Aliens are common creatures in science fiction films, but they also appear more often than you think in horror. And they’re not even the schlocky post-war b-movies from the 40s and 50s with giant ants or killer weeds either. It’s only fitting that some of the biggest, well-known horror movies feature creatures we have both admired and feared since the dawn of time. Alien movies are horror.
The thing is, the battle between aliens and humans over the Earth is parable to many issues we face in society today, meaning we don’t really think of them as horror in the first place — more often, they’re labeled sci-fi or “co-genre’d” with something else like action. In reality, we forget to look past what we’re being shown on screen and think of how we feel about these issues (both societal and alien). Deep down, we are scared. The base feeling is always fear.
What would you do if you were looking out into the night sky and saw a blinking light growing bigger and bigger before entering our atmosphere and landing somewhere in the distance? Shock and disbelief would probably come first, then wonder, then panic as you contemplate what this means for you and everyone else. Will we be given ultimate universal knowledge like those in the History channel’s Ancient Aliens, or will we be doomed to ultimate destruction like Cloverfield? There’s no way to know for sure — until it’s too late (The Twilight Zone’s “To Serve Man” would show us that).
While alien movies have been around since World War II (technically earlier, but they got a b-movie super-release in the 40s and 50s), these earlier ones were a bit one-noted and shallow. For example, the focus would be purely on the scariness of the alien (Target Earth) or have a plot where red-blooded Americans always prevailed over the invading creatures (It Came From Outer Space). While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it does leave something to be desired. There’s not much meat to the story; but I suppose that’s not the point of a b-movie. Later on, alien movies grew more robust with less happy endings, mirroring something closer to actual life.
With the recent technological advancements in space exploration and general shift of societal norms and thinking over time, it makes sense that our alien movies would grow both in size and concept. Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing have made aliens the prime suspects in taking over our bodies and minds. Nothing is sacred anymore, and you’re either blissfully unaware of what is happening to you or fully aware that you are not yourself anymore. Aliens can represent anything from mental illness to government overreach in how we live our daily lives; the latter is heavily alluded to in They Live, along with the capitalist-yet-communist concept of greed and power. Or perhaps the real threat is the idea of being taken, or ultimate destruction of all we know and love. The Fourth Kind, Dark Skies, and Fire in the Sky may hit a certain population more than most as they put real-life incidents (kidnapping, rape, police interrogation and victim disbelief) into the spotlight.
But aliens can also remain monstrous, as in Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Apollo 18. Because aliens are inherently not like us, there will always be an err of mystery surrounding them and their true intentions. Even religion isn’t safe, as Signs showed us aliens might just be our demons coming to collect on broken promises. The Alien franchise manages to go in all sorts of directions, hitting on many of these concepts at once.
No matter how you look at it, horror and extraterrestrials were made for each other. Aliens represent an endless stream of thought that instantly links our psyche to the movie — which is awesome because it could literally be a different feeling for everyone. Not only is this subgenre highlighting certain dark parts of our culture, it’s still terrifying us with astonishing monster design. There are an infinite amount of pairings you could make, from a squid-base that is after our atomic weaponry to a humanoid shapeshifter race with a mission to destroy all inferior planets. Everywhere you look, there is an alien waiting in the darkness, cleverly disguising itself as another genre but always instilling the most basic human instinct in us: fear.
What’s your favorite alien movie? Let us know in the comments!
