[Editor’s note: this list was originally published in July 2022. It has since been updated with new entries to coincide with the release of “Alien: Romulus”] Aliens are never far from the pop culture hive mind . It makes sense that audiences would turn to the skies in the 21st century: a time of existential ennui that’s left many screaming for escape and wondering “What else?” But where the enduring nostalgia of “E.
T.” or the effortless charm of “Earth Girls Are Easy” might have made emotional contact in the past, a burning need to really feel something has festered. The scariest alien movies terrify in many of the same ways the scariest earth-bound horror movies do: building (and sometimes killing) likable characters; producing otherworldly visual displays with seriously grim implications; getting the jump scares, if applicable, timed just right; and daring to put the unimaginably terrible on screen.
Alien flicks further distinguish themselves through the subgenre’s unparalleled ability to explore the unknown, conjuring up heinous fates for humans so sweepingly sadistic few other films can attempt them. Director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s “The Fourth Kind” enumerates the taxonomy of human-alien interactions well: “They have different categories for these types of things, different levels. An encounter of the first kind, that’s when you see a UFO.
The second kind is when you see evidence of it: crop circles or radiation. The third kind is when you ma.