There's just something about diminutive
monsters that go for the feet first. From the undead Gage in "Pet
Sematary" to the tiny creatures from "The Gate," they all strike
a chord of terror in us that is so primal that it makes us pull up
our feet and sit on them while we watch the movie.
Here's my list of the top 13 scariest tiny terrors in horror films.
13. Ghoulies
"Ghoulies" is a campy horror film in which demonic tiny terrors are summoned during a magic ritual. I'll warn you, the acting is pretty bad, but the monsters make it worth it.
12. Critters
"Critters" is about a monstrous alien species that lands on Earth and proceeds to terrorize a family living in rural American. This was one of those horror movies that I saw when I was a little kid that scared the bejeezus out of me. There's just something about unstoppable eating machines that are nothing but teeth and stomachs that is just creepy. I guess that's why people don't like sharks.
11. Subspecies
"Subspecies" is a cult classic by Full Moon Entertainment. It's about an evil vampire who sends out his little minions, or ghouls, to kidnap people for him to eat, or seduce and then turn into other vampires. Either way, vampire Radu Vladislas won't stop until he gets his girl. The little creatures in this movie don't speak, but their presence is so important that they became the iconic monsters of the series.
10. The Gate
"The Gate" uses the premise that playing a record backwards will allow you to hear the band speaking Satan rituals. In this case, it opens a gateway to hell, and little demons soon crawl out of it and invade a kid's home.
This is one of those classic 80s horror films that actually had child actors playing the part of kids. I know, it's crazy, isn't it?
9. Gremlins
Three simple rules, and yet, Billy Pelzer can't manage to follow a single one of them. "Gremlins" is quite possibly the best movie that Joe Dante has ever directed. It is a horror comedy that manages to be equally scary and funny at the same time, and it has a Mogwai in it, so you know that it has to be good.
8. The Hand (1981)
"The Hand" is both a tiny terror film and a psychological horror film all wrapped up into one neat package. Is Jon Landsdale losing his mind, or has his severed hand become a reanimated, unstoppable killing machine?
"The Hand" was directed by Oliver Stone and stars Michael Caine. It is based on "The Lizard's Tail" by Marc Brandell and is about a comic book artist who loses his hand in a terrible car accident. The hand takes on a life of its own, and soon begins to terrorize the people that are making Jon's life a living hell.
7. Cat's Eye (1985)
"Cat's Eye" is an anthology based on the stories of Stephen King. In this horror movie, the tiny terror is an evil troll.
The last story of the anthology, "General" is named after the main character, which happens to be a cat. The evil troll wants to suck out the soul of General's owner, a little girl played by Drew Berrymore.
6. Aliens
"Aliens" is one of my favorite Sci-Fi horror films. While it does have a large adult sized alien at the end, there's a good number of scenes in it that star the FACE HUGGER skittering around and wreaking havok. Because it's so creepy to me, I have included it in this list.
The tiny terror of "Aliens" is the face hugger.
5. Puppet Master
"Puppet Master" features killer puppets that have been animated by dark magic. They are attempting to get revenge for the death of their creator, Toulon. When a group of psychics meets up in a hotel where the puppets were hidden, all hell breaks loose as the puppets start to kill them off, one by one.
4. Pet Sematary
Quite possibly the most depressing and terrifying movie I have ever seen, "Pet Sematary" has one of the most memorable tiny terrors in film history. The Creeds move into a new home, and soon learn that an ancient Indian burial ground lies behind their property. When tragedy strikes the family, they soon learn of the burial ground's evil powers. Remember, sometimes, dead is better.
"Pet Sematary" has two tiny terrors in it, the resurrected cat Church, and the evil undead Gage.
3. Child's Play
"Child's Play" is about a killer who uses a voodoo spell to send his soul into the body of a toy. When Charles Lee Ray finds a gullible kid to help him, he goes on a killing spree and attempts to transfer his soul to a living, breathing body.
Chucky is the epitome of creepy dolls. This movie came out when electronic talking toys like Teddy Ruxpin were popular. Chucky became the icon of nightmarish children's toys, and remains as one of the scariest tiny terrors in horror films to date.
2. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" was one of the most underrated horror films of 2010. It features tiny evil fairies that are trying to kidnap a young girl and turn her into one of them.
Sally is sent by her mother to go live with her father when he purchases a large mansion that he intends to fix up and sell in order to make money. She soon finds that she is not alone in the house, and that the little people that live in the walls of the home aren't as friendly as they appear to be.
These faeries are the stuff of nightmares.
1. Trilogy of Terror
"Trilogy of Terror" has one of the scariest tiny terrors ever to appear on film, the Zuni Fetish Warrior doll. The third story of the anthology "Amelia" features Karen Black as a woman who receives a strange gift in the mail and unknowingly unleashes a monster in her apartment.
There are a lot of ghost movies in the world, and like ghosts themselves, some are good, some are bad, and some are downright terrifying. The good ghost movies avoid cliches and get right into the suspense and horror of being haunted by the vengeful dead.
Here's my list of the top 13 scariest ghost movies. Enjoy!
13. The Devil's Backbone (2001)
"What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber."
1939, near the end of the three year Spanish Civil War, The right-wing Nationalists are about to defeat the left-wing Republican forces. Carlos, son of a Republican war hero is dropped off by his tutor at an orphanage that is far away from civilization, where an undetonated bomb sits ominously in the courtyard. The orphanage is run by a strict headmistress Carmen, the kind Professor Casares, and the brutal, sociopathic caretaker Jacinto who hides a terrible secret that the ghost of Santi, the boy who disappeared when the bomb fell, is desperate to share with the living in an effort to stop Jacinto from getting away with murder.
This cinematic masterpiece by Guillermo Del Toro is a wonderfully scary ghost movie that is both an allegory for the Spanish Civil War, and a terrific fairy tale all wrapped up in one.
12. The Dark (2005)
Sarah and her mother have not been getting along. Her mother thinks that a trip to visit her father in Wales will be just the thing to fix their strained relationship. But she's dead wrong.
While taking a stroll along the cliffs near the sea, they come across a memorial with a missing plate, with the word Annwyn (pronounced ah-noon) written on it. Annwyn is the Welsh afterlife, and is represented by the water.
Soon afterward, Sarah vanishes while walking along the beach and is replaced with a girl named Ebrill- the dead daughter of a local shepherd and the town pastor, who died tragically when her father, desperate to save her, gave her to the sea where she was swept away to Annwyn. In an effort to get her back by exchanging a life for a life, he convinces his followers to throw themselves over the cliffs to enter Paradise.
Ebrill did come back, but something returned with her, something evil. Soon the sheep began throwing themselves off the cliff and into the waters.
When Adele and Sarah visit James, the sheep begin to once again throw themselves off the cliff, an ominous sign that the evil that Ebrill brought with her into the land of the living has returned.
This little known ghost movie has an interesting folk-lore premise and some very creepy scenes that you have to see to believe. It is based on the book "Sheep" by Simon Maginn.
11. Fragile
Jaume Balagueró's "Fragile" is about Amy Nicholls, an American Nurse, who gets a job at the dilapidated English children's hospital, Mercy Falls, to help transfer the last eight patients to a new hospital prior to the building being shut down for good. Soon after she starts working there, Amy learns that there is a malevolent spirit, called "The Mechanical Girl", a ghost wearing orthopedic braces that is attacking the children and breaking their bones.
This ghost movie has a tense atmosphere, and a strong female protagonist who will do anything to protect her young charges. It covers the themes of loneliness, and the bonding that occurs between nurses and children when they are patients in a hospital and suffering from an incurable, often painful, disease. Unfortunately, some nurses become too attached to their wards, and will do anything to keep them in the hospital.
The paranormal elements, and the mystery behind the Mechanical Girl is well done and creates an eery amount of suspense and dread that many other ghost movies fail to produce.
10. Shutter (2004)
After being involved in a hit-and-run accident, a photographer, Tun, starts to see white faces appear in his photos. It is soon clear that the ghost of the accident victim is haunting him, and she won't stop until she gets her revenge.
The original version of "Shutter" is a fantastic Thai horror movie that has a lot of really intense, scary moments that you have to see to believe. When the ghost appears in the apartment and begins to haunt Tun's girlfriend is when the movie really starts to get good.
9. The Orphanage (2007)
You may have noticed that this is the second movie with Guillermo del Toro's name on it that appears on my list of Top 13 Scariest Ghost Movies. There's a reason for that. He has a great talent for story telling and interweaving historical set pieces with heart breaking tragedies and his appreciation for horror movies shows in every work he undertakes.
In "The Orphanage," Laura and her husband Carlos have moved back in to her childhood home, which also happens to be an orphanage. She wants to turn it into a home for disabled children. While living there, her adopted son Simon makes a friend with a masked boy, Tomas, and starts playing a hiding game with him, where they hide other people's possessions and Simon has to find them in order to get his wish granted.
Unfortunately, Simon uncovers his adoption papers and learns that he is HIV-positive. Angry with his adopted mother for not telling him the truth about his past, or that he is deathly ill, he runs away and hides from her. Laura desperately searches for Simon, and encounters Tomas, whom she believes is a ghost.
After six months of searching, there are strange banging sounds in the home, and other instances of paranormal activity, which leads Laura to believe that the ghosts of children that died at the orphanage are responsible for her son's disappearance.
The interaction between Laura and the ghosts makes some really good scares, with my favorite being the one where she plays a hide-and-seek game with them.
8. Stir of Echoes (1999)
"Stir of Echoes" is based on a book of the same name by Richard Matheson, which I highly recommend by the way.
Tom is a normal guy living in a working class neighborhood in Chicago. One night at a party, his wife's sister Lisa, convinces him to let her hypnotize him. Tom doesn't believe in it, but ends up being hypnotized anyway. Lisa ordered him to become more open-minded, but instead of making him be less cynical and jaded, it actually opens his third eye and allows him to receive messages from the dead.
This movie is one of the most underrated movies from 1999. It was completely overshadowed by "The Sixth Sense," which pales in comparison.
"Stir of Echoes" is more of a slow burner, and involves a tormented man attempting to solve a murder and find the body of the dead girl that is haunting him and his son (who can also communicate with the dead). The slow build of tension and suspense allows the frightening conclusion of the movie to stick with you for quite some time. At least, I know that it did for me.
7. The St. Francisville Experiment (2000)
"The St. Francisville Experiment" came out one year after "The Blair Witch Project," and the found footage film's influence on the movie is hard to miss. It follows the same format of introducing the people involved in the ghost hunting experiment, laying down the folklore and local legends of what occurred in the mansion as a means to set up the foundation for the scares of the movie, and then proceeds to place the group of four strangers in a building over night; a formula for the boiler room plot device where some of the tension is caused by the fact that the people that are involved in the story cannot leave or run away from it.
In "The St. Francisville Experiment," ghosts of the slaves of the sadistic murderer, Delphine LaLaurie (an actual historical figure in New Orleans who has had her name slandered and has been branded as a serial killer according to local legends) haunt the LaLaurie house. A group of four people has been gathered to enter the house and spend the night. While there, they record everything that they experience, and it's soon clear that they are not alone, and that the ghosts are real.
Unfortunately for the ghost hunters, the vicious ghost of the house's mistress has remained behind, and has turned the tables on them, making the ghost hunters, the hunted.
This is one of those horror movies that are best when watched in the dark, when you are all alone and in the mood for a good scare. While there are some cheesy moments in the first half of the movie, once the action ramps up and the ghosts start to haunt them, it really gets good and spooky. Fans of "Grave Encounters" will especially like this ghost movie.
6. The Ring (2002)
Based on "Ringu" a book by Koji Suzuki, this ghost movie is about a cursed video tape. After you watch the tape, the phone rings. The voice on the other end says, "Seven days." After seven days, the vengeful hungry ghost of Samara comes for you and kills you.
The main character, Rachel, is a newspaper reporter. When her niece dies of fright, she begins investigating the circumstances surrounding her death and uncovers a cursed video tape. If she can't find a way to placate the ghost that killed her niece, she will soon be its next victim.
"The Ring" is one of those rare U.S. remakes that was actually better than the original film. In this case, it is a remake of the Japanese horror film, "Ringu." While some of the main plot points of the original movie have been dropped, the U.S. version added several layers to the myth of the Video Tape of Death, added character development to make us really care for the main character's young son, and overall created a well paced and scary ghost movie.
The movie was so good, that it brought J-horror into popular American culture, well, at least in many horror circles at any rate, and that's a good thing. While Americans generally don't scare as easily as the Japanese (or so I'm told), there are story elements from Japanese culture that are absolutely fascinating. The mixture of American and Japanese ghost stories has created a wonderfully terrifying movie.
Actually, "The Ring" has two scary movies in one, the first is the absolutely creepy cursed video tape that perpetuates the curse, and allows the ghost to kill more victims, and the second is a movie that is more fast paced and suspenseful ghost story than it's overseas counterpart.
5. Darkness (2002)
"Darkness" is a film directed by Jaume Balaguero, the co-director of [REC] and [REC] 2, and stars Anna Paquin in what I think is the best role I have ever seen her play.
The movie is about a teenage girl, Regina, who moves into a haunted house in Spain with her family. Her father suffers from mental breakdowns and periods of psychotic attacks, so when he first starts having problems it is thought that the stress of moving into a new home is the cause of it.
Regina's little brother Paul, suddenly becomes terrified of the dark, and claims that something is living under his bed. As her father slips further into insanity, her brother becomes more and more afraid. After observing the power outages in the home and her father and brother's behavior, she believes that the power outages and their problems are related. So she hunts down the architect of the house and learns that it was built for a dark magic ritual, and that the ghosts of the children that were killed there are roaming the halls while a dark presence is waiting to kill the last sacrificial victim.
4. Session 9 (2001)
"Session 9" is one of the best psychological horror films I have ever seen. On top of that, it is also one of the scariest ghost movies out there, which is why it is on this list.
I love ghost stories that take place in abandoned insane asylums. Between the atmosphere and the eerie backdrop of a dilapidated building that always seems to have at least one wheelchair left behind, they always manage to creep me out.
In "Session 9", Gordon Fleming and his hazmat removal crew are hired to take out the asbestos from the Danvers State Hospital, which was shut down in 1985. One member of Gordon's crew uncovers an evidence box in a tunnel beneath the hospital. Inside the box are nine tapes of therapy sessions with patient number 444, Mary Hobbes.
When Mike finds a working tape player, he starts to listen to the tapes, which slowly uncover the bizarre, twisted mind of a killer suffering from multiple personality disorder. As we learn about the personalities and what happened to Mary, the members of the cleaning crew begin to be killed off, one by one. But is it the ghost of Mary, or the evil entity that claims to possess her who calls himself Simon that is killing the men?
This low budget film more than makes up for its small pocket book with big scares and intense, spooky scenes that will leave on the edge of your seat, constantly looking behind you to make sure that something isn't standing right behind you, waiting to pounce.
3. Grave Encounters (2011)
Pouty-lips girl aside, "Grave Encounters" is one of those movies that actually earned the hype surrounding it. Really, it is. This found footage film features ghost hunters that were a part of a paranormal reality TV show called "Grave Encounters." The ill-fated sixth episode took place in the Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, which was shut down years ago, and is supposed to be haunted.
What was meant to be another installment in the series turned out to be the last episode the crew ever filmed. It starts out innocently enough, with the crew interviewing people about the hauntings and talking with the groundskeeper, who shows them a window that opens by itself every night.
They lock themselves inside the building over night to begin the paranormal investigation and capture everything on camera. One by one, the crew begins to disappear, and it's made apparent that the building is not just haunted, it's sentient and has become a labyrinthine maze of horror. The ghosts of former patients and the doctors that performed terrible experiments upon them, up to and including transorbital lobotomies, won't leave them alone. Trapped in a realm of forever night, where the pitch black darkness threatens to swallow them whole while they are relentlessly hunted and hounded by the tormented souls of the tortured dead at every turn.
What I really loved about this movie is that it wasn't predictable, and it borrowed ideas from "House of Leaves" and faerie abductions, where time has no meaning and dawn never comes to bring light to the world. The terrible fate of Lance Preston and his crew induces mind numbing horror in the viewer, and it reminded me a lot of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
2. The Changeling (1980)
"The Changeling" is based on true life events that author Russel Hunter claims to have experienced when he lived at the Henry Treat Roger Mansions in Denver, Colorado.
Composer John Russell is a grieving widow looking for solace. He moves into a secluded estate near Seattle Washington in an attempt to return to composing music and picking up the pieces of his broken life. It is soon clear that he is not alone, and the house is haunted by a violent ghost of a young boy who was murdered there years ago.
Some of the best ghost stories have settings that take on a personality and life of their own. Much like the hospital in "Grave Encounters," the Victorian house that Russell lives in has a looming presence. There are tense moments when you can practically hear the house breathing as the poor man attempts to uncover the mystery behind the ghostly apparition's origin.
The scares in this ghost movie are subtle and the tension builds up beautifully in this utterly terrifying ghost movie. Don't watch this one alone. I mean it.
1. Poltergeist (1982)
"Poltergeist" is about a middle class American family, the Freelings, who move into a haunted house. The dark malevolent forces are playful at first, but things take a bad turn once their youngest child, Carol Anne, is stolen and taken over to the other side; the Land of the Dead.
Diane and Steven Freeling have to confront the invisible forces that are manipulating objects in the home and becoming increasingly dangerous as they attempt to get their little girl back.
Once they contact parapsychologists from UC Irvine, they learn that it's not just one ghost inhabiting their house, but a whole slew of them, and they are being led by an evil presence called "The Beast," who is using Carol Anne to manipulate the other spirits and use them to its own gain. What exactly it means to accomplish is never truly revealed, but this doesn't matter.
All I know is, you shouldn't build a house on a cemetery that is still inhabited by interred corpses. It never ends well.
"Poltergeist" has to be the scariest PG movie ever made.
Never before has static on a television instilled so much horror.
Even at 30 years old, this horror film still manages to scare me. It's the clown man, that damned clown doll. Gets me every time.
There are alien movies that are strictly in the fuzzy, feel good Sci-Fi Star-Trekkie sickeningly sweet category and then there are alien movies that scare the living crap out of you because the aliens are ALIEN-- their actions motivations that drive them to kill, maim, consume, abduct and experiment upon our fragile flesh are inconceivable and incomprehensible to our logical, pattern seeking human minds.
For horror buffs that are xenophiles, it's the scary alien movies that matter.
So, here's my list of the top 13 scariest alien movies of all time.
13. Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998)
"Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County" aka "Alien Abduction: The McPherson Tape" is a made for TV movie based off the short film "The McPherson Tape" that appeared on the internet in the late 1990's. The movie aired on the now defunct TV channel UPN (United Paramount Network) in 1998. This controversial little film is thought by many to be real footage of an alien abduction.
When this first aired on TV it was called a mockumentary, a type of movie genre that is now called a found footage film. While it is a low budget movie, "Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County" more makes up for it with some very tense scenes that still make me cringe in fear and hold onto my cat like a little girl whenever I see it.
12. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Dr. Miles Bennell's patients are becoming paranoid, and more people are coming to his office, telling him that they believe that their family members or friends are impostors. Is this sweeping mass hysteria, or is something far more sinister actually replacing the townsfolk with duplicates?
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has been remade several times over the years, but the original is by far the best, with it's ability to create mind numbing paranoia in the viewer. In some ways, it's claustrophobic tone makes it the forefather to the classic alien invasion film "The Thing." This is the movie that invented the term Pod People- you know, the doppelganger copies of people that have all of their memories but just don't act quite right. Those Pod People.
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is a classic alien invasion movie and definitely a must see.
11. Signs (2002)
"Signs" is the only M. Night Shyamalan movie that I like. And it has a great soundtrack to boot.
"Signs" is several movies wrapped up into one-- it's a parable about a priest who lost his faith when his wife dies and manages to regain it, and it's about what happens to a small town in the middle of farm country when aliens invade.
Between the quirky (and at times hilariously funny) characters and the pulse pounding, nail biting climax where the aliens enter the Hess' homestead, this movie covers everything from aliens making mysterious crop circles as a form of communication, to UFO sightings and contact with mysterious alien invaders.
The filming style is breathtaking and clever with the alien's never quite fully coming into view until the very end. Which I just absolutely love, because it heightens the suspense and doesn't ruin the movie with terrible over-done CG.
10. Aliens (1986)
James Cameron's 1986 masterpiece "Aliens" is one of my favorite horror movies of all times.
What makes "Aliens" so great is that it takes the spooky atmosphere of a desolate planet wracked with storms and the panic inducing claustrophobic setting of the terraformer's colony to create one heck of a scary ride. Even better, "Aliens" started the whole concept of space marines in pop-culture, which has been the darling of Sci-Fi video games for many years now.
"Aliens" has a strong female lead character, Ellen Ripley, who manages to find her own place among ;a rag-tag crew of misfit marines and survive yet another encounter with the xenomorphs. This time, Ripley takes on the big momma of the aliens herself, the Queen.
9. Prince of Darkness (1987)
John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" is a gem of a Lovecraftian Horror film that covers everything from the nature of evil to the existence of alternate dimensions, atomic theory and theoretical physics.
After the last of an ancient secret order of Catholic priests dies, Father Loomis discovers that they had kept an ancient alien artifact locked up in the basement of an old abandoned church. Concerned with what he has found, he contacts Professor Birack and convinces him to bring some of his graduate students over to the church to investigate it. While staying at the church the students start sharing the same dream; a vision of the future and a dire warning of things to come.
During their investigations, the mysterious neon green protoplasmic substance that is swirling ominously in the artifact begins infecting and possessing them. It is soon revealed that the cylinder contains a dark slumbering alien god that has awoken and is going to bring about the end of the world.
While they may call the evil entity "Satan" or the "Anti-God," the themes present in this film are taken directly from pages of H.P. Lovecraft's stories. There are prophetic dreams of a looming disaster, mirrors used as portals to other dimensions and ancient alien artifacts that drive people mad and turns them into monstrous zombies that collapse into insects. The imagery in "Prince of Darkness" is so surreal and alien, if you haven't given John Carpenter's most under-rated horror movie a try, you certainly should.
8. Super 8 (2011)
"Super 8" is one of those kid's growing up over summer vacation movies that is sort of in the same vein of "Stand By Me" and "ET," except a lot darker. It's an alien invasion film full of action and suspense, and at the same time a movie about kids that are learning about life and each other. It's also the first movie in quite a while that I've seen that has actually had kids cast to play kids, as opposed to 20 year olds posing at high school students.
It's the summer of 1979 and a group of kids have gotten together to make their own zombie movie, called "The Case" on Super 8 film. While filming on location at a train station, they witness a train crash caused by their science teacher. Scattered all over the ground are weird white cubes, which later are revealed to be sections of an alien spacecraft. Unfortunately, the cubes weren't the only thing that escaped the train during the crash, and now a giant alien is out to recapture the parts of its spaceship in a desperate effort to return home.
The alien in "Super 8" is both menacing and sympathetic at the same time. All it wants to do is go home, but the evil government refuses to let it leave. This movie not only smartly deals with the movie being filmed within a movie motif, it also has characters that are well fleshed out and very believable. 7. Fire in the Sky (1993)
"Fire in the Sky" is based on a novel of the same name by Travis Walton.
Travis and his logger buddies are working in the forest, cutting trees to clear the area for development. One night while driving home from a long day of work, a strange fiery glow appears in the sky. Travis, compelled by the sight of it, steps out of the truck and is hit by a beam of bright white light. His friends, terrified, drive off, leaving him for dead.
They report the incident to the local authorities but no one believes them and they are suspected of murdering Travis and dumping his body in the woods.
Five days later, Travis appears at a gas station-- he is naked, deyhydrated and out of his mind with fear.
The flashbacks to Travis' alien abduction are pretty intense, and there is an awful eye-scare in one of the scenes that to this day makes me cringe.
6. Alien (1979)
The Nostromo, a commercial towing spaceship, is heading home to Earth with a nice haul of ore. The ship picks up an emergency transmission from a nearby planet, which causes the computer to wake up the crew and bring them out of stasis.
They land on the desolate planet and several crew members head out to investigate the signal. Before long they find themselves walking up to a long abandoned alien space ship with a chamber full of eggs. As they walk through the chamber, one of the eggs hatches and a face-hugger leaps out and attaches itself to crewman Kane, who passes out. Attempts to remove the face-hugger from Kane reveal that the creature has corrosive acid for blood. Yikes.
Soon, it's revealed that the face-hugger implanted an alien larvae into his chest- well, the alien actually reveals itself when it bursts through Kane's chest and kills him. The alien runs off, and the Nostromo crew is stuck fighting an alien creature without any real weaponry.
"Alien" is a brilliantly filmed Sci-Fi horror film that uses light and shadow to great effect to build up suspense and dread in the viewer while the xenomorph picks off the crew one by one.
5. Undead (2003)
"Undead" takes place in the Australian fishing village of Berkley. The sleepy village suffers a barrage of meteors that turn people into the hungry undead. A group of survivors is left to fend for themselves as the ravenous zombies attack them at every turn.
While "Undead" is a zombie movie at heart (and a pretty scary, yet hilarious, movie at that) it is, ultimately, an alien invasion movie. Yep. The aliens made the zombies. Way to go E.T.
This movie apparently recieved terrible reviews, but I think that it is a wonderfully campy gore fest that has both zombies and aliens in the same film. The characters are stereotypes, but the kick-ass fisherman steals the show, providing both John Wayne-like swagger and highly inventive weapons to two genres that are over-run with trite weapon cliches.
4. The Blob (1988)
Ah yes, "The Blob." Never before has strawberry jello been so terrifying.
This alien creature feature starts out with a meteor crashing near a small town in California. An old old hobo comes across the crash site and finds a strange smoking rocky sphere. The sphere cracks open and a thick pink slime engulfs his hand. Terrified, he runs for help and encounters three college students, who take him to the local hospital. Unfortunately, it's too late for the man and the pink slime grows over him and dissolves his body as it consumes him.
The giant amboa from hell then goes on a killing spree/eating binge as it begins to devour the entire town's enhabitants, growing larger with each person it consumes.
Walking Dead fans will find it interesting to learn that Frank Darabont co-wrote the screenplay for "The Blob" and that Jeffrey DeMunn (Dale) plays Sheriff Herb Geller in the movie. How about that? (Of course, now I have watch "The Blob" again so that I can spot DeMunn in action.)
3. Communion (1989)
"Communion" is based on a book of the same name by Whitley Strieber.
Whitley Strieber is played by Chrisopher Walken, whose family experiences run ins with aliens during their vacation in the woods. Whitley is abducted from the cabin by aliens and his life changes forever. Tramatized by the events, he goes to a psychiatrist and undergoes hypnotic regression where he has flash-backs of his abduction that are absolutely horrific.
"Communion" is one of the most trippy, and at the same time terrifying, alien movies I have ever seen.
2. Altered (2006)
"Altered" was directed by Eduardo Sanchez, the co-director of "The Blair Witch Project."
15 years ago, five teenage boys went on a hunting trip that they would never forget. While in the woods, the boys were abducted by aliens and became the subjects of cruel experiments that killed one of the boys.
Wyatt distanced himself from his friends and now lives in constant fear and paranoia away from civilization. Unfortunately for him, two of his friends have taken it upon themselves to hunt down the aliens that tortured them, and they've just caught one.
"Altered" is a suspenseful, scary horror movie that does well with a small budget. This movie is definately a sleeper hit that will one day be a cult classic.
1. The Thing (1982)
John Carpenter's "The Thing" is a remake of "The Thing From Another World" that was based on the novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell. And is a more faithful interpretation of the pulp fiction alien story than "The Thing From Another World."
"The Thing" is a movie that is just oozing paranoia and dread. Between the desolate Antarctic landscape, the eery minimalistic soundtrack, and the utterly alien Thing that transforms into creatures that Should Not Be, this movie is one of the best alien movies ever made.
Although it was filmed in 1982, "The Thing" has aged quite well, and the recent Blu-Ray release has brought new features on the Thing back to life. There are details on the monsters that were lost in the low resolution VHS and DVD versions of the movie (such as all of the eyes that open up on the Thing after it assimilates the dogs and becomes that towering monstrosity in the kennel. I didn't even know they were there until I saw it on Blu-Ray), and the new HD digitally remastered version of the movie on Blu-Ray reveals the monster in all it's unearthly glory. If you get a chance to watch "The Thing" on Blu-Ray, you really should.
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