Basic Trope: An nasty parasite leaves the body in a nasty way.
- Straight: The alien erupts from Bob's chest.
- Exaggerated: Bob explodes, leaving a brood of aliens squirming amid the gore.
- Downplayed: The alien slices a small hole in Bob's chest from the inside, then oozes out with minimal damage.
- Justified:
- The alien was going to make a less messy Orifice Evacuation, but then something in Bob's body made it leave in a hurry.
- The creature is too large to get out using any non-lethal route.
- Inverted:
- An alien burrows into Bob's chest to make its home.
- Bob is eaten whole by an alien and bursts out of the alien's chest.
- Bob has a symbiotic relationship with the creature(s) living in his chest. He gives them a home and food, they basically function as a Lovecraftian Superpower.
- Subverted: After having an alien embryo placed inside him, Bob clutches his chest and screams in agony, but he's just having a heart attack.
- Double Subverted: Bob's heart attack turns out to be the result of the alien living inside him. *burst*
- Parodied: Bob's chest has a door inexplicably built in, and the alien parasite leaves in a very civil manner. Then the parasite suffers a Chest Burster.
- Zig Zagged: An alien bursts out of Bob's chest, he successfully kills it and patches up the wound, and another alien bursts out of his chest a while later.
- Averted: The aliens in this story are not parasitic.
- Enforced: "We need to make our aliens more terrifying. Let's have them burst out of their victims!"
- Lampshaded: "Why do they always come out of the chest?"
- Invoked: A Mad Scientist breds chestibursticus horriblis as a terror-inducing bioweapon.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied:
- Anyone discovered to be harboring an alien parasite is promptly killed and burned.
- Alternatively everyone in an area even remotely suspected to harbor one is dosed with a drug that kills the eggs if they get into their system.
- Discussed: "If one of those beasties stings you, it's really laying eggs. So hold on to your ribs".
- Conversed: "The aliens are chestbursters? Gross!"
- Deconstructed:
- The aliens purposely burst out of peoples' chests as a form of psychological warfare...
- Bob is really a Worm That Walks made of a colony of snake-like aliens, he's doing this to attack without revealing himself, or because he's in trouble and ejecting a single Worm is the only way he can escape without raising suspicion.
- Reconstructed: ...but it turns out the aliens need to burst out of something to survive in the outside world (much like a butterfly breaks out of its chrysalis to stimulate its wing muscles).
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Chest Burster
