![]() ![]() The “Mars Attacks!” Martians are abjectly offputting in their apperance, with that, uh, exposed brain situation going on. Tim Burton brings a zany, noto-for-everyone, B-movie touch to this colorfully crafted Ed Wood knockoff-turned-cult classic, featuring a star-studded cast with Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Pierce Brosnan, Jack Black, Sarah Jessica Parker, Danny DeVito, and more. Image Credit: ©Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection But a certain toddler sucked out of a certain dog door also comes to mind. Yes, it’s mostly flashing lights and silhouettes of little alien dudes. Still, the legendary director’s beautifully rendered 1977 alien drama - starring “Jaws” actor Richard Dreyfuss as a man who witnesses a UFO - is intensely immersive, and includes some particularly scary scenes for younger viewers. Spoiler alert: Steven Spielberg’s alien visitation classic isn’t ultimately scary in context, instead telling a peaceful tale of exploration. Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) But it’s also a bleakly realistic consideration of what could plausibly happen should aliens make themselves known to our historically volatile species: one that tragically flips the script and seriously consider Earth as a threat to the universe. It’s a hamfisted (hamclawed?) metaphor for Apartheid, yes. Humans are the real monsters in “District 9,” director Neill Blomkamp’s sobering sci-fi imagining of crustraceous aliens rounded up and placed in rundown encampments in the filmmaker’s home country of South Africa. Image Credit: ©Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection To keep things interesting, two restrictions apply: (1) only one movie per franchise and (2) it’s the remake or original. Ranging from the disturbingly goofy (“Bad Taste,” “Slither,” “Mars Attacks!”) to the menacingly mean (“Alien,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “Nope”), here are the 25 scariest alien movies ever made. Along the way, these filmmakers have made salient points about human nature, questioning what we owe to one another in the face of certain doom. Night Shyamalan, James Gunn, and Jordan Peele are among the Hollywood heavyweights who have set their twisted imaginations to actually creating these encounters for the big screen. John Carpenter, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, M. But the fourth kind: there is nothing more frightening than the fourth. The second kind is when you see evidence of it: crop circles or radiation. An encounter of the first kind, that’s when you see a UFO. 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.ĭirector 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. 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. ![]() 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. Aliens are never far from the pop culture hive mind.
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