Chest Burster

LEGO of my spleen!

"The truth is Earth citizens are no longer willing to do these dull, labor-intensive tasks. We tried using illegal aliens instead, but they kept bursting out of people's chests."

— Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space

Parasitic Horror where an alien parasite or a Fetus Terrible within someone else decides it's about time to move out and find a body of its own. This is achieved in a messy, painful, and almost always fatal manner.

Related to Orifice Evacuation (where the alien leaves not quite as violently), Orifice Invasion (where an alien wants in), Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong (how these alien pregnancies start), and Spawn Broodling (often the point of this, and the weaponized version of this). Sometimes preceded by a Painful Transformation. Compare Kill It Through Its Stomach and The Infested.

Often part of the life cycle of a Xenomorph Xerox. Not to be confused with Chest Blaster or Chest Monster.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Parodied in the 2004 Nik Naks advert where the eater of the Nik Naks (crisps) has a giant one explode out of his chest, as everybody around him is splattered with dusty cheese. After an awkward moment they all start dancing.

Anime & Manga

• Several of Berserk's nastier monsters such as the trolls of the Qliphoth and Emperor Ganishka's demonic Daka soldiers reproduce like parasites whose offspring kill the host. The former are conceived through rape of human women, the later by immersing pregnant women in a vessel connected to Hell so that their children are corrupted in the womb. What both have in common is that once developed, they exit the host in an extremely painful and fatal way. Young trolls grow quickly in the woman, until they claw and rip their way out of her stomach, then eat her still warm body. Baby Daka burst out of the abdomen, leaving the woman to bleed out, and get collected in cages by attendants.
• The USBM from Bio-Meat: Nectar manifests as a mess of tentacles breaking through the victims' chests.
• HUMANOID Szayel Aporro Grantz does this in Bleach. He impregnates the victim with himself, being "reborn" fully grown upon death.
• Parodied in one of the omake for Blue Exorcist. Rin hides his tail under his shirt and uses it to mimic the chest burster scene around Shiemi, who passes out from shock. Yukio is not amused.
• In Dragon Ball GT, Baby bursts out of Dr. Myuu's body, killing him.
• Played with in Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East as Murasame bursts out of Shino's arm. It's more to do with the fact that it's where he resides as Shino is his vessel.
• In Hunter × Hunter, the Chimera Ant King bursts out of his mother the Queen this way, shredding most of her internal organs in the process. The Queen eventually dies despite the Hunters' medical intervention, but Colt is able to save her last unborn child, who turns out to be Kaito reincarnated.
• Immortal Rain: This is how Yuca Collabel resurrects himself after a two-month gestation period. He probably wouldn't have fit out the normal way since he had already aged to the form of a prepubescent boy in utero.
• The Six Gates World franchise is fond of this. In Mon Colle Knights, Oroboros does this to its host, the Dread Dragon. In Majuutsukai No Shoujo, Kashe uses her own body as host for a demon, which ends up growing through her skin from all sides and eventually around her. After overcoming its mindrape from the inside, Kashe then chest-bursts from it.
• In one episode/chapter of Soul Eater, Soul does this to Maka. However, it's All Just a Dream.

Comic Books

• In the Accursed volume of The Darkness, Jackie creates a woman out of The Darkness to satisfy his needs. She ends up becoming pregnant with a child made of pure darkness, which, naturally, emerges by ripping her stomach apart.
• Jonesy (2018): To be expected, since it takes place during the events of Alien, though the very scene where Kane dies from this is obscured by Jones bursting out of Ripley's jacket.
• In Red Robin, Sac is a Pest Controller who has thousands of poisonous spiders eat and claw their way out of one of his victims once the man has served his purpose.
• In one of the first issues of Spawn, the hellion comes up against a heavily armored cyborg. As Spawn notes, that armor is like a safe: meant to keep people out, not in. And now he has an array of reality altering powers at his command....
  Spawn: Ever see Alien?
• Vampirella vs. Aliens: Vampi is one of several people who get a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong and subsequent baby Xenomorphs bursting out of their chests. Notable in that she actually survives thanks to her durability as a vampire and Healing Factor. Though this does lead to a winged Xenomorph later on...
• Wolverine bursts out of the Hulk's stomach when he eats him in Old Man Logan.

Comic Strips

• Discussed in Dilbert. A cop tells Dilbert that a fugitive known as Tiny Tom may have crawled into his torso during a recent appendectomy. When Dilbert asks what his plan is for getting out, the cop says, "Ever see the movie Alien?"
• Parodied in one strip of The Far Side, which shows a Xenomorph family sitting down for dinner and a misbehaving juvenile at the kids' table is "playing in the turkey."

Fan Works

• Flashpoint 2: Advent Solaris: Shadow the Hedgehog defeats Grayven, one of Darkseid's sons, by chaos controlling inside of him and bursting out of him.
• Nine Days Down: A species of crab-like animals in Tartarus reproduce by implanting eggs in other creatures through their claws, which, if they take, quickly mature into larvae that burst from their host. Adult crabs remain attached to their hosts' bodies, which dangle as withered husks from their bellies.
• Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights: Joker manages to hijack the Incubators and corrupt their Hive Mind, so that whenever his current body is killed, a new one is born from an Incubator in this fashion.
• Son of the Sannin: Hidan has the Demonic Summon: Sons of Jashin, which enables him to summon demonic creatures inside his opponents' bodies and then kill them from the inside out.
• Vow of Nudity: After an unfortunate encounter with abyssal swamp vines, Haara comments that she isn't interested in giving birth to podlings in nine months, spurring Fiora to assure her that they'll come bursting through her stomach long before that. (Luckily, she knows how to brew a potion to spare both of them from such a fate.)
• Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse: Zigzagged example. After Nabiki Tendo devours a hostile Blob Monster made from a bacterial mat with a Hive Mind, and it realizes her blood-manipulation abilities make her immune to its infection, it tries to brute-force its way out of her body by violently ripping through the stretched skin of her monstrously distended stomach, in an invoked case of the trope. The trope is subverted, however, due to Nabiki having sufficient Super-Toughness and a Healing Factor that the Blob Monster can't break through, and instead she digests it.

Films — Animated

• Despicable Me 2 : Pollito (a Chicken) does this to Gru while attacking him at the restaurant.
• An homage appears to the chest burster scene in Shrek 2, when fighting Puss. Puss comes bursting out of Shrek's shirt at chest level, hissing and clawing.
• A Whack-A-Mole style game where a you have to hit aliens coming out of an astronaut's chest appears at Pizza Planet in Toy Story.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien:
  • The Xenomorph life cycle is the Trope Namer and Trope Codifier in modern media.
  • Prometheus:
    • The Deacon skips the Xenomorph's larval stage and rips its way out of the Engineer's chest already a humanoid.
    • And that thing came from a squid-like creature that very nearly killed Shaw had she not quickly gotten it removed — made all the worse by the fact that her crewmates actively refused to help her, and she had to resort to the use of a machine programmed for men which cut her open and removed it while she was still fully conscious.
    • And before that there's a strange, facehugger-like creature apparently coming from mutated worms. When confronted, this thing will latch onto its victim, and much like the facehugger, getting it off is easier said than done, since attempting to remove it only causes it to tighten its grip, and cutting it releases a highly corrosive acid. Then the creature in question actually works its way into the victim's mouth and in the process causes them to suffocate to death while it does... something in their body — probably reproduce.
• Alien 2: On Earth, being an unauthorized In Name Only sequel to Alien, inevitably features parasitic aliens who reproduce in this manner, but with a rather unique twist — these ones explode from their victims' faces.
• This is oddly the method in which Satan possesses people in The Dark Side of the Moon (1990), leaving a perfect triangle-shaped hole in their lower torso when he exits.
• In The Guyver, Lisker kills Sean by ripping the control medal from his forehead. Sean's body withers away and melts. However, it turns out the medallion still contains Sean's genetic code, and begins regrowing his body. When another Zoanoid (played by Jeffrey Combs) swallows it, it finishes regrowing Sean in his stomach, and Sean cuts his way free of the dead Mook's body fully grown.
• In both the 1980 version of Humanoids from the Deep and its 1996 remake, the women impregnated by the Humanoids die horribly as the babies rip out of their bellies.
• This is how the mutant cow in Isolation reproduces, by infecting other cattle and producing parasitic larval offspring that burst out of the cows.
• This happens to Jesse in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge when Freddy cuts his way out of his body.
• Nightwish (1989): The students go looking for ghosts in an abandoned mansion situated on top of an abandoned mine, which turns out to be a breeding place for alien worms. They don't just burrow in people's chests, but all over the body, like a spider implanting hundreds of her young into a larger insect.
• A supernatural, non-sci-fi example occurs in Seeding of a Ghost, which has the Demon Fetus — the restless soul of an aborted baby who became a demon — later gaining a physical form, and bursting out of its victim's chest.
• Spoofed in Spaceballs when a spoiled sandwich in a greasy spoon diner results in a chest-bursting alien that then grabs a top hat and cane and does a further parody of Michigan Frog from Looney Tunes. Made even funnier by the fact that the guy it happens to is played by the same actor.
  "Oh, no, not again!"
• Special Silencers combines this with transflormation. Big Bad Gundar is a murderer who spikes special pills into the food or beverage of his victims, which converts their insides into plants. More than one of his victim are killed by branches and roots suddenly bursting through their chest and stomachs, with bloody results. In the final battle, the hero Hendra gives Gundar a Karmic Death by forcing him to swallow a dozen of his own pills - cue Gundar getting ripped apart by vines growing inside him, not just his chest, but also through his eye and gonads.
• Species II has a scene with a woman who just had sex becoming visibly pregnant almost immediately, and splitting open.
• In Tales from the Hood 2, Audrey suffers Death by Childbirth when dozens of golliwog dolls rip their way out of her abdomen.
• The Void: Two women are impregnated with extradimensional monsters that later come violently bursting out of their stomachs.
• In Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies, one of the casino patrons, who chooses to stop and gather money from the slot machines rather than fleeing with everyone else, collapses to the floor and his internal organs erupt upwards out of his torso in a very self-mobile fashion.
• Xtro has a woman being impregnated by an alien entity, with the offspring (a fully grown man) exploding out of her the next day.

Literature

By Author:

• One of Brian Aldiss' stories has a non-lethal example: the crew of a spaceship are horrified when a parasitic worm burrows its way out of a man on a planet they're visiting. The victim is pretty sick, but survives.

By Work:

• Coffin Princess Chaika has possibly the first time this trope has been combined with Only Mostly Dead. Frederica "dies," but some time later, a Fun Size version explodes out of her abdomen.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Getaway: Greg gets startled by a sea horse while snorkeling, and in a panic, swallows some water. Worried that he might've accidentally swallowed the seahorse, Greg imagines it bursting out of his midsection at school.
• Downward to the Earth: One of the organisms on Belzagor is a sessile, sponge-like creature that inserts its larvae inside of living beings. The larvae grow within their immobilized, wasted hosts, both sustained by a liquid produce by the parent, until grown enough to burst out.
• Dreamcatcher: The "shit-weasels" have a particularly nasty exit: chewing out of people's butts.
• In The Cat from Hell from the anthology Just After Sunset, a cat kills a hitman by Orifice Invasion through his mouth, and then the next day a passerby sees the hitman's body with a hole in his stomach that the cat had made with its claws.
• In "The Last Step" by Zenna Henderson, alien invaders use zap guns that give the target a little prick. In a few hours, the pricked area swells up to the size of an orange, leaving the victim in extreme pain. Cutting the area open relieves the pain, and also releases a zillion tiny creatures with pointy little feet — which scramble out and run everywhere, pricking the sufferer's skin (and everybody else's) on the way. Then those pricked places...
• In-Verse example: When Molly's team from Neuromancer surprise him in Istanbul, Riviera uses his subliminal perception-warping tech to make himself appear to be a victim of this trope, with a gruesome monster ripping its way out of his back.
• In an appropriation of the Athena myth, Paradise Lost sings of how Lady Sin burst out of Satan's skull, horrifying Heaven and Hell alike.
• The eponymous "Rawhead Rex" from Clive Barker's short story anthology Books of Blood Vol 3 was mentioned as having a reproduction cycle that involved impregnating human women and having their young burst out of their bodies. The way it's phrased, it's not clear if this is actually necessary for it to reproduce, or just something it does because it's misogynistic to the extreme and considers this a form of punishment and expression of power. Oh, and the rape dynamics in that description are definitely intentional.
• This is apparently how Puppeteers reproduce in Ringworld, though unlike most examples, they apparently can't do it to humans, instead being obligate parasitoids of a single particular species native to their home planet (which they refer to as a "third gender" for PR reasons).
• In Speaker for the Dead, it is revealed that infant piggies eat their way out of their mother's body as a natural part of their reproductive cycle. This is actually one of the less weird aspects of their biology.
• In Storm Front, Harry has to investigate a series of murders in which the victims' chest cavities exploded and their hearts flung out.
• Reneesme from The Twilight Saga. An odd version given that she is the daughter of the two lead characters. The character from whom she bursts out of survives only by Emergency Transformation.

Live-Action TV

• Angel: The episode "Lonely Hearts" has a parasitic demon that leaps between victims, coming out of the chest of the old host, and burrowing into the back of the new one, after it has sex with the next victim.
• An escaped pet boa constrictor emerged from its owner's corpse on Bones, having curled up inside the mangled body's chest cavity because it was warm in there.
• Happened in CSI, of all places. It was a rat that burst out of a drowned body's squishy chest (freaking out Grissom and Doc Robbins) and ran amok in the lab. Robbins initially thought it was the gas that normally builds up during decomposition, but it wasn't.
• The TV Show Fringe really enjoys this one, and in just one and a half seasons has featured monster larva, monster parasites, giant slug/monster viruses, and monster babies all bursting out of unwitting human hosts.
• Invoked in Sanctuary. Abby is infected with an abnormal parasite that will soon take over her body entirely. Magnus concocts a risky solution: Implant another abnormal into Abby's body which will cause the parasite to stop trying to convert Abby and jump to the other abnormal. It then escapes Abby's body chest burster-style.
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: It's eventually revealed that this is how the Gorn reproduce. They infect their victims with their eggs. The incubation period differs depending on the host's species, anywhere from a few weeks to as little as a few hours. Gorn hatchlings are extremely dangerous and can kill moments after hatching, even one another. The hatchlings mature in a matter of hours. They often fight for dominance until they establish a hierarchy. Evolution has also made them virtually impossible for medical equipment to detect when inside a host's body. It also turns out that they infect their victims by spitting some green slime on them. A Gorn spits at Uhura, only for Hemmer to block the spit. He eventually realizes he's infected and chooses to sacrifice himself in order to save the others.
• Stargate-verse:
  • Done at least once on Stargate SG-1 with a Go'auld which had to exit one host and transfer to another in order to survive. (Tanith, the seeming Double Agent turned triple agent.)
  • Stargate Atlantis: In the episode "Doppelganger", an alien entity is plaguing the expedition members with vivid nightmares. It does this to Dr. Keller by creating a dream where an Iratus Bug bursts through Teyla's chest and kills her. She admits this is a fear of hers, having apparently been terrified by Alien. During medical school, someone pranked her by putting a live snake in a cadaver she was dissecting. This probably made said fears worse.
  • Stargate Universe had these in "Time," repeatedly popping out of the away team's bodies after burrowing in to eat their juicy insides. They got better.
• A variation on this in War of the Worlds (1988) where the alien joins with a human host through the chest, melds perfectly with the body, and when it wishes to leave the host it's arm bursts through the chest to touch the skin of a new host to repeat the process.
• Ultraman Dyna has an alien parasite called a Cyclometra in one episode, who operates by infecting kaiju-sized foes, infecting the monster Grossyna early in the episode. Ultraman Dyna manages to destroy Grossyna, only for Cyclometra to burst out of the chest, at which point Dyna vapourizes Cyclometra with a second shot before it can escape.
• Season 2 of Wolf Like Me opens with Mary (a Werewolf) having a Catapult Nightmare involving this trope, with her unborn baby tearing its way out of her womb and attacking the guests at her wedding.
• The X-Files: The episode "Firewalker" features a parasitic fungus that makes its victim burst open, spreading spores to surrounding people. All the scarier, since because this is an early episode, the concept exists in Real Life. Admittedly, it parasitizes ants, but...

Music

• The cover of the Megadeth album The World Needs a Hero has mascot Vic Rattlehead breaking out of frontman Dave Mustaine's chest.

Mythology

• Classical Mythology:
  • Good ol' Zeus has survived more than his fair share of this trope: first, when Athena sprang (fully formed and clad in armor) out of his head, and another time, when Dionysus was born out of his leg (though in this case Zeus had actually stitched him up in there beforehand).
  • There were also the flying serpents. They give birth to live young that all burst out of their mother at once, killing her.

Tabletop Games

• Be very afraid if your GM for the BattleTech RPG Mechwarrior decides to bring in some of the various wildlife that inhabits the setting. The crana is essentially a giant isopod partaking of this trope, thanks to its spike-like claws, paralytic venom, blood sucking feeding methods, and their tendency to lay eggs in victims that require highly advanced medical care to remove. Oh, and they're immune to poison and never appear alone or in small numbers, so the only way to handle a crana swarm without being overrun is lots of fire.
• In Deadlands, Prairie Ticks are giant ticks which somehow have mouthpieces too weak to penetrate skin. So, they crawl down a person's mouth into their stomach to suck blood from their softer innards. And seeing as how the basic tick is about the size of a fist and, like a normal tick, they expand to 200 times their original size, when they detach and crawl back out, it usually kills the host.
• The wrap rule for whenever a character in Die Laughing is killed by "Bloodthirsty Bunnies" requires this to happen to the unfortunate player, requiring one character to make a Spirit Check in response.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • One breed of slaadi has eggsacks in its claws and can implant an egg through a successful claw attack. The new slaad then grows inside the victim, eventually eating its way out.
  • Carrion crawlers lay their eggs inside other creatures, though they kill the creatures immediately prior to doing so. Typically, they paralyze their victims a couple days before laying eggs, and kill them right before the laying so the corpses will provide a reasonably fresh meal for their spawn.
  • One prestige class called the Blood Magus has, as its most powerful ability, the power to teleport between the locations of any two living beings, with the option to deal damage to the destination creature. Guess how?
  • The Ixtl-expy xill and an obscure creature called a gryph have a similar modus operandi.
  • Neogi are spacefaring spider-eels whose method of reproduction involves laying eggs in older members of their species neogi called Great Old Masters. Said masters exist in constant rage and pain until they start spitting neogi spawn, which eat their way out of the thing's body.
  • Forgotten Realms: The phaerimms reproduce like some wasps. They paralyze the target with a sting, then inject an egg.
• In Hc Svnt Dracones, Whispers can liquefy and "dive" into a potential host; seconds later, either the host explodes and two Whispers emerge, or the host simply explodes.
• The board game Nemesis, in the footsteps of its main inspiration, has a mechanic where characters can get infected with an alien larva that kills the character instantly upon hatching.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Early-edition rules allow genestealers (think Xenomorphs minus the acid blood) to implant eggs into models in close combat. A young genestealer could hatch from the model on later turns, presumably Alien's style. This rule was later incorporated into a different Tyranid, the Hero Unit called the Parasite of Mortex, after the nature of the genestealers was tweaked.
  • The Barbed Strangler weapon, in early rules, instantly kills the target due to a seed pod instantly growing into a sentient mutated vine cluster from inside the body and scything through people nearby.
  • The wasp-like psychneuein reproduce by implanting their eggs directly within the minds of intelligent creatures, preferably psykers. On hatching, the larva feeds on its victim's mind and brain until it's grow, at which point it tears its way free and pupates into an adult.

Theatre

• In The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged), Eve (played by a hand puppet) emerges from Adam's ribs in this this manner.

Video Games

• The facehuggers in Alien: Resurrection implant the player character with these, just like in the films, and you have only a short time to find an Auto Doc before they hatch.
• Hearteater, one of several of those bosses from Baten Kaitos Origins, has an attack called Ovulate that shoots an ally with a bunch of needles and starts a countdown. If you don't cure it before it hits zero a bunch of worm larvae violently erupt from the character and deliver a One-Hit KO.
• Broforce, as an '80s action movie homage, naturally features Xenomorph Xeroxes as enemies. No points for guessing what happens to you if a facehugger latches on your face.
• In Conker's Bad Fur Day, Heinrich bursts out of the Panther King's chest in the final.
• One of the two endings of Covetous ends this way, with the parasitic twin emerging from its brother's stomach, killing him.
• One of Q-Bee's EX Special Attacks in the Darkstalkers series has her sting the enemy and encase them in a cocoon, whereupon she dies (she's a bee, after all) and another Q-Bee bursts out of the victim's back and continues the fight.
• Devil Survivor has the boss battle with Belzaboul and his maggot minions, who spawn eggs in your party members and their demons. It's implied that this trope is at work when an egg hatches, because not only does a squad of maggots spawn next to the victim, the victim takes massive damage.
• Don't Escape: The third game has the mysterious crystal being capable of doing this if it infects a human being's insides, eventually growing too large to contain.
• Elona features a hostile alien that bursts out of a character's chest, as a homage to Alien.
• Eternal Darkness: Bonethieves have a disgusting habit of forcing themselves into the body of a victim and using it as a cheap suit to attack the bearers of the Tome of Eternal Darkness. When the host bodies have taken enough damage, the Bonethief will blow its way out in a shower of gore, greatly damaging your Sanity and proceeding to attack you. It kills you, it gets a new host. Maximillian's ravings and paranoid fear of the Bonethieves are quite justified in-game, as it's revealed that at least one of the servants he slaughtered was indeed a Bonethief host.
• Hollow Knight: The Gruz Mother is a giant version of the fly-like Gruzzer enemies fought early in the Forgotten Crossroads. When she's defeated, her chest ripples a few times before bursting open to reveal eight newborn Gruzzers.
• Jurassic Park: The Game: This is how the Troodon reproduce. Note that there is absolutely no evidence for this happening in real life.
• Kabuki Z: One of the bosses, the Dragon Warrior, hides the soul of two kunoichi inside himself. After you defeat the warrior, he then collapses, before his back starts moving with the motion of something about to burst out. And then two kunoichi jumps out of his dead body (who deflates away) and you fight them as a Dual Boss.
• Mortal Kombat X: The Xenomorph brings alongside a Ovomorph which can result in a brutality involving the Chestburster appearing out of the opponent. Even if you don't do a fatality, the Xenomorph can still kill opponents in its outro by having a Chestburster emerge.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil 2: Either Ben or Chief Irons gets one of these from the mutated William Birkin. Canonically speaking, it winds up being Irons.
  • Resident Evil 6: The Rasklapanje, a creature similar to the Regeneradors from Resident Evil 4. They infect others by drilling a hole into the victim's face and planting a parasite, which, in seconds, bursts out from the victim's chest, fully-grown.
• Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge: Don't get kissed by the Xenomorph-lookalike, or it will impregnate Roger with one of these, hatching out of him near the end of the game.
• Splatterhouse:
  • Parodied in Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, the NES-only Super-Deformed sequel. At one point Rick encounters an unconscious Ki on an operating table: suddenly, her belly inflates and bursts, releasing lots and lots of little spiders. When Rick kills all of the spiders, Ki wakes up, being perfectly fine, and goes away!
  • In the first level of Splatterhouse 2, a boreworm enemy ejects itself from a zombie's chest in this fashion, effectually re-killing it.
• StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm: In one mission Kerrigan implants a Zerg larva into a Protoss prisoner then allows her ship to "rescue" her. Once it's on board the larva bursts out of her chest and starts sneaking around the ship infesting and bursting out of several lab animals until it accumulates enough biomass to mutate into a Brood Mother.
• Zuul reproduction in Sword of the Stars can result in this. They are marsupials, and the mothers' milk is a potent narcotic. As long as the mother is alive and produces milk, her children are in dreamland inside her pouch. If she dies, or becomes unable to produce milk... She becomes their first meal. More commonly (and less fatally to the Zuul), the Zuul mother removes the children from the pouch and leaves them near a suitable source of meat.
• A taunt in Team Fortress 2 does exactly this, and it's aptly named "Burstchester". The merc's reactions to the alien coming out of their chest vary, from the Medic being fascinated by it, to Soldier trying to strangle it.
• X-COM:
  • Chryssalids. First, they inject you with an egg, which zombifies you and makes you attack other humans. Once zombie you has been killed, or the Chryssalid inside you matures enough, your entire body splits open, revealing a Chryssalid. The only way to prevent this is to kill the zombies with fire.
  • Tentuculats in X-COM: Terror from the Deep work the same way, except they're flying brain squids, but worse.

Visual Novels

• In Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, Monophanie suffers this fate as Monokuma secretly activates something inside of her stomach when Gonta was getting executed. A giant killer wasp rips her stomach apart, slices Monotaro in half and skewers Gonta. Monokuma took pleasure in all of this while this left Keebo horrified and upset.
• Fate/stay night: In Heaven's Feel, True Assassin comes to being by "eating" Assassin from inside.

Webcomics

• The Bikini Bottom Horror: This happens to Mr. Krabs after being force-fed a raw Krabby Patty.
• This Cyanide and Happiness strip is a rather odd example — instead of a woman bursting out of a cake, a cake bursts out of a woman's stomach.
• Homestuck used this to parody Alien in conjunction with Pokémon.
• Cromax of The Perry Bible Fellowship, an alien working at an Earth fast food restaurant, apparently infects the food with his larvae, which proceed to burst out of unwitting customers' insides. Cromax's punishment? He's fired.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal uses this combined with Lethal Harmless Powers and Precious Puppies. Turns out that the ability to make puppies appear out of anywhere includes making them "appear" out of human bodies.
• Aylee from Sluggy Freelance. Not surprising, given the fact that she was introduced as a parody of the alien from Alien. And then later parodied in a... rather interesting way. Let's just say Bun-bun is quite badass.
• Unsounded: Weaponized in mechanical form in Beadman's Better Mousetraps, which look appetizing to rodents but burst out in an insectoid, bladed form once they've been in a warm body long enough.
• The World is Flat depicts this here. Apparently, dating an astronaut carries the risk of having an alien intestinal parasite chest-burst all over your dining table.

Web Original

• One asdfmovie skit has someone apparently deliberately cause a monster to pop out of his chest as a subversion of the Squirting Flower Gag.
• In the Burgrr.com Terms and Conditions ARG, eating Burgrr's food causes the eater to serve as an incubator for the Brainflies, which then go on to be processed and sold to another dimension.
• In DEATH BATTLE!, this is how Ant-Man kills The Atom. After Hank destroys Ray's Bio-belt and takes him to the Overspace, a bunch of ants start growing and bursting out of the latter in rather graphic detail.
• In one Happy Tree Friends Easter short, Toothy gets this treatment after the eggs he swallows turn out to contain little chicks. Cue them popping out of his stomach, and no worse for wear.
• In The Lazer Collection, Doctor Octogonapus does this once somehow when he bursts out of some superhero.
• In Mortasheen, this is the creature Depraven's main attack. It is apparently hermaphroditic, as it has twin stingers, one which injects a "spermatomoeba" and the other an "egg-spore". The Depraven dies shortly after stinging its victim, while the resulting embryos rapidly mature and peck their way out.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-150 ("The Prosthetic Parasite"). After SCP-150 has removed all of a human victim's limbs, it will infect the victim's torso. The torso will swell up and large numbers of SCP-150 larvae will emerge, killing the victim.
  • SCP-371 ("Macrovirus"). After SCP-371 infects a victim with its genetic material, new SCP-371 specimens are created inside the victim's abdominal cavity. Once the specimens grow to a length of 20 centimeters they burst out of the victim's body, causing severe trauma (including internal injuries, serious bleeding and death).
  • SCP-632 ("Intrusive Thoughts About The Many Spiders Forming Inside Your Head"). After the baby SCP-632 inside the victim's brain have grown large enough, the victim will repeatedly hit their forehead with great force to relieve the pain. When the victim's forehead shatters, the baby SCP-632 will leave the skull through the hole.
  • SCP-695 ("Eels"). After SCP-695 eggs have grown to juvenile size inside a female human host, they may escape by erupting through the wall of her abdomen.
  • SCP-751 ("Organ Eater"). After eating its victim's internal organs and increasing in size, SCP-751 swells up and causes the victim's skin to stretch and burst, releasing it from the body.
  • SCP-834 ("Marked"). A researcher used a SCP-834 marker to drew reptilian scales on their chest. Six months later their internal organs were converted into a reptile-like monster and burst out of their chest.
  • SCP-845 ("Liquid Polecat"). If SCP-845 is swallowed while in liquid form, it will change back into its animal form in the victim's stomach and burrow its way out of the victim's body through the abdomen.
  • SCP-867 ("Blood Spruce"). After an SCP-867 seed is injected into a living creature's body, it grows throughout the creature's circulatory system, eventually killing it. SCP-867 then bursts out of the victim's body and grows to full size, consuming the body as it does so.
  • SCP-1003 ("Tapeworm Child"). A subspecies of tapeworm that after infecting a human develops into a humanoid fetus with razor-sharp teeth that then devours the host from within until finally bursting from their abdomen. They then grow into seemingly normal humans, except have tapeworm DNA and secrete eggs through their bodily fluids.
  • SCP-1092 ("A Species of Fish"). After SCP-1092 inside a mammal's body grow to adult size, they bite their way through blood vessels and the skin and expel themselves from the body.
  • SCP-1294 ("The Laughing Fox"). After SCP-1294 mates with a normal female fennel fox, the fungus will grow inside the fox and eventually burst out of its chest. Once outside it will assume the standard shape of a SCP-1294.
  • SCP-1325 ("Easter Frog"). When the SCP-1325 growing inside the victim's stomach are large enough they release an emetic toxin that causes the victim to throw up, expelling the SCP-1325 out the victim's mouth. This has a 25% chance of rupturing the victim's esophagus (Boerhaave's syndrome). The chance is higher if the victim is elderly or a child.
  • SCP-1407 ("DJ's Headphones"). SCP-1407 creates more instances of itself inside a human body, such as in the stomach, head and intestines. When enough are created the internal pressure will cause them to be expelled from the body through its orifices or through the skin.
  • SCP-1429 ("Organoid Organisms"). When SCP-1429 infects a human body it settles into a specific randomly chosen organ, grows to large size and exits the body, sometimes through the victim's skin.
  • SCP-3963 ("I Contain Multitudes") is a pendant that, when touched, teleports the current subject to an oversized version of the previous subject's spleen or brain or whatever, while a miniaturized demon is teleported into one of the current subject's organs. When the pendant is accidentally broken, the first person to touch SCP-3963 (a Mayan nobleman) appears, only to die when a female researcher bursts out of his chest. Then her male colleague's corpse bursts out of her stomach, killing her. Then all the succeeding subjects burst out nesting-doll-style, right down to the demon.

Western Animation

• Ace Ventura:
  • In the crossover episode with The Mask, Ace thinks that an alien is inside him, but it turns out that Spike is in his clothes.
  • In the "Halloween Special", Ace does this with Spike and scares a high school principal.
• Parodied in an episode of The Amazing World of Gumball which has a squirrel do this to one of the LEGO-style construction workers. The guy then points out that it only burst through his shirt, but he is still freaked out about it.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: The Cold Opening to the episode "Super Bowl" has Steve bursting out of Dr. Weird's chest for unknown reasons.
• In the As Told by Ginger episode "Hello Stranger", Lois has a nightmare where a snake bursts out of her stomach.
• Bread Winners: This happens to Buhduece three times in the episode "Space Ducks". The bursters include Swaysway (who snuck onto the spaceship), Jelly (who Swaysway brought with him), and an actual Xenomorph.
• Parodied in the Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation: L.I.C.E.", in which a giant lice parasite bursts though Numbah Five's hat.
• Parodied in Family Guy. A video about talking about gay people has a scene in which a gay man is syringed by a doctor — he suddenly spouts acid blood, and a full grown Xenomorph bursts out of him, attacking the doctor.
• Parodied twice in the Gravity Falls episode "Summerween". Firstly, Grunkle Stan tries to pull one of these in his attempt to scare some snarky Trick or Treaters, but it turns out unsuccessful; the fact that he uses a cute and cuddly pig might have something to do with that. Later on, Soos eats his way out of the Summerween Trickster and comes out in a similar fashion.
• In the first episode of Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi after Ami and Yumi get to the moon to ditch their Number 1 fan, she ends up bursting out of the front of Yumi's shirt.
• Robot Chicken: A sketch based on The Jetsons has Elroy adopting a Facehugger, resulting in a chest buster eventually coming out of him. At the end, a second chest burster emerges from Astro's ass, to which Jane quips "You know that's scary exactly once."
  Elroy: Ranger slept on my face all night, and when I woke up, he was dead. It makes me so sad, I feel like my heart is gonna rip out of my— [painfully clutches his chest]
  George: Wow, you really are sad.
• The title characters of Sanjay and Craig fake this as a distraction to sneak into a hospital, with Craig (a snake) bursting out of Sanjay's shirt.
• The Simpsons:
  • Parodied in the "Itchy & Scratchy" segment in "Deep Space Homer", with Itchy bursting through Scratchy's stomach.
  • In "Homer the Father", Bart has an Imagine Spot of being branded a traitor after selling nuclear secrets to China for a dirt bike, and a bald eagle comes flying out of his chest.

Real Life

• The Real Life scientific term for a creature that reproduces by implanting eggs or young within the bodies of other species, with the offspring then feeding on and killing its host, is a parasitoid. It should be noted, though, that most parasitoids are external and just feed off a host that's been paralyzed by the parent.
• Several insects reproduce in this way, planting their eggs inside another arthropod.
  • Some species of wasps have a special larvae that acts as a Puppeteer Parasite, turning the empty husk of the caterpillar into a zombie-like Meat Puppet guardian.
  • Spider wasps paralyze one or more spiders with their sting and store them in a safe place. Before closing the entrance, the wasp lays an egg on or inside the victim. Once it hatches, the larva feeds on the paralyzed spider(s). Through this process, the spider is still alive while being eaten alive from the inside out; not only that, but the larva avoids killing the spider^note by eating the vital organs last, if you're curious as long as possible to keep it from decomposing.
    • Some kinds of wasps don't permanently paralyze the spider and just lay an egg. After the spider recovers from the sting, it goes about its business until the egg hatches and the larva begins to feed. The larva becomes a Puppeteer Parasite, so the spider ignores it until the larva is ready to become a pupa. It makes the spider build a special web to protect it before finishing it off.
    • Ceropales and Irenangelus wasps are notable for not catching their own prey. Instead, they will follow another wasp that caught a spider and lay its own egg on it. Their egg hatches very quickly, so the larva will eat the first wasp's egg or larva and then the spider.
  • The wasp Dinocampus coccinellae plants its eggs into ladybugs. Amazingly, after the larva bursts out of it and becomes a cocoon, the ladybug often survives.
  • The wasp Cotesia glomerata plants its eggs into white cabbage caterpillar. However, after the many larva burst out of it and become cocoons, they are vulnerable to being attacked by the wasps Lysibia nana and Gelis agilis, which lay an egg inside the pupa which will eventually burst out of it fully grown. Gelis agilis also sometimes lay eggs inside Dinocampus coccinellae pupa.
  • According to some stories, Charles Darwin was so horrified by finding out about the habits of parasitoid wasps that it destroyed his faith in a benevolent God.
  • Spider wasps aren't the only that use spiders as hosts. Some worms enter the spider's interior — without bothering to paralyze them — and feast on their innards (castrating them in the process by eating the reproductive organs). Not content with this, the spider often becomes controlled by the nematode going close to a source of water before the parasite leaves its host. Needless to say, the poor spider usually dies just before or after the worm bursts out.
  • Jewel wasps use the bodies of cockroaches as nests for their eggs, which is accomplished by stinging the roach twice: first to paralyze it, then again with surgical precision in the roach's brain to halt dopamine production, turning the roach into a mindless zombie. Once the roach is sufficiently incapacitated (and after a quick pick-me-up snack on the roach's blood after tearing off one of its antennas), the wasp leads the roach to its burrow, implants the eggs, then closes the burrow up to keep the roach in and potential predators out. Over the course of approximately a week, the eggs hatch, the young feast upon the roach's innards, and ultimately emerge from its husk fully matured.
  • In general, there seems to be a wasp that specializes in doing this for nearly every species of spider or insect. The Methocha wasp attacks tiger beetle larva and one kind of Chalid wasp attacks antlion larva.
  • Phorid flies breed by using ants as hosts for their young. The flies lay eggs in the ants, and when the larvae hatch, they slowly make their way toward the ant's head to "zombify" them. The horrifying part comes from the larva emitting a chemical that causes the ant's head to fall clean off, and eventually a full-grown phorid fly bursts out of the ant's disembodied head. One species of phorid fly that favors fire ants has been deliberately imported to the United States, where the ants are an invasive species.
  • Tachinid flies, similar to parasitic wasps, tend to lay an egg or give birth to live young that burrow into a certain insect and eat it from the inside out before bursting out of it.
  • Acroceridae flies lay a lot of eggs, often near a spider web or burrow. When they hatch, the maggots will actively hunt down spiders to burrow inside them and eat them before bursting out.
• Scabies mites burrow into your skin and lay eggs which hatch to produce more mites that lay more eggs, and so on and so forth. They also periodically fall off and get all over everything, spreading them to everyone who dares to set foot anywhere you've been.
• Horsehair worms infect grasshoppers and praying mantises while young, then influence their host to go to the water when they are ready to rip through its chest and begin their free-living existence.
• While not nearly as violent as some of the other examples, the Human Bot Fly certainly qualifies. As do a few other parasites that use human hosts. They follow mosquitoes and lay eggs in the bites, which then develop there for a few weeks before wriggling their way free and metamorphosing into flies. There is a story about a man who became attached to his little bot fly. He decided to "carry it to term," so to speak, instead of having it removed. Then it started tearing its way slowly out and he said, "Get this thing outta me!" Leaving the thing in is actually often the better option, as killing it is likely to cause the wound to be infected unless the entire maggot can be removed (while alive it secretes antibiotics that keep the wound clean). On another note, a biologist who was implanted with several bot flies on a trip to Central America was inspired to start studying the human microbiome by the experience. The mouse botfly plays the trope a little straighter. Its a lot like the human bot fly except it lives over a much greater range and is MUCH bigger in proportion to its host. Wile they prefer to live between the skin and muscle, they often get big enough that their anchoring spines tear holes that expose their poor hosts organs. If this happens, the cavities they leave upon erupting will indeed give the mouse a lethal infection.
• An urban legend speaks of a woman who went vacationing in South America and came back with what appeared to be a boil on her cheek. When the boil was lanced, it was revealed that a spider had laid its eggs in her cheek, and hundreds of newly-hatched spiders crawl out of the wound and across her face. Thankfully, no species of spider lays eggs in people. This was the basis for one of the stories in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
• Viruses do this on a cellular level, injecting their genetic material and hijacking the cell's internal mechanisms to make more viruses. This will usually end in the host cell's lysis, allowing the new viruses to spread to other cells and repeat the process, though enveloped viruses simply bud out of the host without killing it, keeping it alive for further replication. In multicellular organisms this appears as disease on the macroscopic level.
• There is a type of fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which possesses ants and controls them so it can make them crawl into a good spot to grow and reproduce in. After it forces the ant to go into a suitable spot it uses the sugars in the the ants body to live on and eventually leaves the ant as a husk. It will then grow out of the ant's body, ripping it open. Several ant species have developed counter-measures to this by observing ants with unusual behavior and quickly guiding them far away so that the doomed ant won't infect the whole hive. It's quite efficient too.
• When a female Surinam toad lays eggs, the male fertilizes them and presses them into his mate's back. The eggs form pockets under the skin, and when they hatch, the tadpoles develop into mature frogs in these pockets. Eventually, the frogs burst from their mother's back. (WARNING: Not for the faint of heart.) Despite this, her body is evolved to allow this, and she's completely unharmed.
• Tasmanian devils have been known to burrow inside large carcasses while feeding and sleep inside them for some time before eating more, although that's less reminiscent of Alien and more reminiscent of that scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo stuffs Luke inside a dead Tauntaun for warmth.
• The most common creature capable of pulling off this trope in the developed world is the ordinary house fly, but fortunately such an event would actually be a good thing. Flies typically lay their eggs in rotting meat, and the larvae proceed to devour the whole thing. If a living creature is so badly injured that they have a gaping wound, and if human are unable to get to medical attention, but are still able to survive for an extended period of time, the flesh at the edges of the wound will almost immediately start to rot. Flies will become attracted to this and lay their eggs, however the larvae cannot consume living flesh. As a result, they end up doing you a huge favor by eating dead flesh before it can finish rotting and become infected with dangerous bacteria, thus extending your remaining lifespan drastically. In that time, you can hopefully find help so that the wound can be properly treated. This type of parasitic action is how two women survived a plane crash that left them injured and stranded in the middle of the South American rainforests, as without the fly larvae nibbling away at skin that started to rot, their wounds would have been infected by the many, many nasty microbes that lie in the soil and waterways of the area. Another man had a disfiguring facial tumor devoured by maggots, which dropped off into his sink in front of his horrified nurse. Doctors, especially army doctors in times of war, have occasionally actively infested necrotic wounds with maggots, a practice that has become known as maggot debridement therapy. In recent years some hospitals and clinics have taken it up, since a bunch of tiny maggots can clean a wound with more precision than a human can.
• In November 2020, a photographer in Maryland spotted a heron that had swallowed a live snake eel... only for the eel to burst out of the heron's stomach and try to escape. While the eel did not, in fact, manage to get out and return to the water in time, it's probably safe to assume the heron didn't make it either.

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