Gomer95 said:
In 1979 my teenage cousins took me to see "a monster movie" in the theater when I was 6 so I 'm like "Cool I love Godzilla and King Kong." Ummmm it was Alien and I didn't even know they could do things like that in a movie lol. After the chestbursting I shut my eyes so long I fell asleep haha. My mom about killed them. But even at 6 back then I never thought any of it was real. I love it now but that was too young lol.
That's awesome. I recall a thought along the same line prior to seeing Alien in June 1979.
I had to go to the restroom right after the full-sized critter grabbed Harry Dean Stanton. This was an old building in Sugar Land, TX that I saw Alien at, and the restroom was not in great shape. One of the ceiling tiles was completely missing, leaving a big, black, gaping hole through which my 12-year-old imagination went to immediate work on. I never peed so fast in my life.
But the movie didn't really bother me much until later in the year when we saw it again. Then that movie f***d me up. I think I picked up on some subliminal imagery, later confirmed when I watched the making of feature on the laser disc (yes, I have one of those paper weights). The critter is not on screen for much time at all, but even so, the fact that its head in close up was built around a fake human skull is evident, at least subliminally. In the coming months after that second viewing, I knew none of it was real, but my sleeping mind didn't care about all that. My sleep was frequently interrupted by some really terrible dreams. I've never had a movie since impact me like that, and I've seen some that were probably pretty damn scary by any standard.
Alien is the most perfect movie of its type ever made, and will never be topped IMO. Aliens was great, but pales in comparison.