I saw Alien when I was way too young. It never gave me nightmares though. Those films that gave me nightmares were always set on Earth. Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton's brash, loud, candy-colored Martian invasion movie was infinitely more horrifying to me than Alien, simply because I recognized the locations. The first time I saw the film it was on TV, so I was spared the gorier details and some of the violence (for example, I don't think I saw Ash ram a rolled up stack of paper down Ripley's throat to shut her up until I was 17). Had I managed to see the final few moments of the infected crew member's life I don't think I could have avoided having nightmares.
Of what I did see, two images stuck with me the most, and they're not even of the famed Alien itself, nor Ripley bashed and bruised and running. I remember the crew member in quarantine, shortly before he "miraculously" recovers from his face-hugger induced coma, and how quiet and uneasy the film is then. I remember very well the first few frames of the scene of his death, because it was my cue to bury my head in something.
I've seen myriad terrible sci fi in my life, many of these films seem to pander to an audience it doesn't identify with or respect. Ludicrously attractive heroes and brainless kickass heroines shoved into space. Look at the crew of the Nostromo. They look like an actual crew, they look like people who had ended up on this god-forsaken mining vessel on this god-forsaken mission because whatever else was out in that universe couldn't hold them. Ripley is sharp and sinewy, not a character who is basically constant fan-service and nothing else. Victim #1 is completely helpless, and the image of him, frail body on a bed in a niche in the dark, his breathing aided by a waiting monster, embodied much more of the horror of the situation for me than much of anything later. I began to recognize aspects of the film. Unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, like Victim #1 they too were just biding time before they encountered the beast themselves. Actually, the worst part for me about the whole film is pasta. Once Victim #1 starts eating my blood pressure shoots up.
Pasta also comes into the second scene which has never left me, but I only know it because I was an avid viewer of the show Movie Magic. Ash is a terrible force on the Nostromo, second only to the Alien itself. Like Hal 9000 he has ulterior motives which run counter to the safety of the crew. At one point, however, he is destroyed, his head ripped not so cleanly from his android body. He is made to explain his actions in this state, decapitated, head propped precariously upright and just barely tethered to the rest of his body by gooey strings and fibre optics bathed in white android blood. The android's innards are pasta (and tripe!) with milk. Somehow knowing this (and I've known this for a really long time) does nothing to soften the squicky effect. It's not much of a comfort knowing that the second physical threat and the top mental threat in the film has been reduced to a pile of offal, because his demise means very little in terms of furthering the chances of the crew surviving. In this state Ash's power is nothing, and watching him try and speak in his condition freaks me out much more than the overt monster parts of the film.
Ripley acts on the knowledge that she's totally powerless in the face of the force that has destroyed the crew, and runs.
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