Yarr! There be spoilers ahead. Ye’ve been warned!

Wow, what a movie.

As a boy, I watched and read very little Fantasy. It was for girls, full of unicorns and princesses, quests for jewels and other things no boy would be interested in. Until I discovered Tolkien’s The Hobbit, I lived in spaceships, slavered over the high-tech gadgetry of Tom Swift and loved to see the fall of evil scientists as their plans went awry at the hands of a too-clever teen. This was through no fault of my parents, who are both generous, open-minded people with little interest in drawing gender lines for their children, but rather because I adored Science Fiction, loved the conflict and, in my youth and naivety, had strong misconceptions about the Fantasy genre. Despite this love for Science Fiction, however, Alien, and its sequels, were never on my radar. Even as a teen, when the films first became age-appropriate for me, I was a bit of a lightweight where horror was concerned and stayed far away from anything that was remotely frightening. Blame my over-active imagination, blame the monsters under my bed, blame whatever you’d like, but I skipped out on Alien, not realizing that years later I’d discover it for the genre classic that it is.
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