10 Sci-Fi Monster Movies That Owe Everything To Alien

The movie was a brilliant blend of genres. It proves that sci-fi can still offer the best horror available, and few movies have done it as well as this first movie in a franchise that is still successful, more than four decades later. Alien is also a movie that has influenced several movies that came later. The film shows that pure horror genres could be transplanted into a science fiction setting and still deliver a terrifying tale while never once betraying the sci-fi roots.

There are also several movies that homage Alien and its monster design, which itself was influenced by Lovecraft. While few movies were able to do it as well as Alien and its action-packed sequel, Aliens (by James Cameron), many sci-fi horror movies with monsters owe their entire existence to this fascinating and horrific world. These movies include deep cuts and giant blockbusters, all growing from the seeds that Ridley Scott planted in 1979.

Predator (1987)

Not only does Predator owe its existence to Alien, but it ended up intertwined with the monster movies as they appeared together in two mash-up movies. Directed by John McTiernan, Predator stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dutch, a man leading a paramilitary rescue team into Central America, where they end up battling an alien from another world who landed on Earth with the intention of hunting the best prey.

The creature (played by Kevin Peter Hall) was designed by Stan Winston, and it remains one of the most iconic movie monsters alongside the Xenomorphs. Predator and Alien were both Fox franchises, a shared ownership that later birthed Alien vs. Predator. Both movies center on a relentless extraterrestrial hunter picking off a tough, wisecracking team with body-horror kills.

Pitch Black (2000)

In 2000, Vin Diesel started a new franchise where he played an antihero named Riddick and went to battle with unstoppable alien monsters. Directed by David Twohy, the film follows Riddick, a man who had a procedure done that allows him to see in the pitch black, and when he is arrested and his prison transport craft crashes on an unknown planet, the survivors are targeted by alien monsters who come out when the planet goes into pitch black at night.

The plot seems very similar to Alien, but with the survivors on a planet rather than trapped on a ship in space. However, when a spaceship crashes, stranding a small mixed group of survivors and one dangerous prisoner, who are hunted one by one by an alien species in an enclosed, lethal environment, it is clearly a direct riff on Alien's survival-horror template. Like Scott's film, the creatures are largely kept off-screen, only glimpsed, heard, and felt, until they jump out at the scariest moments.

Cloverfield (2008)

Directed by Matt Reeves, written by Drew Goddard, and produced by J.J. Abrams, Cloverfield is a found-footage monster movie following several young New Yorkers fleeing a giant creature. While this is different since it is a found-footage horror movie above all else, it does have sci-fi elements, since this is an alien attacking people in New York City.

The movie delivers body-horror beats in the Alien chest-burster tradition. This also has the survivors being picked off in confined spaces, such as a subway tunnel and a collapsing building, bringing terror that is not unlike what Alien did in a smaller, more cramped space. Also, like Alien, the film withholds a full, clear view of its monster for most of the runtime.

A Quiet Place (2018)

Directed by John Krasinski, A Quiet Place stars Krasinski and his real wife, Emily Blunt, as parents who have to protect their children during an alien invasion on Earth where the murderous creatures are blind but hunt using a keen sense of hearing. The blind creatures (Death Angels) hunt purely by sound. The family survives by living in near-total silence, using ASL to communicate. Designed by special effects supervisor Scott Farrar, the final look drew on prehistoric fish and mummified bog people.

Just like in Alien, a small group of people in a confined area is stalked by a nearly unstoppable creature, forced into silence and stealth. The Alien tagline was In space, no one can hear you scream." In A Quiet Place, this is the literal means of survival, as screaming would lead to immediate death.

Life (2017)

Life is a movie that is highly influenced by Alien, as both movies take the characters into space and have them encounter an alien lifeform on their ship. Directed by Daniel Espinosa, Life features a six-member crew on the International Space Station who discover and revive a single-cell Martian organism, named Calvin by schoolchildren, that rapidly evolves into an intelligent, lethal predator.

The entire movie is a copy of what Alien did so many years earlier. The film sticks closely to the Alien playbook. This includes the intimately acquainted, flatly characterized crew, as well as the scenes of chaos, panic, and overlapping dialogue. The creature also grows from a microscopic cell into an ever-larger threat, echoing Alien's facehugger-to-adult-xenomorph growth. ​It is almost like the filmmakers watched Alien multiple times before making their movie.

District 9 (2009)

District 9 almost got director Neill Blomkamp a chance to direct the next Alien movie after its great success, but that will always remain a "what if?" situation as it never came to pass. This movie shows an alien spacecraft arriving over Earth with malnourished aliens looking for asylum, and then being placed in a sort of concentration camp in Johannesburg, South Africa, where they live in poverty.

Sharlto Copley plays a bureaucrat named Wikus van de Merwe, who is tasked with relocating the stranded aliens from the slums, but then he finds himself starting to change as these aliens look to find a way to get their autonomy back. The documentary style that Blomkamp uses makes the extraterrestrial feel tangible and lived-in, the same working-class sci-fi texture that made Alien's universe feel real.

Species (1995)

Species is a 1995 sci-fi horror movie about a predatory alien who arrives on Earth. Directed by Roger Donaldson, Species stars Natasha Henstridge as Sil, a seductive alien-human hybrid that scientists and agents are hunting down before she has a chance to mate with a human male. Sil's alien form was designed by H.R. Giger, the artist who created the Alien Xenomorph, making this the most literal creative successor.

The alien is a lot more sexy than horrific for much of the movie, but when she attacks someone and attempts to assimilate them, it becomes more of a tale of body horror. Giger actually revealed several Alien homages to the creature's design,from a chestburster-style birth to a punching, barbed tongue, a cocoon, and the use of flamethrowers against the creature.

Slither (2006)

Before James Gunn began making superhero movies, he worked in the realm of horror and one of his best horror releases was Slither in 2006. This was Gunn's directorial debut, and it features a small South Carolina town that is overrun by a malevolent alien parasite. There are some intense moments of body horror here, especially concerning the alien parasites taking over the body of Michael Rooker's character and mutating him into a grotesque monster.

The core horror moments, including the parasite that invades and bursts out of human hosts and spawns grotesque mutations, descend directly from Alien's violation-of-the-body terror, executed with heavy practical effects work. Gunn said his main inspirations were films like Shivers, The Brood, Night of the Creeps, and The Thing, but this is the same universe that Alien lived in, a true lineage from the Scott horror movie.

Deep Rising (1998)

Written and directed by Stephen Sommers (The Mummy), Deep Rising stars Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, and Anthony Heald as three people on a luxury ocean liner (the Argonautica) that is attacked by a giant tentacled sea creature while mercenaries and a thief are aboard. This is a darkly humorous Alien homage movie that has tough men and women fighting an unknown monster under deadly pressure.

The tentacled monster was designed by Rob Bottin, the effects legend behind John Carpenter's The Thing. In the movie, the beast picks off characters in the confined, flooding corridors of the ship, which is itself Alien's haunted-house-in-space structure moved onto the water. While a box office bomb, it remains a cult classic with true genre appeal.

Leviathan (1989)

Directed by George P. Cosmatos, Leviathan is another movie that owes its existence to Alien, while also taking the horror in space idea to the ocean, which also allows little chance to escape. The film features an impressive cast, which includes Peter Weller (RoboCop), Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters), and Daniel Stern (Home Alone), playing part of a deep-sea mining crew stalked by a mutant creature.

The creature was designed by Stan Winston, the score was by Jerry Goldsmith, and the production designer was Ron Cobb. All three of these key craftspeople worked on the Alien franchise, and brought their talents to fill out the world of this ocean sci-fi horror movie. The plot is the same as well, with an isolated, blue-collar crew trapped in a confined facility and picked off one by one by a mutating creature, Alien's premise transplanted to the ocean floor.