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I enjoyed that much, much more than I thought I was going to. My experiences of horror films as a kid were very similar to those others have mentioned. I still think of myself as pretty easily frightened, but I guess I have matured. Now, I see my sensitivity as a strength. I start to believe to strongly in movies, I get frightened and upset. And that just makes the screen that much more immediate for me. Haha. Making it personal. Of course, I still wouldn't rule out any possible nightmares... (fingers crossed)

I took a bit of a scientific approach to watching the film. Maybe because I didn't care about the characters in Alien as much as I did in Technolust, I found my mind wandering. And whenever it did, I kept asking myself: how did they do that? How did they build that alien? Since I have a strong puppetry background, I found myself imagining the materials, wiring and manipulation system for the aliens. How would you make a faux alien carcass to be dissected? This made the images on the screen not just palatable, but, once more, personally interesting to me. The problem was that I sometimes forgot about the plot. I was pretty engrossed in the slime, not its social circumstances.

As I was walking out of Dalton, I burst out laughing in surprise at how much male authority was lampooned in the movie. I couldn't believe that mainstream seventies Hollywood green-lighted that script. Too bad it couldn't have been progressive in other ways. I also was annoyed with the fact that the only person of color in the movie was a mostly angry, underpaid, hyper-macho mechanic whom is often disrespected by his superiors.

The two most powerful and intelligent characters were both women: Mother, a feminized computer, and Sigourney Weaver's character. Even the evil villain science officer is a robot-man controlled by orders from mother. The men and the other woman were mostly uninteresting stereotypes puffing up their feathers at any sign of danger, but ineffective at dealing with the situation. One could certainly read Alien as a treatise on the power of women. But, what is most interesting here is that Weaver's character, while predicting much of what happens, is not readily listened to or respected by the captain or science officer or even the rest of the crew. What a sad way to treat such a physically and mentally brilliant person.

And wow! The birth imagery! My favorite sequence was entering into the womb-like ship where the eggs lived. This was certainly a masculinized, "pure" (ie without women), birthing process. According to this movie, men need women to control them, reproduce and clean up after their mistakes. The men and machines are pawns in their game.

Flora