For millions of fans across the globe, Alien remains the first property people think of when they hear the words “sci-fi horror.” Seamlessly blending these two conflicting genres together, Ridley Scott’s Alien series helped set the standard for sci-fi-themed horror for the next 40 years. Influencing countless movies, TV shows, comic books, and video games, Alien’s larger impact on the world of pop culture speaks for itself, whether looking at tonal successors like Event Horizon and Annihilation or similarly-veined video games like Dead Space or Alien: Isolation.
To coincide with the franchise’s latest installment (Alien: Romulus), we thought we’d take a look back at some of the most iconic moments in the Alien series to date, each of which continues to captivate decades later.
Most dedicated Alien fans have taken an ambivalent view of the series’ recent prequel films, starting with Prometheus and continuing with its immediate sequel, Alien: Covenant. Yet even then, it’s hard to discount some of the critical achievements of Ridley Scott’s 2012 sci-fi horror film. Though it includes only a handful of connections tying the movie into the Alien universe, one of the movie’s best tie-ins can be spotted in Prometheus’s very final moments. As the camera pans back to the Engineer’s corpse on LV-223, viewers can only watch with rapt attention as the xenormorph’s ancestral precursor – the Deacon – claws out of the Engineer’s entrails, letting out a primal scream as the camera abruptly cuts to black.
Trapped inside the corridors of LV-426’s former colony, Ripley and her fellow survivors in Aliens desperately fend themselves off from the unending hordes of xenomorphs trying to break inside. Racing to seal their facility’s doors as the xenomorphs bear down on them, audiences watch helplessly as the aliens close in on Ripley and the Marines, one meter at a time. If that weren’t haunting enough, the scene somehow gets even more spine-tinglingly scary when Ripley glances up at the ceiling, leading to the horrifying realization that the only thing separating the aliens from their human prey is a few inches of thin metal and wire.
While Alien has perfected the art of claustrophobic horror, few scenes feel as chillingly isolated as Dallas’s descent into the air shaft. Hoping to lure the xenomorph into a trap and cut off its potential exits, Dallas’s anxiety-riddled game of cat and mouse with the rampaging alien is enough to send viewers’ heart rate through the roof, wondering aloud if – or more importantly when – the alien might appear.
As if the xenomorph weren’t a dangerous enough threat to deal with, the rapidly dwindling crew of the Nostromo are surprised to learn that they have an even more disturbing enemy amongst them when battling their android ally, Ash. Violently attacking Ripley and trying to suffocate her with a rolled up magazine, everything about Ash’s behavior in this sequence seems just as disturbing as the xenomorph (if not more so).
After getting a fleeting glimpse of the xenomorph shortly after its horrific birth, audiences are left avidly pining for a closer look at the monstrous creature following its escape aboard the Nostromo. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait very long before we’re allowed a more detailed appearance from the now fully-grown xenomorph. Descending behind Brett like a massive insect silently stalking its prey, everything about the adult xenomorph’s introduction is pure nightmare fuel through and through.
Aside from the chestburster scene in the original Alien, most people tend to cite Ripley’s hair-raising challenge to the Xenomorph Queen in Aliens as the second best moment in Alien history. Donning an industrial exosuit and stomping her way into the ship’s cargo area, you can’t help but feel like Ripley has finally figured out a way to match the physical might of her larger, far stronger extraterrestrial antagonist. Of course, the real icing on the cake comes with Sigourney Weaver’s biting delivery of “Get away from her, you b*tch!”, kicking off her brawl with the Queen in the best way imaginable.
It’s hard to think of a scene more universally tied to the Alien franchise than the famous chestburster sequence in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Just when all seems to have gotten back to normal aboard the Nostromo, the crew’s banter-filled meal is cut short by Kane’s violent convulsions, culminating in the infant xenomorph ripping through the hapless crewman’s chest in an explosion of blood and gore. As shocking now as it was back in 1979, it’s a scene that can only accurately be described as timeless, continuing to mentally scar entire generations of viewers from one decade to the next.
