The Xenomorph's Sexual Horror

One kind of sexual horror might try to interweave what is intended to be sexually exciting ideas or imagery with dangerous creatures or situations (while sexiness is subjective and does not even reflect if something is sexual in the first place, this is the goal in this type of art).  Another kind of sexual horror integrates sexual concepts or imagery into its environments or creatures without necessarily trying to present them in a sexually attractive way.  Hostility to human life, the ways that sexual encounters can be terrifying, and the foreignness of non-human beings is more at home in this case.

The former might focus more on humanoid entities that many humans might be attracted to or scenarios that are meant to be sexually enticing; the latter is what the 1979 film Alien belongs to.  In some ways subtle and in some ways overt, Alien features a variety of sexual imagery that borrows from the appearance and sometimes the function of human genitalia, male and female, and makes them a part of its titular extraterrestrial.  Across the different stages of its development, with each successive version of the xenomorph dying as a stage produces the next step, the creature is distinctively comparable to human sex organs (though neither the display nor admiration of human sex organs, of course, is sexual in itself whatsoever).

Xenomorph eggs are like wombs, the camera showing the facehugger suspended inside as it stirs next to a potential host.  The facehugger is seen up close repeatedly once it emerges, and its vaginal underbelly from which it orally impregnates victims is shown directly.  The chestburster implanted by the facehugger is also shown up close, its head already resembling a human penis before it scurries away to grow in solitude.  Depicted more selectively and often in the shadows, this creature's adult form keeps the phallic shape of its head.  It can extend a second, inner mouth that also somewhat resembles a penis with teeth.

Near the very end of the film, this second mouth of the alien protrudes as the protagonist Ellen Ripley puts on the spacesuit over her underwear as if it is the erect penis of a male rapist, the xenomorph just laying on its side watching her in what director Ridley Scott has said were its final hours of life.  This is in the context of the general creature design among the most explicit portrayals of sexual horror in the entire movie.  The xenomorph is in its various stages as an organism a beast that shows how oppressive and lethal sexual aggression can be, and it even acknowledges, intentionally or not, that women and men alike can use their genitalia to force a will on others rather than bring mutual pleasure.

It is the prequel Prometheus that has some of the most obvious sexual horror elements of the entire Alien franchise, but the original film introduces the basic ideas of the xenomorph's sexual horror very well.  Logically possible physical expressions of sexuality, after all, are not limited to the specific ways that humans can interact with each other.  Even the observable animal kingdom in this world show a great diversity of genitals and sexual behaviors.  It is very fitting that a creature like this alien that is born only to pursue savagery or the continuation of its species both parallels aspects of human sexuality and is at the same time so very unlike us in other ways, hence how its reproduction is weaponized against the human victims of its forced sex or sexually suggestive attacks.