“How on earth did you get that thing coming out of his chest?!”
The Big Picture
- The chestburster scene in
Alien
was created using real animal guts, resulting in genuine reactions from the cast. - Several directors turned down
Alien
before Ridley Scott due to the iconic chestburster scene, but Ridley was instantly inspired by it due to his background as a designer. - Stanley Kubrick was baffled by Ridley Scott’s realistic chestburster scene, showing Scott’s brilliance in filmmaking.
There might be an entire Alien franchise, one which will continue with this year’s Alien: Romulus from director Fede Álvarez, but let’s be honest, it’s only the first two films so far that stand the test of time. You can take your pick on which one you like better. Ridley Scott‘s 1979 original, Alien, is a slow burn, almost like a slasher on a spaceship, while James Cameron‘s 1986 followup, Aliens, is an intense action movie. The second film might have more xenomorphs, a higher kill count, and more gore, but nothing it does can top what Scott did in the original with the moment a baby xenomorph bursts out of the chest of John Hurt‘s Kane. It was a shocking scene, not only for the audience, but for its cast as well, including Sigourney Weaver. The chestburster scene was such a groundbreaker that even a brilliant director like Stanley Kubrick couldn’t wrap his head around how Scott had pulled it off.
Alien (1979)
In deep space, the crew of the commercial starship Nostromo is awakened from their cryo-sleep capsules halfway through their journey home to investigate a distress call from an alien vessel. The terror begins when the crew encounters a nest of eggs inside the alien ship. An organism from inside an egg leaps out and attaches itself to one of the crew, causing him to fall into a coma.
- Release Date
- June 22, 1979
- Director
- Ridley Scott
- Cast
- Sigourney Weaver , Tom Skerritt , John Hurt , Veronica Cartwright , Harry Dean Stanton , Ian Holm , Yaphet Kotto
- Runtime
- 117 minutes
- Main Genre
- Sci-Fi
Several Directors Turned Down ‘Alien’ Because of the Chestburster Scene
The screenplay for Alien was written by Dan O’Bannon, the future genius behind Return of the Living Dead. Its story is simple but effective, with a crew on a commercial freighter spaceship called the Nostromo having their temporary home invaded by an alien creature who picks them off one by one. The premise is like so many others of the genre, but what set Alien apart was its chilling setting, a great cast, a perfect badass heroine in Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, and a truly terrifying alien monster designed by H.R. Giger.
20th Century Fox saw Alien as “Jaws in space,” but four times they met with directors who ended up saying no. On the fifth try, they brought in Ridley Scott, who at the time had directed just one feature film, 1977’s The Duellists. In a 2019 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Scott reminisced about the initial meeting, saying that he read the script in 45 minutes, at first seeing it as just one scene after another with no characterization, but then he came upon a moment where everything changed. Scott told The Hollywood Reporter:
“And then I got to a page where it says, ‘And then this thing comes out of the guy’s chest.’ And I’m thinking, ‘This has put off four of the directors’ — because I was number five on TheShockNews. Obviously, clearly, the previous four went, ‘What?!? This is ridiculous,’ and just put it down.”
Instead of being scared off, Ridley Scott was intrigued and confident due to his background as a designer. He wanted Alien to be the opposite of Star Wars, with the Nostromo being a dirty, old ship. He also used his design talent to rein in H.R. Giger, who created a brilliant design for the film’s monster and setting, but kept on wanting to redo it because he thought he could make it better. This was all well and good, but just how in the heck was he going to create a realistic-looking scene of an alien bursting out of a man’s chest?
The Chestburster Scene in ‘Alien’ Caught the Genuine Reactions of Its Cast
The first xenomoprh we see ripping out of Kane’s chest cavity is nothing more than a puppet cleverly hidden by blood and guts. When you see Kane’s innards, those are real animal intestines, as Alien‘s art director, Roger Christian, explained in the book Cinema Alchemist, writing, “I sent one of the team to the local abattoir to fetch a bag full of bloody animal innards. The buyer returned clutching a plastic bag full of liver, intestines, kidneys, and lungs – whatever organs they could find.”
In an interview with Empire, Ridley Scott said the scene was created by screwing an artificial chest to the table, with John Hurt underneath it. When the alien would explode through his chest, fake blood would be pumped through hoses, but Scott wanted everything to look so real that, according to Dan O’Bannon, he even had a piece of beef organ hanging out of the creature’s mouth when it burst through. The trick of the scene had been figured out, now they just had to film it, but to do so, Scott needed to pull off another trick by getting the genuine reaction of his cast. When Kane begins to writhe in pain and collapse on the table during dinner, he’s surrounded by the Nostromo crew, made up of Ripley (Weaver), Dallas (Tom Skerritt), Parker (Yaphet Kotto), Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), and Ash (Ian Holm). When Kane’s t-shirt explodes in a burst of blood and the xenomorph slithers out, the crew jumps back in shock and horror, selling the scene, but also giving a real reaction, for while they knew from the screenplay that the moment was coming, they were purposely kept away from the setup process so they wouldn’t know how it plays out.
In their talk with Empire, the cast said they walked onto the set to find the the crew wearing raincoats and covered by plastic shields. They knew something gory and intense was going to go down, but none of them were ready for it when the moment happened. It was such a shock that Veronica Cartwright passed out and Yaphet Kotto walked off the set angry. It’s poor Veronica who gets splattered with blood the most, but it was an easy scene for her. She said, “I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to say, ‘Oh, I’m acting now.’ Your reaction is just going off what you’re seeing.”
The ‘Alien’ Scene That Was Made Using Real Animal Guts Sounds Vile
Thought THAT scene was gross before? Wait until you read how it was made.
Stanley Kubrick Asked Ridley Scott How He Made the Chestburster Scene Look So Real
The intensity of the chestburster scene in Alien had audiences on the edge of their seats for the rest of the runtime, because if Ridley Scott could show us this, what other twisted creations was he capable of? It’s the most famous scene of the movie (and one of the most famous scenes in horror history), one that sticks with you so deeply that even director Stanley Kubrick couldn’t wrap his head around it.
In 1979, Kubrick was already a master filmmaker, having been the man who helmed 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are so many shots in that film that are awe-inspiring and impossible to figure out how they pulled it off, but despite being the one who had made the impossible possible, Kubrick really couldn’t understand how his friend, Ridley Scott, made the Alien chestburster scene so realistic. According to Scott, a week after Alien‘s release, Kubrick called him up and said he’d just seen the movie. Scott recalled that Kubrick said:
“‘How on earth did you get that thing coming out of his chest? Because I’ve got a print, and I’ve run it on the machine, and I can’t see the cut.’ So I said, ‘Well, I had John Hurt cut a hole in the table, lie in a horrible, awkward position, and I made a fiberglass shell …’ He said, ‘I got it, I got it, I got it. Brilliant.'”
It’s a brilliant scene indeed, and Alien was received so well (it was the fifth-biggest box office draw of 1979) that it opened up Ridley Scott to a vast number of projects. Forty-five years later, Scott is still going strong as one of the most talented directors of all-time. For John Hurt, the scene followed him everywhere, so much so that he recreated it in a parody for Spaceballs. When Hurt passed away in 2017, the chestburster scene was mentioned in articles paying tribute to his life. What a thing to be remembered most for.
Alien is available to stream on Hulu in the U.S.
This article was originally published on collider.com