"What also counts here is execution. Cameron accepted Scott's (and, of course, H. R. Giger's) design ethic — gloop, scaly bits, loadsa teeth and long, dark, dingy, dripping corridors — but reinterpreted them as a battleground rather than a haunted house. The point he grasped straight away is that you can't win against this foe or the stigma, the sheer terror that this endomorph engenders would be lost. You can only escape. He replaced Scott's "behind-you" tension with a muscular fury, unrelenting, sweaty-palmed, pant-filling movie intensity. Nothing before or since has locked the viewer in with such an all-consuming sense of peril (audiences and critics actually complained of physical discomfort even illness upon exiting the auditorium)."