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Thinking about the movie Alien and how much scarier that must have been in the 70s when it first came out
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Since like
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By now the Xenomorph is a fucking pop culture icon
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It appeared in Animaniacs for fuck's sake
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(It menaced Dot, who pulled out a bigger, tougher looking alien from a tiny box)
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(Then the two aliens went on a date and left the scene)
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So like we all know what it looks like
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What it can do
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What a facehugger is
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but in 1979 no one knew what the FUCK that thing was because it came from the mind of HR Geiger and had never been seen anywhere else
EsperBot
Honestly the movie's still pretty fucking scary today even with all that considered
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It was an original creation
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YEAH
EsperBot
but yeah
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IT'S A GOOD MOVIE
EsperBot
exposure has dulled it somewhat
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But also consider this:
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This was around when VCRs were FIRST coming out
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and VCRs put a huge boom in the horror film market
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for 2 reasons:
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1: You can watch a VCR at home, by yourself, with the lights out
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2: VHS tapes are much lower quality than a film in a theater
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So it was like
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In scenes that were perfectly clear in the theater
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If you watched them at home they were shittier looking and as a result it was way easier to be like "Oh god"
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"Is that a shadow or is that the alien!?!??!?!?!"
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Aliens was ALSO a really good movie
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But it was a very different movie
EsperBot
There’s two parts in the movie where Ridley Scott has the balls to just put the creature on screen for a WHILE and you don’t notice it because it’s so still
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Alien was survival horror suspense
oh i'm scary
Aliens was the RE4
EsperBot
And even in 1080p it lands
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Aliens was action horror
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so yeah what Raven said
EsperBot
But I can only imagine on a shitty VHS transfer
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My two favorite scenes in Aliens:
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- When they're sitting in their bunker, watching the ammo counters on the sentry guns steadily drop
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not sure if the aliens are going to overwhelm them or not
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You can't see what's going on
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You just see the number going down while everyone stares at the screen in horror
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- At the climax, when Ripley is surrounded on all sides, but she's also right by the eggs and she has a flamethrower
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So she threatens the eggs and the aliens back off
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And for like the first time in the franchise
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There's a moment of actual communication between the aliens and the humans
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It's incredibly simple
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It's a fucking threat
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"Leave my young alone or I'll cook your young"
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(Because she had the kid with her)
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But like because it was so SIMPLE, even something as wildly different from humans as the xenomorphs could actually understand it
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Anyways good movies
00000000
IIRC the sentry gun scene wasn't in the theatrical cut
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it wasn't!?!??!
00000000
Nope
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lame!
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It's so good!
EsperBot
It wasn’t!?
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Holy shit that’s so fucking vital
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Anyways you know what has gone through the phenomenon of villain decay TEN times worse than Alien?
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Dracula
EsperBot
Haha oh my god yeah
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Decay through overexposure, I should say
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The book Dracula hinges on the fact that the reader does not realize that the character Dracula is a vampire
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So reading it now
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It just comes off as quaint
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Dracula: "I do not drink....wine."
1897 reader: "What a curious thing to say. I wonder why he doesn't drink wine?"
2020 reader: "OHOHOHO I BET HE FUCKING DOESN'T"
duck bastard
I remember osp did a thing on Dracula about how it had so many different stuff to it, like letters and news articles and things like that, which is harder to convey in, like, a movie, and that's a genuine part of the experience
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The sentry gun, Ripley finding out about her daughter, the Hadley's Hope flashback, and Burke's final scene were all cut from the film
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It's been so long since I watched that movie
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I don't remember almost any of that
EsperBot
Ripley finding out about her daughter I knew about, although as a cut that one is straight up offensive
EsperBot
The movie’s major theme makes no sense without it!
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Back to Dracula real quick
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I have read it
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And
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The multimedia aspect of it is interesting?
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But like
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It doesn't really hold up all the way to the end
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The last third of the book is just prose out of characters' journals
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Animaniacs Alien
for posterity
Love Snake Kaja
I remember Dracula being spooky when I read it but also with some weird scenes like the spider eating guy
kamikasei
Maven from Vampire Reviews has talked about this when discussing seminal old stuff like The Vampyr, Dracula, and Carmilla, the idea that at the time people had an idea of what "a vampire" was that these charming aristocrats didn't fit, and so they were genuinely surprising and subversive to their contemporary audience
Hazard Kitten
yeah, Vampires if they knew it were basically what we'd think of Ghouls - hideous cunning corpses and corporeal plagues on towns, not cunning aristocrats capable of blending in and planning.
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Fascinating
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