The best space horror movies are so likely to make you scream that whether anyone can hear you or not will be the last of your worries.
Below you’ll find 10 of the best films ever to splice sci-fi settings with blood-curdling scares, a mix of lethal alien encounters, psychological terror, and some spectacularly gory visuals — it's particularly interesting to see how blood (acidic or otherwise) behaves when the gravity is switched off.
Not all of our selections are "Alien"-level classics — though Ridley Scott's seminal 1979 scare-fest has, of course, made the cut — but all of our best space horror movies are worthy of reappraisal. So, buckle up for this selection of extra-terrestrial terrors — to paraphrase the "Event Horizon" tagline, infinite space means infinite terror.
While you're in the mood for fear, you might want to check out our guides to the best sci-fi horror movies and the best space horror games.
10. Pandorum
- Release date: September 25, 2009
- Cast: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Cam Gigandet, Antje Traue
Despite being critically panned when it first landed, some B-movie aficionados now consider "Pandorum" to be an overlooked gem. While we wouldn’t go that far, it’s certainly a creepy ride.
Named after a (fictional) medical condition caused by spending too much time in deep space, it starts out as a two-hander as Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster's planetary colonists wake up with amnesia after a lengthy hypersleep. The premise is familiar — their derelict spaceship is filled with hostile creatures — but it also has more ambition than its reputation suggests. Indeed, the original "Pandorum" screenplay started out as a more contemplative "Solaris"-type movie until it was bolted on to a thriller script.
Although the writing isn't always A-list, "Pandorum" boasts more than enough thrills and solid twists. The grotty, lived-in production design is impressive, while it also features the underrated Antje Traue in a role that helped bring her to the attention of the casting directors on "Man of Steel".
9. Jason X
- Release date: April 26, 2002
- Cast: Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder, Chuck Campbell
Most of the horrors in this list are extra-terrestrial in origin, but Jason X's boogeyman is most definitely homegrown. It's Jason Vorhees! The same Jason Voorhees that spent the '80s and '90s terrorizing teens in his familiar hockey mask get-up. Thanks to some cryogenic shenanigans in the early 21st century, he wakes up in a distant future unprepared for his unique brand of machete-based mayhem. Indeed, you'll find yourself screaming, "Don't do it!" when a bunch of kids exploring the remains of Earth take the frozen Jason back to their spaceship.
While Jason X isn't going to win any prizes for originality or sophistication, it is a smart way to reinvent a franchise that had passed its sell-by date many years earlier. With the impossible-to-kill Jason now cyborgified, and some wonderfully inventive death scenes — 2000's "Final Destination" clearly made everybody else raise their game — it's unashamedly gruesome, schlocky fun. It also features a cameo from horror maestro David Cronenberg, who's since gone on to guest star as Dr. Kovich in "Star Trek: Discovery".
8. Life
- Release date: March 24, 2017
- Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada
Although "Life" is far from the most original film in this list, it's a sleek example of mainstream space horror with a truly killer ending. Besides, movies don't always need to break new ground to leave an impression.
In the near future, an unmanned Mars probe returns to the International Space Station, where its crew retrieves and analyzes samples from the red planet. It turns out there is life on Mars after all… and it probably killed every other organism there centuries ago. You can guess where the film goes next, but things get more creative than you'd think — though it's not, as many suggested at the time of its release, a "Venom" origin story.
The cast is stuffed full of A-listers — not all of whom survive as long as you'd think — while Hiroyuki Sanada proves he's a sucker for outer space punishment after his earlier appearance in "Sunshine".
7. Alien: Romulus
- Release date: August 16, 2024
- Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Isabela Merced, Archie Renaux
Yes, "Aliens" is arguably the best Xenomorph movie of them all — we even said as much in our Alien movies ranked guide — but technically it's not really horror. In fact, the real genius of James Cameron's sequel was reinventing the story as an extra-terrestrial action film, establishing a new genre of its own just as Ridley Scott had with space horror movies seven years earlier. So, while "Aliens" and all the subsequent sequels/prequels have included plenty of horror elements, 2024's "Alien: Romulus" is the franchise entry closest in spirit to the original movie.
Although at times it plays out like the greatest hits of "Alien" and "Aliens", director/co-writer Fede Álvarez ("Evil Dead", "Don't Breathe") has an undeniable instinct for delivering screen scares. Pitting a bunch of teens/20-somethings against Xenomorphs is an ingenious idea that echoes Earth-bound slashers like "Halloween" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street". Plus, "Romulus" features one of the saga's best synthetics, Andy, played by David Jonsson. It's just a shame that the magical "Prometheus" black goo rears its slimy head in the final act.
6. High Life
- Release date: April 12, 2019
- Cast: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth, André 3000
Don't let the combination of an outer-space setting and A-list "Twilight"/"The Batman"/"Mickey 17" star Robert Pattinson fool you, as French arthouse auteur Claire Denis's English-language debut is anything but mainstream. "High Life" is something of an outlier in our list of the best space horror movies, as, to be fair, it would be in any collection of films. Whether it works for you or not, it'll leave you with plenty to think about by the time the credits roll.
This movie follows a group of dangerous criminals considered expendable enough to be sent on a dangerous mission to extract alternative energy from a black hole. To make matters worse, a morally dubious doctor (played by Binoche) uses them as guinea pigs in her sinister artificial insemination experiments. It's weird, uncompromising, and bleak, but ultimately worth the effort.
5. Event Horizon
- Release date: August 15, 1997
- Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs
A critical and commercial flop back in 1997, "Event Horizon" has gone on to have a successful afterlife as a cult classic. Writer/director Paul W. S. Anderson (then hot property off the back of successful videogame adaptation "Mortal Kombat") envisioned the film as "'The Shining' in space", and it duly delivers the prequisite gore and diabolical horror.
An "Alien"-esque line-up of astronauts are sent on a mission to recover an experimental spacecraft — the eponymous Event Horizon — that has just reappeared near Neptune after going AWOL seven years earlier. It turns out the ship's black hole-powered propulsion system opened a rift in the space-time continuum, prompting many of the crew to descend into madness, and the ship itself to become possessed by something very nasty indeed.
The imagery is undeniably graphic, featuring eye gouging, vivisection, and some sexual violence, but the ingenious gothic production design allows you to believe that a futuristic spaceship has been transformed into a "Hellraiser"-inspired vision of Hell. There's also a strong cast who do a great job of selling the interplanetary nastiness.
4. Sunshine
- Release date: July 27, 2007
- Cast: Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans
"Trainspotting", "Slumdog Millionaire", and "28 Days Later" director Danny Boyle has spent his entire career refusing to be pigeon-holed, and his contribution to the best space horror movie genre is suitably unconventional.
In 2057, the Sun is dying and humanity's last hope is the group of astronauts who've been dispatched on the Icarus II spacecraft in an attempt to reignite it. As anyone who's ever watched a sci-fi movie will have guessed, this was never going to be a smooth mission. Indeed, with the team placed under unimaginable levels of stress, much of the horror stems from their gradual mental decline — especially when they start piecing together the mystery behind the fate of their predecessors on the doomed Icarus I.
With moments of philosophy and spirituality, "Sunshine" plays out as a thinking person's space horror movie until it slides into more conventional slasher territory in the final act. And, while the solar death the film portrays isn't particularly realistic (though TV physicist Professor Brian Cox did work as an advisor on the film), Boyle does smuggle a powerful climate change parable into the story.
3. Pitch Black
- Release date: February 18, 2000
- Cast: Vin Diesel, Radha Mitchell, Cole Hauser, Keith David
Before Vin Diesel started living his life a quarter-mile at a time in the "Fast & Furious" franchise, "Pitch Black" was the movie that propelled him towards Hollywood's A-list. Playing charismatic criminal Richard B. Riddick, he creates one of cinema's great antiheroes, an amoral convict whose motives are never entirely clear.
One thing that is certain, however, is that Riddick isn't the only one with skeletons hiding in the closet when the Hunter-Gratzner spacecraft crash-lands on a desert world. In fact, survival is touch and go, even before the ragtag assortment of castaways have a series of nasty close encounters with the planet's indigenous life — flying, shark-like creatures that only come out at night. To make matters worse, they've arrived at the one time every 22 years when a total solar eclipse plunges the planet into darkness. What could go wrong?
Writer/director David Twohy exploits his simple "stay out of the dark" premise for maximum scares, while making the most of a comparatively small budget — particularly when he uses Riddick's surgically enhanced night-vision (you never know who might sneak up on you in prison) to show what's going on. And, as Riddick emerges as the survivors' unlikely savior, a star is born before your eyes.
2. Solaris
- Release date: November 1972
- Cast: Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Jüri Järvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky
While you wouldn't necessarily expect to find this 1972 classic from the former Soviet Union listed under horror on a streaming service's nav screen, it definitely meets the relevant criteria. Because although the terrors facing scientist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) are all in the mind, the gradual unravelling of his psychological state is definitely the stuff of nightmares.
When Kelvin arrives on a space station orbiting the titular ocean planet, he finds one of the crew dead, others exhibiting strange behavior, and — most disconcerting of all — visions of his wife who died a decade earlier. There are echoes of "2001: A Space Odyssey" in Andrei Tarkovsky's intentionally cold adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel, even though the director said he was trying to avoid the "phoniness" of Kubrick's 1968 classic. It's a film that offers more questions than answers, and is all the more disconcerting for it. Steven Soderbergh's 2002 remake of "Solaris" (starring George Clooney) is slightly more accessible, though not quite as powerful.
1. Alien
- Release date: June 22, 1979
- Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, John Hurt
There was never any question, was there? "Alien" is the space horror movie that changed everything, a timeless classic that wrote the blueprint for every space horror movie that's followed — all the good ones, anyway...
The first of Ridley Scott's sci-fi gamechangers (the other is 1982's "Blade Runner") is a masterclass in delivering iconic scares, whether it's the visceral horror of the chestburster ruining John Hurt's dinner, or Captain Dallas going on a monster hunt through the Nostromo's air ducts. From the moment the ship investigates a derelict spacecraft on LV-426, it's clear that the seven-strong crew are in for a very bad day — the only question is how they'll die and when.
As with Steven Spielberg's similarly influential "Jaws", "Alien" is as much about what you can’t see as what you can; Scott uses sound, slime, and the ship's cat to up the fear factor. Of course, when you actually see the Xenomorph, the H. R. Giger creation turns out to be one of the most iconic in movie history, and a major reason why so many "Alien" movies (and now an Alien TV show) have followed.
