Basic Trope: A 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.
- The escaping Alien has a parasite inside it that shortly thereafter bursts out of it. And the parasite has a parasite.
- A dozen aliens burst out of a dozen people's chests.
- Downplayed:
- The alien slices a small hole in Bob's chest from the inside, then oozes out with minimal damage.
- Orifice Evacuation
- 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.
- Lifeworms are squicky but helpful reversal - they enter grievous wounds and act as a substitute for the missing flesh and blood to save their lives - giving up much of their body and possibly lives to save those in need.
- 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.
- The alien bursts out of Bob's chest...and performs a high-stepping musical number before leaving.
- 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.
- The alien was injected improperly by it's parent: If it was implanted..."properly", it would have been a mere pregnancy, as opposed to the intensely messy exit caused by this Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong
- 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!"
- The aliens are Intelligent Gerbil versions of Parasitoid Wasps.
- Lampshaded: "Why do they always come out of the chest?"
- Invoked: A Mad Scientist breds chestibursticus horriblis as a terror-inducing bioweapon.
- Exploited: Bob hugs his archnemisis to his chest after he's infected, knowing that the escaping creature will kill both him and his opponent.
- 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!"
- Implied: "How do they reproduce? Trust me You Do Not Want To Know."
- 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.
- The aliens know of the bad PR that would be caused by them bursting out of human chests, and instead settle for the alien equivalent of cows.
- The biology involved makes the idea very nonfeasible as a weapon. Anything slow is gross but not much of a threat. Anything fast growing runs out of available resources very quickly. At best it is very noticeable, kills the host in an hour and emerges near helpless from the corpse a week later.
- 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).
- Bob suffers form an Karmic Death at the hands of his species' native parasite: a fungus that bursts out of the worms that make up his body, killing them one by one by one...
- While most members of the alien species are decent folk, it's mentioned that the one attacking the crew is an Ax-Crazy serial rapist, and is deliberately seeking out humans to infect with it's seed.
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