Confession time, guys: I’d never seen Alien until the beginning of this summer.  Or Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, and Alien vs. Predator.  I’ve remedied all of that, now (except for Alien vs. Predator, but that’ll be fixed soon too, I think).

I watched all these movies to prepare myself for Prometheus (I know I’m a clicheeeeee and also I liked Prometheus but that’s another story/post).  I’d seen bits and pieces of Alien, and of course I’d seen the chest-bursting scene, but it is always weird seeing an iconic film for the first time because there is that whole “Oooooh watching an iconic film” atmosphere.  .

The main reason I hadn’t seen Alien yet is because I was TERRIFIED.  When I was little my family and I would go to MGM Studios (now Disney’s Hollywood Studios) and we’d go on The Great Movie Ride.  This was basically a slow tram ride through audio-animatronic scenes from famous movies: Dorothy and Glinda from The Wizard of Oz, a sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the big kiss at the end of Casablanca, complete with a plane.  One of the major sequences was a long, shattered spaceship corridor from Alien.  You saw the destroyed hallway and then a scared, sweaty (really, she was sweaty!) audio-animatronic Ripley and then, all of a sudden, an alien DROPPED FROM THE CEILING ABOVE YOU and was all drippy and trying to claw your head and it was terrifying and it scarred me for life.  Or rather, it scarred me until now.

Alien wasn’t that scary guys!  It was actually pretty awesome in a “Wow, this was clearly a revolutionary film and the dark is pretty terrifying and also Sigourney Weaver is the best” way.  And Aliens was pretty amazing in an excellent action movie way.  And Alien 3 was just pretty amazingly ridiculous (and also Tywin Lannister!)  And I’ll not talk about Alien: Resurrection except to say that I am glad that the human-alien hybrid didn’t have creepy hermaphroditic genitalia like in the original design:

Yep, that almost happened.

So now I know, guys.  I know all about Alien.  I can speak with confidence, and I know that they mostly come out at night.  Mostly.