If there’s one thing that both Skyline – opening in theaters today – and the just-released trailer for Battle Los Angeles prove, it’s that alien invasions can be terrifying things. It shouldn’t be surprising – There’s something upsetting about both invasion/war stories and aliens in general, so putting the two together to get “We don’t know what they want, but we know it’s not good for us” is a potent combination.
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Alien invasion stories can pretty easily get divided into two sub-categories – “Aliens Among Us” and “Oh My God What Is That That Can’t Be Good It’s War” (Okay, there’s maybe a third sub-category, but I’ll get to that soon enough). The latter isn’t really scary as such – Normally, it’s more exciting because the threat is very visible and easy to address, especially if you’ve got lots of guns and/or bombs – and what fear there is is of a visceral “What if they have superior force?” flavor (Spoiler: They probably do, but there’ll be workarounds. See if Jeff Goldblum has a laptop or something) instead of the creeping dread of the former. But fear is in the eye of the beholder, and each of these five invasion tales below offers something that should chill you to the bone… or at least leave you wondering if there’s a scary draft coming from outer space.
Fringe
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Is it too weird to call Fringe an alien invasion story? Maybe, but that’s what it is, at heart – It’s just that the aliens in question (with alternative, superior, technology) happen to be humans, and from another Earth. We have met the enemy and they are us, almost exactly – and there’s something very disturbing about seeing where the road not taken would have left us (Especially when it involves a seeming flip of morality and nanotechnology being needed to keep us from dying).
The Day Of The Triffids
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Sure, the idea of giant killer alien plants is all fun and games now, but wait until someone gets their head bitten off because they’ve been blinded by meteors as part of a giant alien plant plan to destroy the human race and then see how funny it seems. What’s scariest about Triffids isn’t the invasion itself, it’s what happens before to incapacitate everyone before anyone knows that the invasion is underway. Harmless spectacle turns out to be almost 100% successful first strike.
The War Of The Worlds
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Admittedly, this story was scariest the second time around, when Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of HG Wells’ original invasion story accidentally convinced Americans that they were really under attack from outer space. But at its heart, this is the classic alien invasion and the one that all others have to be compared to. It hits all the right fear points: Unknowable enemy, Superior technology and Absolutely no attempt to negotiate or even communicate. Even the happy ending is bittersweet: What if they hadn’t had any trouble with the common cold…?
The Blob
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And here’s the third type of alien invasion I was talking about before: The advance guard (See also Cloverdale and The Thing). Mixing the unknowable aspect of War Of The Worlds with the additional worry of being absorbed by a random gelatinous mass that can’t be stopped – Not even at the end of the movie, if the question mark is anything to go by – the true worry of this film isn’t just “Where did it come from and what did it want?” but “Are there more of these things out there, somewhere?”
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
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The ultimate invasion horror story, and much imitated (See: The Faculty, Secret Invasion, They Live and so, so many others), but with good reason: There is little as scary as finding out that you’re completely right to be paranoid, and this story – in any of its versions – takes that worry and blows it up into (literally) the end of the world as we know it, with you left all alone to deal with it, knowing that you’ll likely eventually lose. Maybe it’s time to watch Independence Day again, just so we can sleep at night…
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