Face Hugger

Give us a kiss!

"I hate these aliens, they're so scary! Luckily, I can't see them! Something's covering my eyes but I can't quite figure out what it is!"

"Ewww! Talk about sucking face!"

— MAD parody of Alien: Resurrection

Advertisement:

The Face Hugger, as the name implies, is a creature that preys on other species, usually humans, by attaching itself to their face. What it does to you from there depends on the creature and how it operates. Some take over your body or mind in some fashion. Some drain you of blood or Life Energy. Some eat your brains. Some transform you in horrific fashion. And some will give you a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong.

In pretty much every case, this is Nightmare Fuel owing to our Primal Fear of Orifice Invasion. See also Personal Space Invader. A creature that does this is frequently the larval form of a Xenomorph Xerox.

---

Advertisement:

Examples:

Comic Books

• The mind-control starfish of Starro the Conqueror in The DCU.

Fan Works

• In the Slash Fic parody ALIEN!!! the facehugger is a lesbian cyborg who wraps her legs around the heroine's face.

Film

• The Trope Namer and Trope Maker (if not Ur-Example) is the crab-like impregnator from the Alien films - shown in the picture above from the first film. Many later examples are homages.

Advertisement:

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • The dreamcrabs in "Last Christmas" attach themselves to their victims' faces and slowly eat their brains, while trapping them in dreams. One of the crew even lampshades the situation as being right out of Alien, which is justified with The Reveal that one of them was actually watching the movie when the dreamcrabs put them into the dream.
    The Doctor: There's a horror movie called Alien? That's really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.
  • In "Revolution of the Daleks", Jack Harkness is planting explosives to blow up a building full of cloned Dalek mutants, when one of them crawls from its tank and leaps onto his face. Fortunately he's able to wrench it off.
• The giant spiders contained in the Box of Gavrok in Buffy the Vampire Slayer attach themselves to people's faces before killing them.
• The Mandalorian: Played for laughs when the Child is tucking into a bowl of chowder whereupon a small squid-like creature bursts from the bowl and latches onto his face.
  Mando: (sternly) Don't play with your food. (Pokes the squid with his knife, and the squid falls back into the bowl)

Tabletop Games

• The Face Sucker in Munchkin.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Facebiter squigs bite... faces. The orks naturally find this hilarious, and often get in contests to see which will bite the other's face off first. The actual Xenomorph stand-ins use an ovipositor to perform the Orifice Invasion instead.
  • The Tyranids have a variant species of Ripper called a Cortex Leech. They leap onto a person's face then use a variety of pointed tendrils to penetrate the mouths, eyes, nose, ears, or any other available orifice and drive them into the brain, where they can then hijack the motor functions and turn them into drooling thralls to the Hive Mind.
  • The Catachan Face Eater. On a planet with the ultimate reputation for Everything Trying to Kill You, this creature is probably the most feared predator.

Toys

• Krana and Krana-Kal of BIONICLE.
  • The Toa Inika possessed a benevolent version of these - unlike normal Toa, their Kanohi masks were organic, living creatures. Unlike the very similar Krana, however, their only interest was helping the Toa, mainly by teaching them how to properly use their powers. Although, their primary method of doing so was giving them nasty headaches whenever they did something wrong. There's also The Skull Spiders from the 2015 reboot.

Video Games

• Alien vs. Predator (Capcom): Face Huggers will attempt to grab on and drain health away. Smash the buttons to get them off.
• The Bone Leeches of Blood II: The Chosen play with this in a way. They cover up your view but actually burrow into your chest using their tail.
• Don't Starve: The Slurpers. They take up the head slot of the character's inventory, dropping whatever is there. When attached, they provide light and slowly drain the character's hunger.
• Duke Nukem 3D: The Protozoid Slimer, who provides Interface Screw while jumping at Duke's face.
• Metroids, although more often than not they latch onto the whole head.
• Headcrabs from the Half-Life saga.
• Brainsuckers from X-COM: Apocalypse, which are used as ammunition by certain aliens in addition to appearing on their own. Replacing a person's brain is their entire purpose; They don't even have a digestive system.
• The Protozoid Slimers from Duke Nukem 3D.
• The Lifters and Diamond Claws from the Descent series behave similarly. While most of the other robots shoot at you, these enemies ram into your ship and inflict damage with their reinforced claws. The E-Bandits use a similar point-blank attack, only they drain your ship's energy instead of your shields.
• Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy: The Aura Beasts come of nowhere and wrap around Nick's face. Oh, and the only way to see them coming is using the psi draining Aura Vision.
• Space Quest:
  • In Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, at Fester Blatz's World O' Wonders on Phleebhut, the postcard for Achoron shows a face hugger hugging somebody's face.
  • In Space Quest V: The Next Mutation, Spike, the acid-squirting face hugger, later dubbed Spikette, spawns lots of little face huggers. The manual shows the design team being inspired by an Alien face hugger model.
  • In Space Quest VI: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier, when examining the ship in shuttle bay, the narrator claims the ship is "probably carrying a half-dozen miniature face-hugging saliva-dripping face-eating exo-skeletal alien piranha things."

Web Animation

• Sonic for Hire: In Season 5, Sonic and Tails are sent by General Pepper to terminate aliens. Tails is attacked by multiple face huggers, then finds ALF hatching the eggs before killing him.

Web Comics

• In The Cyantian Chronicles: Campus Safari, Chrome's miniwhip Aurla does a good impression of one. (Played for laughs)
• Cross Time Cafe: Sam Starfall pulls one of these off in an early strip. Hortmage finds it irritating and, maybe, disgusting.
• Edward's monster in Monster Pulse. It helps that it's actually his face.
• In Zero Percent Discount, a Banana Peel turns into a facehugger.
• In Savestate, Rick is subjected to this by Ness, much to his irritation and, apparently, Nicole's amusement.

Western Animation

• G.I. Joe: The Movie: Pythona and Nemesis Enforcer use something like this. The former on a few Crimson Guards, and the latter on Sgt. Slaughter when rescuing Falcon from Serpentor while infiltrating the Terror Drome during an "extra rough training exercise".
• Rick and Morty:
  • The primary focus of "Promortyus", and spoofed with The Glorzo. It's discussed how they don't have much technological development for a sapient species because they blindly kill their hosts laying eggs. Summer convinces them to hold off on doing that so they can advance their technology, reverse engineering that of all the ships which crashland onto their asteroid.
  • In an advertisement for Alien: Covenant, Rick and Morty head to a space cruiser after intercepting a distress call. Moments after arriving, Rick is attacked by a face-hugger that immediately dies as a result of the drugs and alcohol Rick had in his stomach.
• In Wreck-It Ralph, Ralph finds his medal but accidentally hatches a Cy-Bug egg by stepping on it and the baby bug attacks Ralph by the face, sending him on an escape shuttle that blasts them to Sugar Rush.

Real Life

• Penicillidia are a wingless fly that latches onto a bat's faces to drink their blood, and never let go except to lay a single larvae on the cave walls.

---