Ry’s Blog

I can honestly say that one of the defining moments of my childhood occurred when I was three. My mom seems to think I was four when this particular defining moment occurred, but I’ve been telling this story for a long time, and I was three damn it! So, without further ado, let me tell you how my innocent little mind was corrupted by a film. A film called Aliens.

It was late one evening and my mom had a meeting to go to, so it was up to my dad to monitor me. I was a pretty low maintenance kid, so I didn’t really need any intense supervision, which meant my dad had some time to sit down and watch some television while I was off doing whatever it was I was doing. I can’t tell you exactly how it happened, but for some reason I was drawn out into the living room, where I became captivated by whatever my dad was watching. I climbed up onto the couch and sat down next to him for some quality TV vegetation.

I had absolutely no idea what I was in for. My dad wasn’t watching cartoons, and he certainly wasn’t watching anything cute or cuddly. It turned out that we were watching a group of soldiers, decked out from head to toe with armor, futuristic guns, and little motion trackers that went “beep…beep…beep.” They were creeping around a corridor that had been destroyed, covered from top to bottom in some strange, oozing substance. They were dark corridors, illuminated dimly by flickering hall lights and the shoulder lamps of the soldiers. Already I was frightened. As the soldiers progressed deeper into the corridor, they found a woman who had been literally cocooned to the wall. She appeared to be dead, but when one of the soldiers went up to examine her her eyes suddenly snapped open!

“Kill me!” she stammered!

By now I was sitting rigid as a board, literally petrified by what I was seeing. The woman started to convulse violently and suddenly a creature exploded out of her stomach, her guts falling out grotesquely as blood sprayed everywhere. One of the soldiers pulled out a flamethrower and torched both the creature and the woman simultaneously. You can only imagine my terror! The creatures under your bed were the least of your concerns, it was the ones in your stomach you had to worry about! Suddenly I could distinguish indistinct movement on the screen, but it was hard to make out against the strange substance on the walls. I remember thinking it might have been an octopus (what a great little kid thought), but it turned out to be a fully grown alien, and it had company. Lots of company. Soon the scene turned into an all out battle between the soldiers and the aliens, which were climbing over the ceiling and walls. The soldiers didn’t stand a chance.

The movie progressed onward, and I remained in a state of constant fear. It was not until the film was nearly over that my mom finally returned from her meeting. I can only imagine what we looked like. My dad, sitting there, seemingly oblivious to my horror, and myself, eyes wide with fear but unable to look away. The movie had left me so traumatized that my mom had to go rent the movie and watch it with me again, this time explaining to me that it wasn’t real and that the “aliens” were just guys in suits. But it was too late. The wiring in my brain had already been altered. My fear had been transformed into obsession! In school, I would draw aliens in my notebooks, usually eating someone or climbing on a wall. At recess, I would want to play Aliens instead of X-Men. Honestly, after you have seen something like Aliens, how can X-Men possibly compare? X-Men don’t plant parasitic embryos in your stomach that explode out through your chest once they have matured.

Needless to say, I am still a huge fan of the Alien movies. I became even more captivated by them when I learned that the original film, Alien, was largely inspired by the artwork of a Swiss surrealist named H.R. Giger. I attribute a lot of my own, occasionally morbid, artwork to the Alien movies, as well as my appreciation for visceral, gory horror films, which I will probably always enjoy.