7 Scenes From the Alien Movies I’ll Never Be Able to Unsee

The Alien movie franchise is one of the biggest staples of the horror genre and has endured since 1979 with good reason. Ridley Scott and his cast and crew of talented filmmakers introduced a true nightmare concept in the xenomorph and laced that frightening creature to the thematic subtext of birth, infection, corporate greed, and the dreaded unknown of a vast and dark universe. As the series has grown over the years, Alien also expanded its thematic focus to explore the origins of life and our creation, questioning whether or not we are part of a divine experiment – or an accident of bio-chemical experimentation by more advanced species.

Those are a lot of hot-button themes for one franchise to be juggling – it also explains why Alien has managed to traumatize viewers (like me) on so many different levels, so deeply. Here are the scenes from Alien movies that I won’t be able to unsee for the rest of my life. NOTE: I’m leaving out the Alien vs. Predator films, which include that grotesque maternity ward sequence in Requiem.

7) Alien – Shuttle Surprise

Ridley Scott’s Alien set a lot of new milestones for sci-fi and horror – including setting the standard for pulling off a jump scare by hiding a monster in plain sight.

By the time Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) makes it off of the Nostromo and onto the safety of an escape shuttle, the audience is more than ready to let their breath out. The xenomorph’s rampage and the systematic slaughter of the crew was as tense an experience as filmgoers had seen. It was easy to believe that Ripley was truly safe on that shuttle — so much so that our eyes didn’t see the danger right in front of us. When Ripley is about to settle into cryogenic sleep, she passes a wall of the ship only for it to suddenly start moving, revealing the xenomorph has camouflaged itself in the network of tubes and pipes along the shuttle wall.

Everyone jumps the first time they see that clawed hand reach out from the shadows, and none of our eyes have ever trusted a seemingly safe setting (or horror movie escape), again.

6) Alien: Romulus – Feeding the Offspring

Fede Álvarez did a superb job with 3/4ths of Alien: Romulus – so it was a big surprise that he risked it all on one last big sequence that arguably could’ve jumped the shark and ruined the film completely. Funny enough, “The Offspring” has already become a major icon of the Alien franchise (for both comedic and horrific reasons), but there was nothing funny about one particular shot that will haunt me forever.

As stated, the cycle of conception and birth gets twisted meaning in the Alien films, but Álvarez took things to new extremes (and that’s saying something) with The Offspring’s birth. Isabela Merced’s Kay had it bad enough with her rapid and sudden birth of a human/Engineer/xenomorph hybrid – but the shot of the creature feeding on its mother is an Oedipal therapy bill I never wanted to pay.

[RELATED: Alien: Romulus‘ Original Offspring Design Will Creep You Out]

5) Aliens – Terror in Motion

James Cameron’s Aliens pulled off a bold re-invention of the franchise, changing it from an isolationist horror story to an action-horror thrill ride. Some of the most memorable sequences in Aliens are the Hitchcockian moments when the Colonial Marines use a motion sensor to track oncoming attacks by packs of xenomorphs.

The sequence is used several times throughout Aliens (in the first, second, and third acts). However, the scene that haunts me to this day is the one where the Marines, Ripley, young Newt (Carrie Henn), and Weyland-Yutani corporate worm Burke (Paul Reiser) fortify themselves inside the colony facility on LV-426 for a desperate last stand. Private Hudson (Bill Paxton) tracks the xenomorphs’ movements on the sensor until the horde is impossibly close, within the room, but still out of sight. When Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) finally realizes what’s happening and lifts the vent to the air shaft to see all those xenomorphs charging in, one of horror’s great moments was born.

Whether it’s gaming or real life, anytime there’s a blip on a motion sensor, I can’t help but get goosebumps.

4) Alien 3 – Face to Face

Alien 3 gets a lot of criticism for being a low point for the franchise, but not nearly enough credit for the iconic staples it added. David Fincher honored the tradition Ridley Scott started by giving audiences a scene where Ellen Ripley seems safe – only to find out how much danger she’s truly in.

After being stranded in an all-male prison colony, Ripley managed to bond with one person: former doctor Jonathan Clemens (Charles Dance), who was granted more authority than most inmates due to his medical training. Ripley eventually indulges her attraction to Clemens, sleeping with him in the infirmary. Afterward, just as Clemens is revealing his tragic backstory to Ripley, the xenomorph appears behind a medical sheet and kills him. Ripley is then backed against the wall, with the xenomorph extending its secondary mouth into her face, creating one of the franchise’s most iconic images.

Alien 3 reminded a generation of viewers that no place was truly safe when xenomorphs were afoot: one could pop out and get you at any moment.

3) Alien – First Chestbursting

There’s nothing quite like your first time. When audiences came to watch Alien in 1979, no one could imagine the level of nightmare Ridley Scott was plunging them into. Sure, audiences might’ve known that a scary creature was part of the film, but who could imagine the bloody method of that creature’s origin?

When the crew of the Nostromo finally see executive officer Kane (John Hurt) recover from an attack by a facehugger parasite, it’s all love and celebration at a family dinner. However, that dinner became one of cinema’s most scarring moments when Kane’s chest explodes open and the first “chestburster” xenomorph is introduced to the world.

To this day, I and many other fans still clutch our ribs and wince in imagined pain, thinking of Kane’s final supper.

2) Alien: Resurrection – Newborn Implosion

Alien: Resurrection rightly gets clowned for being an almost satirical take on the franchise lore – but writer Joss Whedon and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet weren’t being ironic at all when they scarred us with one of the franchise’s most horrifying deaths.

As Romulus would emulate years later, Ressurection tacks on a final climatic sequence where a group of survivors thinks they’ve escaped a doomed vessel, only to find they’re carrying a nightmare hybrid creature as cargo. In Alien: Resurrection, that hybrid creature is “The Newborn,” which is a xenomorph birthed by a Queen who was gene-spliced with Ripley to give it a human woman’s womb. The Newborn ambushes Ripley and Co. on the escape shuttle, killing off some of the final survivors. Ripley and android Annalee Call (Winona Ryder) finally kill the beast by blasting a marble-sized hole in the window of the shuttle, while still in orbit above Earth. The Newborn has a fold of its skin sucked out into the vacuum space, which then ruptures, causing the creature to implode as its innards are sucked out through its back in a sickening display of ’90s CGI effects. The Newborn’s remains get folded up into an impossibly small ball and sucked out the window altogether.

In what is possibly its greatest feat of satirical subversion, Alien: Resurrection makes us weep over and pity a monster more so than any of the human victims. I’ll never stop hearing that Newborn’s screams as mama-Ripley watched it die.

1) Prometheus – Emergency C-Section

Leave it to Ridley Scott to return to Alien after more than 30 years and immediately scar us for life all over again. Say what you will about the story and themes of Prometheus, the film definitely gets back to Alien basics by putting Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw through one of the worst body-horror moments in the franchise.

Near the end of Prometheus‘s second act, the duplicitous android David (Michael Fassbender) infects Shaw’s lover and fellow scientist Charlie Halloway (Logan Marshall-Green) with the Prometheus fluid (or “black goo”) of the Engineer race. Before Holloway shows signs of his fatal mutation, he sleeps with Shaw, getting her pregnant despite her diagnosis of being unable to have children. Holloway dies, but Shaw has no time to grieve, as the alien fetus inside her starts its rapid growth cycle. She sprints to the ship quarters occupied by high-ranking corporate executive Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) to save herself, using a medical pod equipped with a robotic surgeon.

Ridley Scott pulls no punches and provides no mind-sparing cutaways as Shaw goes through a race-the-clock procedure of giving herself a C-section while still fully awake – and then, escaping the blood-soaked pod before her new squid-like “baby” can kill her. This scene of Prometheus is arguably the most disturbing in all of Alien, as it drives home the series’ deeper themes about life and creation through one intense body-horror experience. Ladies everywhere winced in pain at the thought (or memory) of childbirth, while men struggled to comprehend the kind of bodily challenges every mother has had to endure. A final scene showing the monstrosity that “baby” grows into only makes us shudder more upon rewatch.

Alien movies are streaming on Hulu and Disney+.