Alien

everybody knows alien. you couldn't avoid this thing via cultural osmosis even if you were trying. example: the chest burster scene is the first horror thing i remember ever accidentally being exposed to as a kid and thus my first recurrent movie-related nightmare. (i was also a massive fucking wimp as a kid so i had quite a few of these! i would be shocked back then to hear what my favorite movie genre is now) i really truly thought i knew what the gold-standard blockbuster horror action flick had in store - so imagine my shock when the best word to describe this film wound up being "lumbering". alien is slow and alien is exhausting. its not a nonstop horrific scream terror frightshow, but when it is scary it has horror in spades. that's what makes it so powerful, i think, the fact that it just keeps coming at you in the same surprisingly subdued way until you're completely worn down. can i also just say, barring the exception of one scene near the end, this movie hasn't visually aged a day? like oh my god why doesn't everything look like this. my dad had h.r. giger's necronomicon and i flipped through that shit constantly as a kid (refer back to the massive wimp comment) which definitely shaped my love for the set and creature design, but also its just really damn Cool on its own! final thoughts: why did every costume designer put harry dean stanton in the most yee yee outfits ever concocted