Scares from Outer Space

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Event Horizon

Greetings, earthlings, I blog in peace. As I make my way through scary subgenre after scary subgenre, I am confronting realms of horror that I once avoided like mommy issue horror, and somewhat-cheesy dubbing in Italian horror. And while I may have the occasional nightmare that features morphed maternalism or voices that don’t line up with one’s mouth, a concept that has always actually horrified me is the final frontier: outer space. As much as I fear the monsters and mayhem here on Earth, there’s something about that great, expansive nothingness that frightens me to my core. Whether or not aliens exist is only one of the terrifying things associated with space, which is why tonight we are not focusing solely on aliens. Well, that, and the fact that I think I’ve already seen every single good and bad alien movie ever made and it turns out, there is much more to be explored in the vast darkness that surrounds our home planet. I’m not an astronomer or a physicist—my science is movie-watching and gabbing—so let’s get into these horrors from outer space and begin with a sci-fi classic that I’ve been needing to see for lightyears (I know that measures distance and not time but I also like to have fun so shut up) : Don Siegel’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This isn’t a a film about aliens coming to Earth and giving everyone snatched bodies—that’s called Ozempic and that’s a horror story for another day—but it does open with an alien parasite abandoning its dying planet to land safely on Earth. This isn’t a big, loud crash landing, but a subtle impact—where these creatures take the form of small seed pods that bloom into unassuming pink flowers. All is calm. The sun is shining. Children play on a playground. Randomly an uncredited Robert Duvall is playing a priest just swinging on a swing (not even joking.) A laboratory scientist at the San Francisco Health Department named Elizabeth (Brooke Adams, of The Dead Zone fame) plucks one of these suddenly-bloomed pink flowers and takes it home to her jocky, hunky husband Geoffrey (Art Hindle, of The Brood fame.) The next day, everything on the surface still seems perfectly normal, but Geoffrey isn’t quite himself. The night before, we’d seen him animated about a football game, horny for his wife, and in general he seemed to have a decent personality for a 1970s Chad-type. But now, Geoffrey is cold, distant, shows no emotion or awareness of anything or anyone, including his wife. Geoffrey begins to disappear at odd hours, not telling anyone where he’s going, meeting up with random strangers, and it begins to rightfully creep out his wife. Desperate, confused, but convinced that her husband has been replaced with an imposter, Elizabeth goes to her colleague and friend at the Health Department, Matthew (zaddy Donald Sutherland), and she explains how bizarrely Geoffrey’s been acting. Matthew is skeptical, but agrees to help Elizabeth by having her talk to his psychiatrist friend Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy, Spock of Star Trek fame, hello, space?) Elizabeth begrudgingly agrees, but on the way to Dr. Kibner, a distressed man (played by the original hero of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers film, Kevin McCarthy) jumps on the car and tries to warn them of something. But before he can finish his spiel, he is chased off by a mob of people and is hit by a random car. Matthew and Elizabeth look at this sudden accident with horror, but the mob of people surrounding this man’s dead body just stare at it, emotionless. This is one climactic moment that further confirms that something weird is afoot, but it is the subtle, slow-burning suspense of Invasion of the Body Snatchers that really showed the darkness that soon tries to consume the whole city. The camerawork and attention-to-detail here is impeccable, because as an impatient movie-watcher who can at times grow weary of waiting to be scared, I was genuinely panic-stricken by the way this film built its tension. We’d be shown regular-looking people doing mundane activities, and it filled me with a distinct feeling of dread. Long before Elizabeth’s suspicions are confirmed, before the scientists and experts start to believe that there may actually be imposters taking over the world, you are made to feel suspicious of everyone, just by how the camera operated. There is a lot of action and sci-fi shenanigans in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and while I’d seen the memorable final frames of this film before, I was still kept guessing until the end. Invasion of the Body Snatchers doesn’t work just because of its plant-based alien lifeforms, its fear-inducing soundtrack, or its use of an incredibly young and hot Jeff Goldblum (though these things didn’t hurt), it worked because this film is a psychological nightmare. Like John Carpenter’s The Thing, this film utilizes sci-fi monsters and existential, psychological anxiety. While aliens and space and Elon Musk’s money is thoroughly frightening, there is nothing scarier than looking in a loved ones eyes and not recognizing them anymore. Or, perhaps even worse, losing ourselves and what makes us, us. This concept is just as cleverly torturous in the original 1956 version, but in this iteration, the effects as well as the script were elevated to an even higher level of horror. I shan’t reveal anything more about this film and its disquieting effects, but I will say that if you do watch this film, you may want to start keeping an eye on your plants. I really enjoyed Invasion of the Body Snatchers but if I had to give one critique, I would say that it’s a liiiiiiittle on the long side, which was not the case with tonight’s next film: Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon. This 96-minute, polarizing little space flick is the reason why tonight’s double feature isn’t just titled “Aliens”, so for that, I am slightly annoyed. I do assume that I am less annoyed than the audience members who first saw this in 1997, though, because Event Horizon spends a good deal of time teasing the fact that there might be an alien, when there quite simply isn’t. Well, “simply” may not be the right word to associate with this film, but I’m putting this fact out there so no one is disappointed by a lack of aliens going forward. Event Horizon follows a stacked cast of a space crew featuring Sam Neill, Lawrence Fishburne, Jason Isaacs, Joely Richardson, Sean Pertwee, and Richard T. Jones, all aboard a spaceship with a specific mission: to search for and rescue the Event Horizon, a research vessel that was tasked with exploring the furthest reaches of space. The Event Horizon went missing nearly a decade prior, and Dr. Weir (Neill), the man who built it, is desperate to find this vessel after receiving a transmission that sounds like human beings screaming. And while there are no aliens in this film, I guarantee you the source of these screams are even more horrific than any space-critter I could envision. The dizzying camerawork and stunning cinematography made this film feel like an even artsier 2001: A Space Odyssey, but once these spacemen stumble upon this lost ship, the blood and guts and extra-terrestrial terror that ensue solidify this sci-fi adventure’s status as a pure horror film. After locating this ship, 3 billion clicks from the nearest outpost, a handful of crew members go inside to investigate. But after a sudden malfunction with the crew’s own spaceship, all of the members are forced to go aboard this nearly-frozen, downright haunted vessel and explore how exactly everyone inside of it met their demise. There is a great deal of real science and science fiction to this intergalactic horror, but there is also that easy-to-grasp insanity that can only occur when in the isolated grip of space, which was thrilling to observe within each member of this committed cast. I hesitate to mention the cause of all of Event Horizon’s glorious gore if you’re not already familiar, but I will tell you that some of its spontaneous, disturbingly creative kills could’ve been crafted by the likes of Hannibal Lecter. I hope these space-set scary movies intrigued you, dear reader, and thank you for coming along for another week of spooky cinema. Don’t get spaced out, let’s chat next week! 👽