Paranormal Pajama Party
Isn't it weird how often the horrors in our favourite scary stories tend to look a lot like, uh… ladies? Join me as I dig up the social and cultural contexts behind classic ghost stories and legends to challenge the often one-dimensional portrayal of women in horror.
Paranormal Pajama Party
“Alien”: In Space, No One Can Hear Dudes Scream
*MASSIVE CONTENT WARNING FOR THIS ONE:* This episode contains well as explicit descriptions of fictional sexual violence that is 100% a metaphor for real-world sexual violence, plus discussion of pregnancy, extremely traumatic births, death in childbirth, and abortion. Please listen with care.
On this episode of Paranormal Pajama Party, we’re unpacking Ridley Scott's 1979 classic, "Alien," and its groundbreaking feminist themes. This episode explores how the film cleverly subverts genre expectations, forcing viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about gender roles and societal power dynamics.
We'll dissect the Xenomorph's lifecycle as a chilling metaphor, examining how it puts male audiences in scenarios typically reserved for female characters in horror.
We'll also discuss how Alien employs the concept of the "monstrous-feminine" through its set design and body horror elements, tapping into deep-rooted societal fears, and how HR Giger's iconic creature design plays with phallic imagery to unsettle viewers and challenge perceptions of threat and vulnerability.
Beyond the film itself, we'll discuss how Alien reflects real-world issues facing women, from bodily autonomy to constant vigilance against potential threats. Learn why this sci-fi horror masterpiece remains a powerful feminist statement over 40 years after its release.
Key moments
- 1:10 – A synopsis of Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror film "Alien"
- 11:54 – The underlying feminist message of the Alien franchise is my Roman Empire
- 12:35 – "Alien" and the monstrous-feminine
- 14:03 – The true horror of "Alien": Rape culture in space
- 22:07 – Why "Alien" is so scary for male viewers
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View all my sources for each episode and read the episode transcipt here.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram.
Steph: Before we begin, a big content warning this time: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode contains more than the usual amount of cursing, as well as explicit descriptions of fictional assault that is 100% a metaphor for rape, extremely traumatic births, discussion of death in childbirth, and abortion.
Seriously, as a sexual assault survivor, I had to take a couple of weeks to prepare myself to write this episode, and I almost didn’t, even though it’s about one of my favourite movies of all time. Please, please, please listen with care.
Do you like the Alien movies? Do you find yourself desperately wanting to talk about them, but no one around you cares enough? I care! Too much! Did you know that you can text the podcast directly? Let’s talk! Details are in the episode description on your favourite podcast platform.
The following is a synopsis of the movie Alien. Spoilers ahead, but it came out in 1979, so you’ve had 45 years to watch it.
It’s the year 2122. Somehow, just 98 years from now, humanity has really progressed, to the point that we’re travelling the universe, having figured out cryogenics and invented really advanced, if incredibly condescending robots. We’re even colonising other planets, presumably because we failed to stop climate change and had to move.
Enter the Nostromo, the spaceship equivalent of a tugboat that’s owned by the ominous-sounding Weyland-Yutani corporation. Also, vaping is out and everyone has started smoking again in the future.
Onboard the Nostromo is a small crew consisting of the captain, a man named Dallas; an executive officer named Kane who you do not want to get too attached to, a warrant officer named Ellen Ripley who will probably never come up again; a science officer named Ash; a navigator and a couple of engineers. There is also, for some reason, a cat named Jones. Are there rats in space? Litter boxes that don’t require gravity? These important questions are never answered.
The Nostromo is controlled by a computer system called “Mother”, and she knows best. But she’s also clearly keeping secrets – as mothers do – because she’s woken everyone up from their cryosleep to respond to a mysterious distress signal from a nearby planet.
Handsome Dallas handsomely takes charge and, despite the crew’s complaints, guides them through a rough landing on the planet – which damages the Nostromo – before leading a small group out to explore. They soon come across a massive crashed ship, the source of the signal.
Inside, they find a giant fossilised, humanoid skeleton whose ribcage has exploded outwards… from the inside. Hmm. That’s foreboding. Meanwhile, back on the ship, Mother has finally translated the beacon to reveal that it’s not a distress signal – it’s a warning. Uh-oh. Ash, the science officer, is suspiciously unsurprised to hear this.
And deep within the crashed ship, Kane discovers an enormous, misty room full of large, leathery eggs. One of them is moving, so he puts his face up close to it. This is a misstep because a horrifying critter that looks like the lovechild of a horseshoe crab and a human hand flies out at top speed, breaks through his space helmet and latches across his face. I told you not to get attached.
The group rushes back to the ship, carrying Kane, but when they get there, Ripley – huh, I guess she did come up again – refuses to break quarantine protocols and let them onto the Nostromo, even when handsome Dallas handsomely orders her to do so to save his crew member. What a bitch. Fortunately, Ash opens the doors for the party and they take Kane to the science lab to try to help him. Good guy, that Ash.
It turns out the face-hugger has shoved part of its body down Kane’s throat and is feeding him oxygen. Why? Ash knows, but he’s not telling, and Ripley is suspicious and uptight. Any attempt at removing the creature will rip Kane’s face off with it, and its blood is made of such corrosive acid that when it drips on the floor, it burns a hole through three stories of the ship. This is a problem because, as you’ll recall, they’re in a spaceship. You want those things to maintain their integrity. Dallas handsomely decides that the ship is repaired enough to take off, and orders the crew to head back into space and resume the journey home.
Overnight, however, the face-hugger drops off of Kane’s head, crawls into a corner, and dies. Kane, however, is fully recovered and can’t remember much besides a feeling of being smothered. Before climbing back into their cryopods for the next several months, the crew has one final meal together. Halfway through, Kane begins to cough violently and begins to seize on the table. To everyone’s horror, a slimy, sharp-toothed creature bursts through his chest, killing him instantly. Before anyone can react, it zips away into the ship.
The crew splits up to search for the little freak but soon finds its moulted skin on the ground. And in the shadows of the ship, one by one, unlucky crew members discover a shiny black alien, like an enormous humanoid insect with way too many mouths and teeth, and a prehensile barbed tail like a scorpion.
They realise the alien is using the ship’s air vents to travel around, and Handsome Dallas, a brave action hero, handsomely offers to enter the vents with a flamethrower. The crew stands watch outside with a makeshift radar gun to track the creature’s movements, but they can only listen in horror as the clever alien tricks Dallas into heading the wrong way and ambushes him.
Left without a captain or an executive officer, Ripley takes charge. Wait a minute – could it be that Ripley, a woman, was the action hero this whole time? What kind of a movie is this?! She takes charge and continues Dallas’ plan to flush out the alien. She accesses the computer system, Mother, which reveals that the company they work for has secretly ordered Ash to return the killer alien to Earth for study – even at the expense of every crew member’s life.
Furious, she confronts Ash, who tries to kill her before the crew intervenes and hits Ash so hard his head falls off – because he was an evil robot the whole time! They incinerate him, but not before he mocks them a few times. Robots are dicks.
Down to only three crew members, Ripley decides to abandon ship and blow the Nostromo up once everyone is safely in the escape pod. The other two crew members pair up to find supplies for the journey, while Ripley goes off alone to initiate the ship’s self-destruct mechanism. But what’s that she hears? A tiny meow? It’s Jonesy the cat! She can’t just leave him! Ripley hunts for him on the deck. Just as she finds him, she hears her crewmates confront and die at the hands of the alien.
She grabs the cat and the flame-thrower and heads to the escape pod, but the alien has cut her off. Off she runs again, this time to try to shut down the self-destruct process. Unfortunately… she doesn’t make it. That ship is gonna blow up, with her and Jonesy on it. She makes one last mad dash to the shuttle and barely escapes with the cat and her life, just as the Nostromo blows up.
In the safety of the escape pod, she and Jonesy prepare for cryosleep. Just as she’s about to turn in, a giant black claw swipes at her. The alien is onboard the shuttle! Ripley runs to the far side of the room, shutting herself in a closet. Watching as the monster extricates itself from its hiding spot, she slips into a spacesuit and then steps out to lure it closer to her. Right before it can touch her, she opens the pod’s airlock door. The alien holds on, but she fires a grappling hook at it and blasts the engines, finally blasting it into deep space.
Safe at last, she and Jonesy fall into stasis, unsure if they’ll ever be found in the endless vacuum of space.
[Music]
Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
I literally just said, this is a podcast about scary women, and there is, of course, a scary woman joining us tonight. She’s so scary, in fact, that I’ve insisted she join the pajama party via Zoom, because there’s no way in hell I’m getting anywhere near her. Game over, man, game over.
The thing is, our guest does not appear in the movie Alien, which is what we’ll be talking about tonight. She’s actually only in the sequel, Aliens. But it’s really, really hard to talk about her without talking about all the events in the lead-up to her appearance, so tonight, I’m cheating a little bit. It’s my pajama party, I’ll bend the rules if I want to.
Anyway, please join me in giving a very cautious and remote but warm welcome to the one, the only, Alien Queen.
[Hissing sound]
Steph: Eugh. Hey girl hey.
If you haven’t seen either Alien or Aliens, please stop this friggin’ podcast and go watch them! Buy them! Stream them! Rent them on YouTube! I don’t care what you have to do, just go put these movies in your eyeballs, dammit.
Full disclosure: I have not seen Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection, the next two movies in the Alien universe, because they are notoriously bad. I won’t be talking about them tonight, and I’m also going to skip over the prequel movies, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and the Alien vs Predator movies because then I feel like we have to talk about Predator and my huge crush on Carl Weathers and we just don’t have time for that kind of fangirling.
I also won’t talk about the new Alien movie, Romulus, because it hasn’t even been out for a week and I try to only spoil things that are at least three decades old. I will say that I saw it this weekend and it was so good and so scary and I think it might actually give me nightmares.
Aliens is one of my favourite movies of all time, full-stop. Like, not just one of my favourite horror movies. Not just one of my favourite action movies. I mean, it’s one of my favourite movies of all time. The characters are well-written, the lines are memorable, the pacing is almost perfect. IT’S JUST SO GOOD.
But as I said, first we need to talk about the original movie, Alien. The underlying feminist message of the Alien franchise is my Roman Empire. Even 45 years after the first one was released, it still strikes me as pretty subversive especially since it was clearly made for a male audience. Let’s get into it.
You may remember that back in episode nine, part one of our series on Coraline, we started talking about the concept of the monstrous-feminine. This is a concept first identified by film critic and academic Barbara Creed, and it’s basically the guiding premise of this podcast: The idea behind the monstrous-feminine is that female figures are scary to audiences in patriarchal societies because they represent something deeply unsettling about femininity itself. This can include fears about motherhood, sexuality, or the body. Creed’s work shows how these portrayals reflect society's anxieties about women and their roles.
And in her article, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection”, which actually came out the same year as Aliens, Creed uses the first film, Alien, as a prime example of the monstrous-feminine. And honestly, the minute you look at the sets – even before you see the alien in any of its forms – it’s pretty clear why. This is a movie franchise that has very much leaned into making vaginas as scary as possible.
When the crew first explores the crashed ship, which is U-shaped like two wide open legs, they walk right into the most vaginal portholes you’ve ever seen, through a long hallway that looks positively organic. It’s… not subtle.
We’ll come back to the monstrous-feminine and the Alien movies, but first I want to discuss the real horror of this franchise, and one that I think male audience members tend to conveniently overlook even though it’s right there, wetly slapping them in their faces, digging into their skulls with giant talon-like fingers and wrapping its shiny tail around their throats. Ahem.
Here’s how the aliens of Alien – which are officially called Xenomorphs, by the way – get you: If you are unlucky enough to stumble upon a face-hugger, or be kidnapped by an alien and forced to come face-to-face with one, it will violently attempt to latch onto your face by overpowering you and choking you.
Once attached to your skull, it will force a long, thin appendage into your body and inject some kind of liquid into the deepest part of your abdomen. It keeps you alive throughout this process because it needs to use you as a vehicle for gestation.
After a period of time, the face-hugger will die and fall off your body. You’ll recover from the attack not knowing whether or not its mission was accomplished – whether there is a byproduct of your attacker growing inside of you. All you know is that if it did manage to do the deed, you have no other choice than to carry this invader to term until you inevitably begin experiencing excruciating pain that only gets worse until the alien fetus bursts out of your body in a gory spectacle that will kill you.
You can try to remove the fetus first, although that’s also a dangerous procedure that must be undertaken within a very small window and medical assistance is inevitably hard to access. If the procedure and its aftermath don’t kill you, you’ll have to live with the trauma for the rest of your life – and there is almost nothing more traumatic than the physical violation of your own body, the one place in the universe that belongs to you and where you should be safe.
Ask me how I know.
We all agree that the Alien movies are horror movies. We all agree that they are horrible because of what the aliens do to their victims. And what the aliens do… is rape. It’s just rape, even though they use different body parts to accomplish the same purpose. And after the rape, their human victims are forced to carry their attacker’s baby to term, even though it will result in their own painful death.
This is literally the premise of an extremely successful franchise that’s been scaring the pants off of movie-goers for almost 50 years, and we all agree that it’s horrific – except when it happens to real-life women, I guess, when it’s all a part of God’s plan.
The truly fucked-up thing is that more than half of the people on Earth already live in the dystopian reality of the Alien movies, but it’s not a humanoid insect monster that’s assaulting us. By and large, it’s the men we know and love.
According to the World Health Organisation, about one in three women has been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence at the hands of their partner, or sexual violence at the hands of a stranger. Think of three women. One of them has had this happen to her.
I should, of course, mention here that men are also the victims of sexual assault. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, one in 16 men in Australia has reported being the victim of sexual violence. Men are also not the only perpetrators of sexual violence. I don’t want to overlook that, but I also don’t want to pretend that the number of men committing acts of sexual violence against women and gender-diverse people isn’t disproportionately high, because it is.
Right now, on this planet, women have to be aware at all times of the near-constant threat of danger. We are surrounded by beings that are bigger, stronger and more violent than us. We have to be especially cautious in the evenings and in poorly lit areas because these attackers mostly come at night. Mostly.
Alien’s tagline is, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Here on Earth, no one will come to help if we scream “rape” so we’re taught to scream “fire” instead.
That’s if we can scream at all. Like the alien facehuggers, our attackers may try to choke us – here in Australia, there’s a literal public health campaign to alert people – mainly men– to the dangers of sexual strangulation. This is a highly gendered practice, often occurring without consent. Here’s a mind-blowing quote: “According to a large US case control study, prior strangulation is a substantial and unique predictor of attempted and completed homicide of women by a male intimate partner. The study showed that the odds of becoming an attempted homicide victim increased 7-fold and the odds of becoming a homicide victim increased 8-fold for women who had been strangled by their partner.”
No matter what elderly white Congressmen tell you, it is as possible to become pregnant as a result of rape as it is from consensual sex. Victims who can become pregnant live in fear of their attack resulting in a pregnancy. If it does, none of the outcomes are happy. If a victim is even legally allowed to make a choice about her own body, abortion can be emotionally devastating, on top of the trauma of the assault. A victim may wish to terminate their pregnancy, but may not have access to legal abortion services – even in the case of rape.
According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, now that the US Supreme Court has overturned the constitutionally protected right to an abortion, “Women in states with abortion bans are nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth.”
Carrying a baby conceived via assault to term, then raising it, can be tremendously traumatic and psychologically challenging for both the birthing parent and child.
And for some reason, even though forced pregnancy is a literal war crime and crime against humanity as identified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, women still have to fight for the right not to go through it.
Most infuriatingly of all, the men around us seem largely oblivious to all of this, because it doesn’t affect them the same way. As an example, I once had a co-worker tell me he was going to jog around his neighbourhood one dark winter evening after work. I told him I wished I could do that, too, and he was baffled that I felt like I couldn’t.
Men don’t have to be afraid to leave the house, or walk into the wrong street, or take a shortcut through a park, or that they just happen to be at the wrong tram stop at the wrong time. They don’t have to think about this all the time, everywhere. In the worst cases, women even have to think about this at home, where a person should feel the safest, with a partner, who should be the last person on Earth to hurt us.
When they are the perpetrators of violence, men are sometimes even protected by the justice system that's supposed to have our backs, the way Mother betrayed the crew of the Nostromo by ordering Ash to protect the alien at the cost of all the crew members’ lives.
Incidentally, I found an interview with Sigourney Weaver, who played Ripley, talking about sexual harassment in the wake of the MeToo movement and she said, “I was very lucky because… I made Alien, which was basically my first film, and no one came near me. They were so afraid I’d yank out a flamethrower…”
Maybe my anger and hurt over rape culture and my own experiences with it is part of why I am obsessed with the Alien movies. Because the only difference between the foundational horror of this franchise and what actually happens to women all over the world, all the time, is that in these movies, rape is equal-opportunity. The horror of Alien for male movie-goers is that they’re forced to imagine a universe in which they, too, could be raped and forced to carry and birth their rapist’s child.
The Xenomorph’s look was designed by surrealist artist HR Giger, who was like steampunk Georgia O’Keefe, but less subtle with the genitalia. Giger was famous for pairing organic elements with mechanical elements, and that’s definitely reflected in the aliens’ bodies. Maybe ironically, the thing that makes the aliens such a perfect example of the monstrous-feminine is just how penis-y they are. So… so penisy.
When the baby aliens first burst out of victims’ chests, they are fleshy, veiny, and have round little helmet-looking heads. Yeah, it’s a penis with teeth. Once it grows up, its head shape becomes long, smooth and undeniably phallus-like, and inside its mouth is what one of my sources described as “a penetrative second mouth”. I mean, forget Aliens. They basically could’ve named this movie franchise, “Boners”.
All these penises were specifically included by the filmmakers to make male audience members uncomfortable. Being confronted with all of these nightmare penises naturally makes you consider – and empathise with – the horror of what would happen if they penetrated you. And then you throw in a heaping spoonful of homophobia and you’ve got a theatre full of squirming men, worrying about the monstrous-feminine.
I’m not making this up or reading Freudian bullshit into it, either. Dan O’Bannon, writer of the Alien screenplay, specifically mentioned that he wanted the movie to, quote, “attack the audience sexually.” Since man is the default being in a patriarchal society, it’s probably safe to guess that he was thinking largely of a male audience when he said that. And it was definitely a conscious decision to make the first victim of an alien attack a man, while other horror movies of the same era were just fine with continuing to visit sexual violence on female characters alone.
By the way, just before Ash is revealed to be an android, he tries to kill Ripley before she can reveal his – and Mother’s, and therefore the company’s – plan. He does this in a weird nook of the ship that’s decorated with soft-core posters, and he attempts to jam a rolled up porno mag down her throat before he’s pulled off by another crew member. Again, it’s not a subtle movie.
But it is a very clever movie. It’s delivering a pretty audacious feminist message in a very male-gaze-friendly way – that sexual violence and childbirth are the stuff of horror movies, and that the perpetrators of sexual violence, including Ash in that scene, may appear humanoid, but are inhuman monsters.
Throughout the movie, Ripley’s defined by her extreme competence, and this includes making a lot of coldly logical decisions. As a reminder, we, as a very dumb society, have decided that men are logical and women are emotional.
Anyone with a brain knows that logic and emotion aren’t separate in our decision-making – they inform each other – and on top of that, we’re socialised to respond to things in different ways as soon as we’re assigned a gender at birth. I think Ripley’s a beautiful example of this, actually, because her empathy is an extremely important part of her character as a female action lead, but the point is that, for the most part, she’s been exhibiting behaviour that we tend to associate with male action heroes. She’s diagnosing mechanical damage in engineering, giving orders, picking up big weapons and using them well, the works.
By the end of the film, she’s kept her cool and managed to execute a bold escape, having rescued the most helpless member of her crew along the way.
In the shuttle, Ripley literally strips off her coveralls and masculine collared shirt and is in her virginal white underwear, getting ready to re-enter stasis. She’s at her most vulnerable, and even though we just saw her kicking alien ass and taking names, male viewers may still feel the urge to protect her in this moment. She’s been doing their job the whole time, protecting them from the sexually violent invader and running the show. Now it’s their turn to protect a beautiful woman in her unmentionables and her sweetly sleeping pet.
But just as the alien is lulling Ripley into a false sense of security in the escape shuttle, the movie is doing the same to male audience members. In its final, emasculating moments, Alien takes another shot at the male ego.
You can’t protect her. You can’t do anything. Remember? You’re just as vulnerable as the rest of us.
And to make matters worse – she never needed your help in the first place.
[Music]
Steph: Alright, sweethearts, it’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party––
[Hissing noises]
Steph: I know, I know. I didn’t even get to Aliens. That’s going to have to be next week’s episode, Mommie Dearest. I promise it will be all about you and your old pal, Ripley.
To learn more about xenomorphs, the artwork of HR Giger, and – oh my god, I just realised the first man to fall prey to aliens and unleash their sin into the pristine world of the ship is named KANE, as in Cain and Abel! I MEAN HOW ARE THESE MOVIES SO GOOD?? HONESTLY.
Heh. Anyway. To learn more about all of those things, check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.
The Queen and I willl be back next week with part two of our Aliens discussion in the final episode of season 2 of Paranormal Pajama Party. See you then!
In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.
[Music fades out]
