...reading something doesn't necessarily mean you'll slavishly accept it without thinking. The point of reading and storytelling is to think about things, and you won't always agree with the author!)
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.
They're dungeon masters not middle school chaperones
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
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
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.
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.
I really wish I saw alien before it became a cultural phenomenon. Everything was spoiled the second I knew the movie existed.
I read the graphic novel (published by Heavy Metal magazine) long before I saw the movie and it was great.
Holy shit, Walt Simonson? It must be fucking epic.
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
Would recommend reading Men, Women, and Chainsaws.
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.
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.
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!
i was just about to write the same sentence.
Do you lack comprehension skills? It is literally spelt out for you what it means...
are you already, mate? bad day?
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.
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.
Haha, men bad amirite?
And now it's a kink!
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 history…
I mean, the chest burst is basically an unsupervised C section. It's not that far from reality.
Get used to the hand.
But still cast a female lead for all that to be portrayed on in the sequels.
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
If self awareness was a disease you'd be the healthiest person alive.
