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The scariest space-related movie you ever saw.

Milo Kurtiss

By Milo Kurtiss
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geb

geb

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I guess I'll be the first to mention a film that is both scary and worth watching (seriously, Apollo 18 and Prometheus were both awful).

Event Horizon.

Plot summary: "oops, our FTL engine opened a portal to hell"

Edit: beaten to first good film suggestion. Alien is excellent, of course.

Edited by geb
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Aescwulf

Aescwulf

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I don't think I've ever been scared at scifi horror. But I would like to see Apollo 18 but the whole Blair witch project way of filming puts me off it and I want to see Promethus but I guess I'll have to wait next week to get it on 3d blue ray XD

Wait was 5 when I watched Alien so I was scared lol

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RedDwarfIV

RedDwarfIV

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Event Horizon was indeed scary, though no amazingly scientific. I guess they presumed that if you had a drive that could fold spacetime, you could also have artificial gravity. They made the ship way too creepy for its mission to have gone right, and it would almost certainly have failed health and safety inspections - one woman fell into the drive bay through a hole in the floor that appeared to be intentional but had no railings.

Seriously, why would you design your spacecraft with a cross as the main viewing window? Still, the Lewis And Clark rates as a Cool Ship.

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RadiationKing

RadiationKing

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Yeah I'd have to go with Event Horizon too. As soon as I saw the thread title it was the first name to come to mind. Alien/s too of course. Moon is a really good film, slow paced but I really like it, the soundtrack is good too.

Although not films, Red Dwarf episodes "Better than Life" and "Quarantine" used to scare me as a kid when I first watched them. "Quarantine" is now one of my favorite episodes.

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Ziff

Ziff

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I'm with Vanamonde. The original Alien is amazingly scary. It's not in your face scary, it's this slow buildup that gives your mind time to settle in on the horrible things that are about to happen. The fear the movie creates goes past the current trend of 'make a sudden loud noise, flash the creature on the screen for half a second, and then cut the camera away' trick. Of course, they use that trick in Alien too, but it's not every scene.

I'd also go with Event Horizon as a good choice. Great story, great characters and great effects all add to the scary story part. Pandorum, honestly, sucked. It had a great story with a ton of potential and then they just killed it with too much of the 'loud noise, camera shift' crap. It does provide a few memorable moments though. 'Is this guy going to help them, or kill them and eat them.'

I would like to add the 1982 version of The Thing.

While the original movie was creepy, the remake turned the creature into something that can imitate anyone or anything. Suddenly you don't know who is a good guy, and who is a shape shifting alien that wants to kill everyone. The scene where the one guy's head just grows some spider legs and walks off out of the room creeped me the hell out for a long time. There is also the isolation factor, which is probably why I also think Alien and Event Horizon are good too. I like when the characters are cut off and you know they either have to figure it out or die.

Also, Ju-on is pretty good too. The little kids creep me out. I haven't seen Prometheus yet, maybe I will look for that On Demand.

Edit: Totally missed that we were talking about space movies, sorry. Yeah, the first two still stand. Does The Thing count? Because the creature was from a spaceship that crashed on earth, so it's somewhat space related. :P

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Whptheenah

Whptheenah

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'The Thing' was by far the scariest for me.

I feel that the 1982 version had a bit more scare factor in than the 2011, just because in the 2011 version, the twists and scary parts were a bit predictable.

Scariest BOOK however, was the founder of all Sci-Fi ever: H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (but both of the memorable films just ruined it a bit).

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Vanamonde

Vanamonde

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The original Alien is amazingly scary. It's not in your face scary
I am going to sound like an old guy, becaue I am kind of an old guy, but most movies now try to substitute violence for scariness. Body parts flying everywhere isn't scarey; it's just kind of gross, and gets downright boring if the whole movie is like that. But an article I was reading pointed out that Alien really isn't very violent. Early on in the movie there's the bloody scene where the chestburster bursts John Hurt's chest, but after that, almost all the violence takes place off camera, and you're creeped out because you remember that earlier scene and keep expecting more like it. Instead, the movie skips the parts where you really know what's going to happen anyway (biting and blood flying), and the other characters find, or sometimes don't find, the mess that's left. In fact, one of the more violent bits of the movie is when Ashe goes nuts and tries to strangle Ripley by jamming a rolled up magazine down her throat. That's more disturbing than the monster, because it's more realistic.

Now, you can still have blood flying and all that violence, but that works better as an action movie like Aliens.

Ziff, you should read Who Goes There?, the short story by John Campbell upon which The Thing was based. It's not violence and gore. Instead, the critter can imitate people perfectly, so the guys trapped at the antarctic station don't know which of them is the monster. It's quite a different kind of story, but it's interesting to see where the ideas for the movie came from. In the first movie, they didn't do the shapeshifting because of limitations on budget and the special effects tech of the time, and nobody since has tried to do much with the original imposter idea. (At least I don't think so. I haven't seen the latest version.)

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Aescwulf

Aescwulf

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I am going to sound like an old guy, becaue I am kind of an old guy, but most movies now try to substitute violence for scariness. Body parts flying everywhere isn't scarey; it's just kind of gross, and gets downright boring if the whole movie is like that. But an article I was reading pointed out that Alien really isn't very violent. Early on in the movie there's the bloody scene where the chestburster bursts John Hurt's chest, but after that, almost all the violence takes place off camera, and you're creeped out because you remember that earlier scene and keep expecting more like it. Instead, the movie skips the parts where you really know what's going to happen anyway (biting and blood flying), and the other characters find, or sometimes don't find, the mess that's left. In fact, one of the more violent bits of the movie is when Ashe goes nuts and tries to strangle Ripley by jamming a rolled up magazine down her throat. That's more disturbing than the monster, because it's more realistic.

Now, you can still have blood flying and all that violence, but that works better as an action movie like Aliens.

Ziff, you should read Who Goes There?, the short story by John Campbell upon which The Thing was based. It's not violence and gore. Instead, the critter can imitate people perfectly, so the guys trapped at the antarctic station don't know which of them is the monster. It's quite a different kind of story, but it's interesting to see where the ideas for the movie came from. In the first movie, they didn't do the shapeshifting because of limitations on budget and the special effects tech of the time, and nobody since has tried to do much with the original imposter idea. (At least I don't think so. I haven't seen the latest version.)

I agree with you on this post about scariness and Alien films. Too many directors use excessive violence to make things scary but most of the time it doesn't work. And I love the suggestive nature of what goes on with the alien in Alien it makes you use your imagination

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RedDwarfIV

RedDwarfIV

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Pandorum.

Sunshine had no real horror, but it was scary to think about having a dead sun with an isolate planet Earth to follow and slowly fade away...

Scary to think about, yes - that was the point of the movie, according to the guy who advised the movie's director about Science. They knew the sun was too damn big to be affected by a nuclear blast even with all Earth's fissile material on board, and they knew that if it was fading now, it would have started dying many millions of years ago - the time it takes for a photon to pass from Solar core to photosphere. Since they knew the premise itself was rubbish, they focused on making the premise interesting enough to be forgiven.

Hence, scientists going forth to battle Nature's most powerful forces.

I do like it, I just read a lot about its production.

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