It’s spooky season! There are many ways to celebrate this Halloween with things like pumpkin carving, dressing up and also, watching scary movies.
Eric Deggans, NPR’s critic at large and Knight Professor of Journalism and Media Ethics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, shared his recommendations for some spooky, space-themed horror flicks.
A note: This story may contain spoilers for the films reviewed.
Here’s his list in order:
Xenomorphs and surviving extraterrestrials: “Alien” and “Aliens”
Directed by Ridley Scott, the first “Alien” came out in 1971. Now fifty years later, Deggans said this movie continues to unnerve its audience. Plus, Deggans said Scott used suspense and wonder well throughout the movie to keep people watching and scared.
“The film also benefits from what we saw happen with ‘Jaws’ where the costume that they came up with for the monster wasn't that convincing when you could really fully see it,” Deggans said. “So, Ridley Scott, very wisely, decided to prevent that from happening until the very end of the film. You don't see the entire monster until the very end of the film.”
Plus, Deggans said the movie is still just as scary as when he first watched it, making it that classic science fiction, horror movie and keeping the series at the top of his list.
“When that Xenomorph burst out of his stomach, I had to leave the theater for about five minutes,” Deggans said. “I had never seen anything like that on film before.”
Deggans also reviewed the new television series “Alien: Earth.” He said it pays homage to the first two movies and creates that same suspense and terror the audience felt watching the original movies.
“Star Wars” and Exotic Species
From Jabba the Hut to perilous moments of near-death for characters , Deggans said while this isn’t necessarily a horror movie franchise, there are still moments that make the audience jump.
“I picked that movie in one sense, because I really like the little touches of horror that are in it,” Deggans said. “Again, it makes it easier for me to watch it, because I'm not somebody who watches a lot of a lot of horror shows. When you have those moments where you get that little jolt and then we're back to the science fiction, I kind of like that a little bit.”
A cosmic journey of accountability with Spock
While not as scary, “Star Trek” stays at the top of Deggans list for similar reasons as “Star Wars,” but also for the character development. Specifically, in “Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan,” Deggans said watching both the character Spock and the actor, Leonard Nimoy, grow throughout the film and start to accept his fate made this movie a favorite of his.
“He makes the ultimate sacrifice to save his found family on the Enterprise, in particular his best friend Jim Kirk,” Deggans said. “Accepting that he feels that way about these people and that he's willing to sacrifice himself in that way puts us on the road to reviving that wonderful friendship between these three characters that has always sort of undergirded the original Star Trek series.”
Back in 2015 after Leonard Nimoy died, Deggans wrote an in-depth essay for NPR about Nimoy’s life in the “Star Trek” franchise and his journey of playing Spock.
Are we stuck in a marble? “Men in Black” says so
For Deggans, the mark of a great science fiction movie is how well you can believe the world is real and if you want to live and experience the world the movie creates.
“What ‘Men in Black’ does is it takes the average sort of trope of government agents tracking down a villain who threatens the entire world and flips it to show you that there's this entire universe that most of the world is unaware of that is populated with all these great aliens,” Deggans said.
Although there are scary elements to the movie, like giant cockroaches crawling into a person’s skin, Deggans said what makes the movie great is that it has a comedic side to it.
“The film itself, especially the first one, has a tone and a pacing that is comedic, but also can be serious when it needs to be,” Deggans said. “It’s filled with sci-fi wonder and is about these two characters bouncing off each other in ways that is really distinctive.”
How “The Matrix” plays on society’s big questions
From questioning society as a whole to looking at how humanity consumes media and culture, Deggans said “The Matrix” explore the big fears and questions people have about our world and society.
“It takes all those questions and kind of blows them up into this gigantic adventure where people are trying to disengage themselves, literally from a matrix that that constantly distracts them with stuff that doesn't matter, so that they can inadvertently be food,” Deggans said.
Science experiment gone awry in the “Fly”
Starring Jeff Goldblum, the movie the “Fly” explores the scary side of science technology -- when an experiment goes horribly wrong. Deggans said it’s a classic science horror that explored the idea that science ambition could lead to destruction.
“You also get this good, old-fashioned horror, body horror story where Jeff Goldblum’s character starts to, you know, his fingernails come off, his body transforms,” Deggans said. “Eventually, he turns into a giant fly.”
Man, or robot? “Robocop”
On theme with the questions humans have about society and government control, the movie “Robocop” is on par with the body horror we saw in the “Fly.”
“The living cop inside the cyborg body is at war to control this thing, this body that was, designed and built and initially controlled by the corporation,” Deggans said. “All these questions we have about what corporations do to us and how much they control us, how much we can resist them, how much we can resist that, is told in this movie.
While at the surface it’s just a fun science fiction movie, Deggans said there is a strong critique of consumer and corporate culture beneath the surface.
“All of this stuff is happening in the subtext of the movie, but you don't need to be aware or perceive any of that to enjoy the story of a hero who tries to find justice,” Deggans said, “Even when you know the big corporation and the big, organized crime figure stand in his way.”
What if our world was taken over by another species, like apes?
Next on Deggans's list is “The Planet of the Apes.” He said while this movie was made decades ago, the makeup and costumes of this movie still stand the test of time, making it a classic sci-fi movie that doesn’t really age in terms of effects.
“I think if you look at the ‘Planet of the Apes’ movie, the apes in that movie, and then you go to a zoo and you watch actual apes, you'll see they did a pretty good job of recreating those faces for the actors,” Deggans said. “Even now, that makeup kind of holds up. That's another reason why the movie is still you can still watch it.”
Plus, the movie has a great plot twist at the end that makes you question what you just watched.
“You think these astronauts crash landed on a topsy turvy world where apes are the intelligent ones who have gotten control of society,” Deggans said. “Homo sapiens, men have been turned into beasts of burden, and don't have the capacity to even really have much of a language, let alone tools or technology. Then you get to the end of the movie, and you realize it's the Earth that everybody knows, and a nuclear holocaust kind of turned everything upside down.”
A spacecraft to Hell
The film “Event Horizon” explores an old, classic fear of what happens when Hell comes to Earth, or someone finds themselves in Hell. In the film, a spacecraft returns, but without any of its crew.
“The guy who designed it is sent along with the team to investigate what exactly happened,” Deggans said. “Spoiler alert, they find out that the that the craft accessed Hell. Demonic presences are embedded inside the spaceship, and Sam Neil's character, who's the designer of the spaceship, gets possessed by them. Lawrence Fishburne has to figure out how to defeat him and keep all these demonic presences from accessing our world.”
While it isn’t as up on his list as the “Alien” franchise, Deggans said this film does a wonderful job at melding science fiction and horror.
Cosmic creeps
As we further explore our universe and we develop better telescopes and spacecraft that peer deeper into space, we are finding some scary things.
That includes giant pulsars and enormous black holes that are so big, they need a new name. Plus, cool comets that whiz by our planet this spooky season.
According to University of Vermont’s Jim Cooney, also a host on the Walkabout the Galaxy Podcast, scientists discovered black holes so large they needed entirely new names.
“It's like, so much bigger than the one at the one at the center of our galaxy,” Cooney said. “We now call those things Ultra massive black holes…there's one called Phoenix, that we measured around 100 billion times the mass of the Sun. We had to invent an even new name for that, and we're calling them stupendously large black holes or slabs.”
On theme with supermassive cosmic phenomenon, University of Central Florida’ s Yan Fernandez said there is a pulsar a bit too close to Earth for his liking -- About 250 parsecs away. When a star dies, also known as a supernova, a pulsar is born. A pulsar is a neutron star that emits radiation and huge magnetic fields.
Fernandez said scientists don’t know when the Supernova went off, or if it did impact the Earth
“They have really strong magnetic fields, and there's a lot of debris and everything gets a lot of higher energy photons that get shot off into jets that go out of the neutron star,” Fernandez said.
Another object whizzing by our planet this spooky season is Comet Lemon. University of Central Florida’s Addie Dove, and a host on the Walkabout the Galaxy podcast, said the comet will have a unique color to it.
“Comet, lemon will be sort of greenish too, sky because of the different emissions, and then how it gets illuminated by solar wind interactions,” Dove said.
Comet Lemon can be visible in the night sky until early November.
The other thing that surprises Dove in the universe is the fact that because of better technology, like JWST for example, astronomers are making more discoveries. Plus, these discoveries hit on that timeless question of what is out there in the cosmos.
“Since JWST has been looking at things in the sky, we've actually been finding things like galaxies, like dwarf galaxies, but also larger galaxies that we didn't expect to see,” Dove said.
