The Alien franchise has garnered a reputation for having some seriously nightmarish moments, mostly revolving around the animalistic and sexual horrors its alien antagonist unleashes on its unsuspecting victims.
- Alien (1979)
- Aliens
- Alien³
- Alien Resurrection
- Prometheus
- Alien: Covenant
- Alien: Romulus
- Alien: Earth
- Alien: Isolation
- Aliens: Colonial Marines
- Aliens: Dark Descent
- Alien vs. Predator
- Alien 40th Anniversary Shorts
- Aliens vs. Avengers
Franchise
- The thought of extraterrestrial beings that invade your body, through another being that technically rapes you, then burst out of your chest when you least expect it.
- For some reason the Aliens never managed to stick with a specific sound effect for their squeals and screeches throughout the movies, but the voices they've had over the years have always been unnerving and their screams in the second movie were arguably the scariest and most well known. For context, there's a shot during the hive attack where we see Hicks shooting something off-screen, and a Xenomorph lets out a human-like squeal. Listen here.
Tellingly, their vocals in the second have been reused for most of their video game appearances and the second AvP movie.- Then there's the haunting wailing screech that the Queen Xenomorph can give. One part cursing, one part lamenting, and all parts make-your-spine-shudder.
- The first movie had the Alien let out a scream that sounds very much like a monstrous baby when it scares Ripley near the end.
- In-universe, Ellen Ripley herself... before and after she was cloned. Feared by both Aliens and some humans. Yep, you heard that right. Even the xenomorphs are afraid of this one human. It goes further in the AvP EU, with even Predators respecting and fearing her.
- Here's a fun fact for your dreams: the Xenomorphs will never be stopped. No matter how many you take down with power loaders or nuke from orbit (the only way to be sure), they're going to crop up on some other planet and start it all over again. You can thank both the Predators and the various humans greedy/stupid/mind-controlled enough to help the Xenomorphs spread and survive.
- The menus for the Alien Anthology Blu-ray disc set are quite eerie. To elaborate, they are framed as being a computer terminal that displays footage from the films along with information on key points from them. This is all accompanied by the eerie humming of the Nostromo's computer from the first film, which renders the menus a very creepy, clinical feel.
- The menu for the 4K remaster of the original film continues the trend, featuring panning shots of the empty halls of the Nostromo accompanied by the very desolate wind sections of Jerry Goldsmith's score, occasionally broken by static and footage of the screaming victims of the Alien before ending on the snarling beast itself in a Jump Scare.
Expanded Universe
- In the comic/novel Aliens: Labyrinth, a critical piece of backstory involves the story's Mad Scientist. When he was younger, he and his fellow colony members were captured by a colony of xenomorphs that was dying due to some sort of disease. Trapped in the hive, he only managed to survive by deliberately working with the aliens to nourish and care for the other captives. Among the horrors he sees is a former female friend of his who has had facehuggers implant her womb, causing her to swell up in an obscene parody of pregnancy before she is torn apart by three grotesque half-developed adult xenomorphs, still linked to her by umbilical cables. Eventually, he finds the source of the disease and uses it to poison the colony, but the colony tries to use him to breed with a female captive to create new hosts. He's presented with a woman who has had her limbs gnawed off and cauterized, driven quite insensible by her abuse at the hands of the xenomorphs. The woman is his mother. Driven mad by the realization, he gives her a Mercy Kill. For this, the queen has him implanted with the last surviving facehugger. When he wakes, he finds the plague has finished destroying the colony and the chestburster inside of him is stillborn. Then he has to escape from the hive and perform surgery on himself, without anesthetic to remove the embryo before it decays inside of him and gives him fatal blood poisoning. It's no wonder he's gone absolutely insane!
- The early Aliens comics provide a truly horrific explanation for why humans constantly grab the Idiot Ball when it comes to looking for the Aliens and bringing them back to Earth. It's all part of the plan, orchestrated by the Queen Mother on the homeworld to propagate her species by using a whole planet. It's hard to decide which is the scarier part:
- That the Queen Mother becomes the subject of her own maternal feelings, to the point of begging for a Facehugger.
- That the humans, in essence, are the Sci-fi equivalent to Sex Slaves.
- That the psychic signal is spread by a madman who sees the Aliens as gods.
- That this is all simply part of the Aliens' life cycle and has no malice at the core.
- That it's clear that this entire process has been played out on other planets before and will continue to play out until every Alien is dead... which is going to be very hard considering that the Predators have spread them throughout the galaxy, if not the universe, as yet another prey species of theirs.
- The 2019 stage play adds a level of The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You, as the first proper appearance of the grown alien has it roar from behind the audience and then crawl down the aisle, with only its back spines visible to anyone not in an aisle seat. Sigourney Weaver herself stated that the show scared her, and she was constantly on the lookout for where it might be.