Original subtitles

[eerie music]

[wolf howling]

[gate clicking]

[rope creaks]

[metal thuds]

[doll thuds]

[projector whirring]

TANANARIVE DUE: I think a lot of these films set in space

are representing that pioneering spirit,

like overcoming the unknown, the adventurous part

of our human nature.

But you've sort of reached the end of everything

once you get to space.

Most likely if things are going badly,

you are going to die alone in the most horrible possible way.

[dramatic music]

[flames hissing]

[groans]

Space is perfect for horror because you have isolation.

It's one of the best tools.

You're usually trapped on a spaceship

and there's nowhere you can go.

[chuckles] That builds tension, and scares,

and it works every time.

TANANARIVE DUE: Space is horrible.

[groans]

TANANARIVE DUE: Space is the worst.

[explosion]

[meat squiggling]

[glass shattering]

[monster roars]

As I gaze into the stars at night,

I often ask myself, what are the must-see

space horror films of all time?

[monster roars]

[dramatic music]

[eerie music]

[monster screeches]

MICHAEL GINGOLD: You go into outer space,

any possible species could exist.

[monster screeches]

[groans]

MICHAEL GINGOLD: And the prevailing idea

is that they're hostile and they want to kill us and/or eat us.

[monster screeches]

All those possibilities are kind of endless

when it comes to horror films.

[eerie music]

[dramatic music]

It, The Terror From Beyond Space, this, of course,

is the granddaddy of the alien is loose inside a ship

and picking off the crew members movie.

[dramatic music]

[monster roars]

[screams]

The way that film started, you're immediately

engaged because you're dealing with the trial of an astronaut

who had just returned from Mars and he's

on trial because they suspect that he

murdered his entire crew.

JUDGE: And Colonel Carruthers is being brought back

for a court martial to face trial for the murders

of the rest of the crew.

[dramatic music]

RYAN TUREK: You discover what actually

happened on the spaceship.

And this crew went to Mars.

They accidentally left like a hatch open,

as maybe you do because this is your first time going to Mars.

[chuckles] And on their way back, they discover

there was a stowaway alien.

[dramatic music]

I'm sure many a drive-in movie viewer screamed with dread more

by the sight of the shadows coming around the corner

or just the edges of this beast's feet or hands

much more than the full-on shots of that weirdly-shaped horror.

[gunshots]

That's what makes this a special movie.

It's fantastic the imagination that went into filmmaking back

at that time and the commitment of these really like dedicated

actors.

[dramatic music]

In a way this is sort of a cousin to things like the thing

from another world where you have

a very isolated setting where people

absolutely can't get out.

In that case, you know you're in the middle of the Antarctic.

You know, you're stuck in this research facility.

[dramatic music]

In this case, you're stuck on a spaceship.

But at the heart, it's basically the same idea.

It's 10 little Indians.

You know, you're all going to die one by one.

You don't know why or what's attacking you except,

it's a monster from outer space in this case.

[dramatic music]

Sounds like Ridley Scott's Alien.

And it reportedly was an inspiration for Alien.

But obviously, Ridley Scott rolled up his sleeves

and said I could do this better.

[dramatic music]

[screams]

[glass shattering]

JOE HILL: What's the best space horror of all time?

I don't think there's any doubt, it's Ridley Scott's Alien.

[monster screeches]

[screams]

Alien is as scary as a hand on your throat.

[ominous music]

ERNEST DICKERSON: They were sleeping.

They were on their way home.

They felt they had already made their money.

But to be awakened and thrust into the middle

of a horrific situation has got to be the ultimate, I

don't know, insult, you know?

[chuckles] It's like, is the universe really

like fucking with me or what?

[monster roars]

[monster screeches]

When it came out, people kept debating like, is it

science fiction, is it horror?

Obviously, it's both.

You can have both of them in the same movie.

[chuckles] But people wanted to pigeonhole it

because they want to know how they're

supposed to process this.

It is unquestionably horror though.

I mean the chestburster scene alone is one of the all time

greatest horror scenes.

[groans] [grunts] [groans] [screams]

[screams]

My mother took--

I was too young to see it at the time because it was an R.

So my mom went with me and she watched the entire movie

through her fingers.

Once the chestburster happened--

[skin bursting]

[screams]

[screams]

Oh, god.

Oh, god.

[sobs]

STEVE NILES: --I was just in love.

[chuckles] I just thought it was the greatest thing

I'd ever seen in my life.

[glass shattering]

NATHANIEL THOMPSON: The genius of alien

is that like the chestburster is not where--

it's not the high point and like the rest of it

is a letdown at all.

Because I think this thing is paced just so well.

Really, the movie keeps yanking the carpet out from under you

over and over again.

[eerie music]

Barking mad.

NATHANIEL THOMPSON: You thought Tom Skerritt

was the star of this movie.

And in a normal sci-fi film, the male captain

would be the guy that you would follow because he's going

on this hunt through the ducts trying

to find you know this alien.

And we don't even know what it looks like at this point.

Last time we saw it, it was a little thing

that came out of his chest.

So how fast does it grow?

We don't know.

[dramatic music]

Am I-- am I clear, Lambert?

I want to get the hell out of here.

It keeps cutting between Tom Skerritt on the hunt

in the dark and then you have especially Veronica Cartwright

is among the group watching him because nobody

does hysteria better than Veronica

Cartwright in any movie ever.

[device beeping]

Move.

Get out of there.

Her performance is so calibrated

because it's supposed to match our own sense of suspense.

And so it keeps like going up, and up, and up, and up, and up.

LAMBERT: Oh, god.

It's moving right towards you.

NATHANIEL THOMPSON: You know, and that's when you really feel

just how truly trapped he is.

If something goes wrong, that's it.

And the very worst thing does happen.

LAMBERT: Wait.

The other way, god.

[monster screeches]

[device beeps]

[ominous music]

JOE HILL: I actually think that I'm not

the only one that the sequel, Aliens,

is actually a better picture.

[screams]

[body crunches]

JOE HILL: Funnier, more intense, more relentless, more exciting.

But the original, the first film Alien is a better horror film.

[monster screeches]

[gunshots]

To me, Aliens is one of those perfect movies.

[gunshots]

[monster screeches]

[pants]

[gunshots]

What's great about Aliens is there's so much great character

stuff in that film.

I only need to know one thing, where they are.

Go, Vasquez.

Kick ass.

When I was a kid watching that movie and we see--

you know, my Latino household, we see Vasquez show up,

we're like, thank you.

It's about time.

We're here.

We're in space too, dog, in the future.

We made it.

OK.

Hell yeah!

[ominous music]

I had never seen anything like that before, a well prepared

group of soldiers to go in and take

down the creature, the villain of the movie, you know?

It's just like, oh, man, we're going to watch an ass

whooping for a while here.

[dramatic music]

MICHAEL GINGOLD: For the first at least an hour,

you don't really have any alien action

aside from a brief nightmare that Sigourney

Weaver's character has.

No!

No!

It's all about building up the suspense,

building up the situation, and letting

you get to know this great ensemble

of colorful characters.

And then about 65, 70 minutes in--

RICKY CARMONA: Shit starts to get real quiet.

And they run into that poor woman who's just attached

to the wall of the ship.

[dramatic music]

[ominous music]

And we see again creature come out.

[monster roars]

[shouts]

RICKY CARMONA: It's like, oh, that's right,

this alien don't fuck around.

[chuckles] And boom.

[groans]

RICKY CARMONA: They all come out.

And it's like, oh, there's--

[chuckles] there is a plethora of aliens

and it becomes a shit show.

[screams]

[gunshots]

The action is just beyond pure.

[gunshots]

[monster screeches]

[groans] MICHAEL GINGOLD: It is horror.

It is very frightening.

But also, a great action movie too.

[monster hissing]

DAVE SCHILLING: The Alien movies are so important to the genre

because it's the greatest monster.

[monster growls]

It's the best monster in the space horror genre

and it's iconic for a reason.

[monster growls]

[eerie music]

The design of that monster, the Xenomorph,

is so terrifying and so unnatural and yet natural.

[monster hissing]

[eerie music]

I think across the board when you talk about space horror,

you're talking about technology being perverted or technology

overwhelming nature.

And nature is the thing that they are the most afraid

of, which is this alien.

[screams]

But then of course in the sequels you find out,

it's like a bio-engineered weapon and all this stuff.

[monster roars]

It's a much more interesting idea

to think of the alien as something that we just

discovered, a natural resource.

Ambiguity is so important to horror in general,

but especially in space horror because the more you get bogged

down into exposition, and lore, and explanation,

the less interesting the ideas become.

And the Alien movies got so complicated as they went on.

And it's unfortunate because those first two were perfect.

[eerie music]

[dramatic music]

TED GEOGHEGAN: So following the success of Alien,

Roger Corman was like, OK, there's

clearly money to be made doing sci-fi horror stuff in space.

So he comes up with this idea for Galaxy Of Terror.

[audio logo]

And it is insane.

[monster growls]

[dramatic music]

[monster growls]

[eerie music]

[spaceship whirring]

[eerie music]

This is insanity.

What a magnificent piece of work.

[monster screeches]

[screams]

[monster screeches]

[monstrous chuckle]

[laser fires]

Look, Roger Corman is an essential.

I don't-- you know, I know people go, oh, low budget,

schlock, and you know, and his weird monsters and the boom

mic might be in the film.

But Roger Corman is part of the horror canon

and you have to see him.

And Galaxy Of Terror has its moments.

[spaceship whirring]

It's essentially about a group of adventurers who

get onto a spacecraft, go into deep, deep space,

and end up on this supposedly barren planet.

They enter this creepy giant pyramid

and there they start to realize that all of their worst fears

are coming true.

It was my own fear that attacked me, brought

to life somehow by this place.

Everyone's worst fears aren't being left by a loved one

or getting cancer.

No, no, no.

Their worst fears are like, what if my crystal throwing star

turns on me and attacks me?

[groans] [grunts]

[dramatic music]

OK.

I was a 12-year-old kid.

I'm at the Culver theater.

And there's a very intense scene where

it looks like glass in the movie but it's clearly plastic,

breaks off and goes into a character's arm.

And it's moving up the inside of his arm.

[high-pitched beeping]

And my dad comes out of nowhere and puts his hand on my

shoulder to ask me if I was OK.

And I scream.

And I go, hell, no, I'm not OK.

[chuckles] And you know, it was a packed theater

so everybody's busting up laughing around me.

So it made Galaxy Of Terror a classic for me.

[dramatic music]

[groans]

This being Roger Corman, one of his mandates in his films

is that you had to have bare boobs.

[eerie music]

I don't know why around that time though they

decided that what people wanted was

to see boobs covered in slime.

[ominous music]

[screams]

TRACEY SALISBURY: It's got the bizarre scene

where the buxom woman who can't act

has all of her clothes torn off by this space centipede.

And that kind of goes on for a while.

[screams]

[dramatic music]

I guess somebody enjoyed that.

I don't want to know who they are.

[groans]

[dramatic music]

As troubling and as difficult as that sequence is,

it's followed up by seeing Erin Moran,

Joanie of Joanie Loves Chachi--

[flesh squiggling]

--getting strangled by tentacles until she literally

explodes from the pressure.

[screams]

[head bursts]

So this is a film that walks both lines

in terms of absurdity.

[eerie music]

DAVE SCHILLING: Pitch Black is, I think, one of the best

alien ripoffs of all time.

[chuckles]

[monsters screeching]

Pitch Black takes that basic idea

of there are aliens out there and they're hiding

and they'll eat you.

[dramatic music]

But it creates a reason why they are attacking.

They only come out when it's dark.

[monsters screeching]

And there's an eclipse.

And there's a crashed space transport with a convict.

And the convict, of course, is Riddick played by Vin Diesel

and he has special eyes so he can see in the dark.

[dramatic music]

[monster growls]

Riddick is the perfect protagonist for this movie

because I think a lot of space horror

needs to have this gritty feel to it.

That it needs to have anti-heroes.

I don't truly know what's going to happen when

the lights go out, Carolyn.

But I do know once the dying starts,

this little psycho fuck family of horrors

is going to rip itself apart.

DAVE SCHILLING: It can't have the swashbuckling Luke

Skywalker or Captain Kirk types.

Looks clear.

[monster screeches]

I thought you said clear.

I said it looks clear.

Well, what's it look like now?

Looks clear.

The whole world of Pitch Black and the franchise

that spawned from it is gritty.

It is tactile and dirty.

[monster growls]

And the monsters are a reflection of that.

[dramatic music]

The monsters are grotesque and strange.

And I wouldn't say they're iconic the way the alien

is but it is this really fascinating world where it is--

a lot of the things are vague.

[eerie music]

[monster screeches]

[flesh ripping]

[monster screeches]

[knife slices]

[body thuds]

It's a very nuts and bolts space

horror film in terms of delivering

the shocks you paid for.

[monster growls]

And running the story briskly on rails towards the

desperate final confrontation.

[monsters screeching]

It works.

It's a well-oiled machine sort of like Vin Diesel himself.

[dramatic music]

[shouts]

[ominous music]

Ooh, what a mean movie Life is.

[laughs]

It's behind you!

[chokes]

NATHANIEL THOMPSON: Kind of strange little trend

for a while where we had these really nihilistic science

fiction movies and Life, I think,

is probably maybe the cruelest of them.

[eerie music]

I don't think we were really prepared for just

how like dirty this movie was willing to play.

[dramatic music]

Life is essentially about this very small outer space crew

and they wind up acquiring what is essentially

just a glorified microbe.

My god, we're looking at the first incontrovertible

proof of life beyond Earth.

NATHANIEL THOMPSON: A life form that they wound up

taking onto the ship and trying to keep it confined

and study it.

But it starts growing exponentially at a very,

very, very fast pace.

[dramatic music]

At first it seems like this very cute thing.

Then it's not so cute.

[electricity crackles]

[dramatic music]

It is incredibly lethal.

It will absorb any kind of matter

that it touches, any kind of organic matter.

[shouts]

Life really works because not only is this a dangerous

entity, it's getting bigger.

[dramatic music]

And then on top of it, it attaches itself to you

and you're not quite sure when it does it.

And so it's just a very unpredictable creature.

[dramatic music]

[gasps]

It's almost kind of like The Thing actually in space.

MAN: Bryn.

[gasps]

JOE BEGOS: The Thing in space without as many makeup effects,

that's a good way to put it.

[dramatic music]

WOMAN: [pants]

JOE BEGOS: It's just a really tight, you know,

nice piece of filmmaking and there's CG in it.

But again, it's minimal and really smartly done.

And the cast is-- the performances are really good.

[dramatic music]

What really sets this one apart though, is the ending.

[dramatic music]

It does a little narrative switcheroo at the end

that is just so sadistic.

I mean, it is such a middle finger to the audience

that you just have to admire just how audacious it is,

for essentially, you have our two survivors wind up going off

on separate stellar lifeboats.

[flames roaring]

TRACEY SALISBURY: They come up with a great plan

and then it just goes haywire, which

is why I just think that movie is just

kind of an instant classic.

That ending is just devastating.

MIRANDA: No!

TRACEY SALISBURY: It makes perfect sense

that this woman ends up spinning off into space.

[screams] No!

No!

TRACEY SALISBURY: And he's down there in the thing.

DAVID: No!

No, no, no!

Yes, you're going to open that and Jake Gyllenhaal

is going to end the world.

[dramatic music]

[eerie music]

[upbeat music]

[monsters groaning]

[screams]

[monster screeches]

[grunts] [shouts] Oh, my god.

[monster screeches]

[monster roars]

[liquid fizzing]

[monster roars]

[face bursts]

[screams]

[body bursts]

[ominous music]

The silly trope of jettising slasher

villains into space started with Hellraiser Bloodline--

[ominous music]

--where the final chapter of that

actually takes Pinhead and throws him onto a space station

that is eventually revealed to be the lament

configuration itself.

That was the film that was finally

supposed to kill Pinhead and finally

supposed to destroy him in this gigantic explosion of light.

[eerie music]

Of course, I think we got like six or seven equals after

that so clearly, sending Pinhead into space

did not work for him.

I am forever.

[dramatic music]

[eerie music]

DEWAYNE PERKINS: I remember Leprechaun In Space

and I was like, why is all these villains going to space?

[chuckles]

[eerie music]

[groans] [screams]

DEWAYNE PERKINS: There is a lot of people

just still terrorize on Earth.

But I was on board.

I need flight.

Speaking of tropes of sending killers

into space for another movie, like I really enjoy Jason X.

[ominous music]

Todd Farmer like with the script took an idea

that could have been just really bad and cheesy and infused

enough of the Friday the 13th elements into it

to make it interesting.

[dramatic music]

[knife slashes]

Jason has been cryogenically frozen and put on this ship.

But nothing can stop Jason.

That's the last place you want to be is

in a closed capsule with Jason.

We're going to be safe here.

[glass shattering]

It's the same formula for all the Friday the 13ths, they just

put a bunch of young kids in tight fitting clothes

on a space ship.

[eerie music]

[screams]

But the fact that they have regeneration machines means

that here is this creature that has

always been indestructible now gets to be new and improved.

[dramatic music]

DEWAYNE PERKINS: To take Jason who's already

such a big terrifying figure and then like upgrade him,

I was like please, keep going.

The most brilliant part of Jason X

is that there is a Holodeck.

[whooshing]

The way they are able to keep him from killing everyone

for a little bit, you see they put him

in a hologram version of Camp Crystal Lake

and he gets to kill teenagers.

[laughs]

WOMAN: [groans] [groans]

That distracts him for a while.

And I think that's brilliant writing.

[screams]

DEWAYNE PERKINS: When he put the head in the hydrogen

and then crushed it, I said, wow,

we are doing something here.

[head shatters]

[dramatic music]

There's also a scene in this movie

where the space ship actually smashes

into an entire space station--

[explosion]

[screams]

TED GEOGHEGAN: --killing I think tens of thousands of people.

[explosion]

It's Jason's biggest kill of all time.

[head smashes]

DEWAYNE PERKINS: That's what I find

very interesting about horror.

You're following the bad person.

Yes, we're on the side of the protagonist

but this is an antagonist's game.

That's why we're here because we're following this antagonist

and seeing how they're antagonizing these people.

Because without that, what do we have?

Like, that is what horror is to me.

[dramatic music]

[projector whirring]

Oh, my god.

Colonel Dan McCready commanding Mars Gravity

Probe 1.

[dramatic music]

[laser firing]

I have no way to contact NASA.

[alarm buzzing]

[air whooshing]

And even if I could, it's going to be

four years until a manned mission can reach me.

Oh, fuck you, Mars.

VINCENT: The entire crew of Tantalus base

was infected by some sort of virulent bacteria.

[electricity crackles]

MAN: Open the panel.

Pretty good chance I'm infected too.

[monster screeches]

Come on, you mindless motherfucker!

[gunshots]

[monster roars]

MAN: Mars, the Angry Red Planet.

Sounds so foreboding, doesn't it?

Help!

Help!

[monster roars]

[device beeping]

[monster growls]

[ominous music]

Current estimates are that the universe is 13.7 billion years

old and that there are roughly 200 million trillion stars,

which means there's so much in the universe

and we're just a little, little tiny part of that.

And what is out there?

[dramatic music]

Are happy nice things waiting for us in the universe?

Or is the universe just a much larger version of what's

happening here on the planet, which is to say it's

filled with death and horror at a scale

that we can't possibly imagine?

[monster growls]

[screams]

[body thuds]

NATHANIEL THOMPSON: Planet Of The Vampires,

probably the greatest of all Italian sci-fi movies

and horror movies.

It does both very well.

This, of course, is the one excursion into pure science

fiction from the great Mario Bava, who

was a maestro of Gothic horror.

[dramatic music]

Also the granddaddy of the giallo.

[dramatic music]

ERNEST DICKERSON: It's two ships that crash land on a planet.

And some unknown alien force is taken

over the crew members that are killed and bringing them back.

[eerie music]

[metal clanging]

And it's about the astronauts trying to fend off

these alien forces that are also trying

to take possession of them.

[eerie music]

This is a film that transports us into a brightly-colored,

weirdly-explored space in space--

[objects clattering]

--in which the costumes, the world is so gorgeous.

I could watch this film silently with just

like Pink Floyd playing and get a lot out of it.

He was a true artist, not just a craftsman.

So when he did Planet Of The Vampires,

you get a train wreck of emotion mixed with a train

wreck of violence--

[dramatic music]

--that is mysterious.

There's no answer for it.

[eerie music]

The horror in the film is really

a lot of like the crew trying to grasp and figure out and find

what can't really be found.

[ominous music]

[whooshing]

Did you see anything?

I don't know what I saw.

I don't even know if I saw anything at all.

There's nothing to like kill and slay.

But it's still like very classical space

horror in that there's the threat

of colonialism and imperialism.

And I suppose you need our dead bodies.

No, they must be willing only to submit.

Lose their bodies, as well as, lose their will.

The vampires on The Planet Of The Vampires are seeking

dominion over the universe, as is usually the case

[chuckles] in these films.

It was [STUTTERS] like another will fighting my own in my mind

trying to take over control.

Their hope is that they could create

some kind of symbiotic relationship between themselves

and the humans.

If you've ever been a part of a dysfunctional relationship

or in an abusive relationship, you can see yourself fully

and validly attaching yourself to another person

in what you believe is a mutually beneficial, symbiotic,

healthy bond.

But what is actually draining of one of the parties involved.

[dramatic music]

LEA ANDERSON: And so it kind of works

as a possession film, as this kind of play

on what a vampire can be.

[laser firing]

[groans]

LEA ANDERSON: It really demonstrates the malleability

of space horror for all of the different possibilities

that the unknown of outer space opens up.

[ominous music]

2001, A Space Odyssey is a horror movie.

It is incorrect to view it as anything

other than a horror movie.

[audio logo]

It is structured exactly like a horror movie.

It brings the villain in at the right time.

It keeps the villain sort of at arm's length for a while.

It starts to go in for the kill at exactly when it's

supposed to go in for the kill.

I mean it's structured exactly the same as Jaws.

[dramatic music]

There's five astronauts.

Three of them are in hibernation and two of them

are just minding the ship, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole.

HAL 9000: The crew of Discovery 1

consists of five men and one of the latest generation

of the HAL 9000 computers.

KURT SAYENGA: The antagonist of 2001

became HAL 9000, the sentient computer.

The 9,000 series is the most reliable computer ever made,

foolproof and incapable of error.

It's a very calmed voice and probably

be like the AIs who are soon doing our jobs

and will be feeding off of our life energy

to power their mainframes in the future.

Can you hold it a bit closer?

Sure.

I think there's a lot of similarities

between that film and Psycho--

[ominous music]

--in terms of how it works and how

it keeps the objective use of who is the bad guy

and they're watching you all the time.

HAL is always watching the guys.

Perkins is always watching, you know,

his next victim you through an eye hole or whatever.

A lot of that is coming out of Hitchcock and very

successfully.

KURT SAYENGA: The astronauts realize that something

is wrong with HAL.

If he were proven to be malfunctioning,

I wouldn't see how we'd have any choice but disconnection.

But what they don't realize is that HAL can read lips.

[dramatic music]

So HAL's going to do something.

But what can HAL possibly do?

Well, HAL can do is remotely take control of one

of these pods while the astronauts are outside

and he uses the pod to kill Frank Poole.

[air hissing]

Meanwhile, inside kills the astronauts in hypersleep

just by turning them off.

[alarm beeping]

DAVE: Do you read me, HAL?

HAL 9000: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.

A lot of great horror movies, especially

haunted house movies, stillness is a huge element of it.

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL 9000: I'm sorry, Dave.

I'm afraid I can't do that.

That is so much a part of why 2001 works and why HAL

is so bone-chilling as an idea.

[ominous music]

HAL 9000: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave.

HAL is one of the great villains in horror history.

HAL 9000: Stop, Dave.

JOE HILL: In some ways, HAL is becoming

more scary with every passing day

now that we're all walking around with HAL in our pocket.

HAL 9000: I'm afraid, Dave.

JOE HILL: HAL is Siri.

HAL is Alexa.

It's fair to be afraid of what will happen on the day

he decides we're expendable.

[air hissing]

[metal whirs]

[dramatic music]

After Dave Bowman is able to defeat HAL,

the next sequence Jupiter and beyond the infinite,

it always gets me.

[eerie music]

Being taken by an unknown force that

transformed him into the next step in evolution.

Talk about being taken out of your comfort zone.

[eerie music]

[dramatic music]

That is another aspect of cosmic horror,

I think, being transformed against your will

into something ultrahuman, superhuman,

or even less than human.

[dramatic music]

You don't know.

DANA GOULD: Arthur C. Clark who wrote the novel and co-wrote

the screenplay said either we're alone in the universe

or we're not alone in the universe,

both options equally terrifying.

[eerie music]

[thunder rumbles]

[projector whirring]

[upbeat music]

Beam me up.

[SINGING] Ooh, la, la, la

[high-pitched whirring]

[SINGING] Ooh, la, la, la

[dramatic music]

[upbeat music]

[SINGING] Ooh

[flames roaring]

[groans]

[ominous music]

MAN: Skipper, no.

Please stop.

Let go. WOMAN: Jesus.

MAN: Get off him.

Skipper!

[dramatic music]

So there's a whole subset of films that are about isolation

in space and what happens to people when they're put

into these extreme conditions.

[eerie music]

Usually, something bad happens.

And the bad thing that happens is that you bring your problems

with you wherever you are.

[screams]

No matter how far you are from Earth,

you're still a human being and you still

have all the drama, and conflicts, and jealousy

that come with that.

I warned you while your ship was still in space,

I begged you not to land on this planet.

A great example of this is the early science

fiction film Forbidden Planet.

[audio logo]

Forbidden Planet is probably the most important science

fiction movie of all time.

I know some people would say Star Wars is more important

but Forbidden Planet was the thing

that created the template for pretty much every space

adventure you'll ever see.

[dramatic music]

DANA GOULD: A precomedy Leslie Nielsen playing it

straight as the mission commander, which

is the only thing about it that makes

it hard to watch now because you keep wanting

to laugh at Leslie Nielsen.

Captain to crew, all hands square away to decelerate.

Ship's beeper will as usual sound 10 times

after lights dim.

He's a sort of Captain Kirk type

leading this kind of quasimilitary crew of spacemen

landing on the planet called Altair 4 to check

up on a colony of settlers.

Welcome to Altair 4, gentlemen.

I am to transport you to the residence.

It turns out everybody is dead in the colony

except for one man, Professor Morbius.

[eerie music]

We so terribly wanted to meet a young man

and now three of them at once.

KURT SAYENGA: And Morbius has a very alluring daughter

and she and the captain developed

a little sexual chemistry.

[dramatic music]

As it happens the professor has found the remains of a machine

built by an ancient civilization that makes your thoughts

become reality.

He hasn't quite mastered this but

what he doesn't realize is that his subconscious mind has

mastered it, and is actively at work,

and has created a creature that killed all the first settlers

and is now starting to pick off the crew

who have landed on this planet.

[laser firing]

[screams]

DAVE SCHILLING: It is invisible.

You can't see it.

It is a manifestation of your villain's desires.

It's his needs, what he wants and what he wants to create

and what he wants to destroy.

I think that's pretty accurate to most

of our problems in the world.

When you thought we were threatening

your little egomaniac empire, your subconscious sent it's

Id monster out again.

More death, Morbius, more murder.

[dramatic music]

DAVE SCHILLING: When you think about space horror,

often, that genre is about the human desire

to be more than what they are biologically,

to overcome, to evolve.

I am not a monster, you.

DAVE SCHILLING: And certainly Forbidden Planet

is a movie about that.

And I think a lot of the great examples of space horror

have that theme of man's overreach, humanity desiring

to be more than what it is.

[dense warbling]

[device beeping]

[screams]

Ikarie Xb1, of course, is one of the great Eastern European

science fiction films, although we

didn't get to see it in its intended form until much,

much later.

But it's very much a serious kind

of philosophical horror film.

[eerie music]

JOE LAMATTINA: I think Ikarie Xb1 like Ingmar Bergman making

a movie via the Czech new wave.

[dramatic music]

[ominous music]

KURT SAYENGA: It's about a kind of international crew sent

on a mission to Alpha Centauri.

And even though it's a full crew,

there's lots of people on this ship.

They're still all kind of plagued

by just the heaviness of being out

in space, alone in the vastness of the universe.

JOE LAMATTINA: They're trying to have normal lives,

and have normal discussions, and have Fellini dance parties--

[upbeat music]

--so they can keep themselves from going crazy.

Unfortunately, that's still not enough.

[eerie music]

[ominous music]

From the start in Ikarie Xb1, one of our lead characters,

Mikhail has already gone crazy.

KURT SAYENGA: One of the key parts of the film

and that's pure space horror is when they encounter

a derelict vessel that turns out to be an American ship launched

years before.

[dramatic music]

First they discover that the pilot and the co-pilot

killed everybody on board.

[ominous music]

But then they discover that there's both chemical

and nuclear weapons on board.

JOE LAMATTINA: Any time I'm watching a space horror movie

and they're like, we've got to board this derelict spacecraft,

I just--

I just have a panic attack because I'm like,

don't go in there.

Like, it's a perfect horror trope.

Do not go in the abandoned spacecraft.

You don't know what's in there.

[dramatic music]

And sure enough, those guys are not getting out of there alive.

[shouts]

[phone beeping]

Event Horizon is one of those movies

that I tell myself I don't like but I keep watching it.

[audio logo]

Like every once in a while, there's an itch

that only Event Horizon will scratch because there's

so much it does well in the first half to even

really 2/3 in the movie.

I loved the crew.

I loved Laurence Fishburne as the captain.

We're sure that you appreciate being here, doctor, but you

must understand that we don't.

We were taken off a well-deserved leave

and sent into Neptune space.

We are now 3 billion klicks from the nearest outpost.

Talk about feeling like you're in safe hands

on a dangerous journey.

Everyone just feels like well-rounded characters

that you believe, and you want to hang out with,

and you're rooting for.

[dramatic music]

BREA GRANT: And there is no one scarier in a horror

movie than Sam Neill.

[dramatic music]

[metal clinks]

He always brings it.

And he's just great at losing his mind.

Hell is only a word.

The reality is much, much worse.

[dramatic music]

WOMAN: [screams]

[ominous music]

DAVE SCHILLING: The Lewis & Clark

is the ship that's going to rescue the people that are

on the Event Horizon, right?

Because you can't just bring the ship back.

You've got to go have people like discover

what's up there because.

It's been gone for a long time.

[device beeping]

So they arrive at the Event Horizon

and there has been a massacre there.

It's horrifying.

What happened here, doctor?

[dramatic music]

[screams]

BREA GRANT: There was both orgies and people

ripping their eyes out.

And the captain was saying this weird Latin phrase.

[speaking latin]

And it turns out the Event Horizon somehow

opened this sort of portal into a hell dimension

and brought it into the ship.

[dramatic music]

And gradually, all of the people who were on this ship

start to hallucinate, and see their worst

fears and their worst traumas come true,

and lose their minds.

[knife slices]

[dramatic music]

I kind of felt that in a way they wanted to retread material

that Solaris had dealt with.

[eerie music]

I have such wonderful, wonderful things to show you.

ERNEST DICKERSON: I think it just kind of fell

apart for me towards the end.

[eyes crunching]

[screams]

I guess I wanted more out of it.

I wanted more Solaris.

[eerie music]

JOE LAMATTINA: When humans decide to explore outer space,

they're asking for trouble because we don't

know what's on the other side.

And we don't know what's going to happen to us.

And the one thing we don't take into account

is what it's going to do to us mentally.

And Solaris is a perfect example of that.

KURT SAYENGA: Solaris is the name of a planet

with a sentient ocean.

It's vast, and large, and unknowable.

We can't really understand it and we can't

really communicate with it.

[eerie music]

The film follows the psychologist named Kris Kelvin

who comes to find out what's happening on this faraway base

on this planet.

And what he finds is the leader of the expedition has killed

himself and the two other scientists that are there are

acting very, very strangely.

And there are other people but they're not real people.

They're people created by this planet drawn from the memories

of the men on this base.

ERNEST DICKERSON: It's the planet's

way of trying to communicate.

It was just trying to respond to like these brain

waves that it was picking up from these humans that

were around it.

It takes the strongest image that it has

and that strong image is of his dead wife

who committed suicide.

And it creates her.

KURT SAYENGA: He pretends he's cool with this

but he is not cool with this.

So he tricks her into getting into a rocket

and blasts her into space.

[air gushing, wheezing]

Next morning, she's back.

Not the same one, just another copy of her.

[eerie music]

KATE SIEGEL: I've lost people in my life

and if they showed up again, you think in your head like,

well, wouldn't it be wonderful, and we would hug,

and oh, there's my dad again.

But it wouldn't.

It would be deeply disturbing in a way

that you couldn't express because it comes with joy.

Knowing that something is terribly wrong but you want it

so badly, living with that just puts your insides in a twist

and having to make-- like, do I want to keep this?

Of course, you want to keep it.

It's a Faustian bargain that nobody can resist.

But you know it's not going to end well.

[dramatic music]

ERNEST DICKERSON: She even drinks liquid oxygen

at one point and it kills her.

But while they were watching, she

starts to come back to life.

Starts to revive.

[metal clinks]

JOE LAMATTINA: So in the original book,

Chris's character is able to work through his feelings

of guilt around potentially being

responsible for his wife's suicide.

But Tarkovsky takes a little bit of a different approach

and decides to have his character spiral

into complete insanity and buckle under the pressure

of the guilt that he feels.

KURT SAYENGA: By the end of the film,

he seems to be back on Earth.

He's at his father's house.

But then it starts pulling out and you realize

that he's still on Solaris.

He's had a nervous collapse that the planet has made real.

If Alien is in space, no one can hear you scream.

[dramatic music]

Then in Solaris, it's in space, no one

can hear you contemplating your existential dread.

[ominous music]

[birds fluttering]

[gasps]

KURT SAYENGA: Aniara, a film from 2018,

is a Swedish-Danish co-production based

on a novel-length epic poem that was very popular in Sweden,

a place where you can publish novel-length epic

poems about space travel and they're very popular.

[ominous music]

Aniara is basically the nightmare version of WALL-E.

[screams]

[dramatic music]

This enormous cruise ship spacecraft

gets knocked off course and goes drifting off into deep space.

[crowd exclaims]

KURT SAYENGA: And the film kind of chronicles

what happens to all the people aboard the ship over the course

of about 30 years.

MAN: [groans] [non-english speech]

BREA GRANT: You're stuck in this space with other humans

and they can be very scary.

[ominous music]

Much more scary than aliens because humans are reactive.

We don't know what they're going to do.

[screams]

[non-english speech]

[screams]

ALEX WINTER: There's been a lot of great sci-fi

literature that looks at the insanity of being isolated.

Looking at just the human psyche and how it starts to get

impacted in terms of a group of people who

are in isolation going crazy.

[groans]

There's no escape.

There's nowhere you can go, you know?

It's not like, oh, man, I guess I'll go back to Chicago.

[laughs] It's like, well, I guess,

you're going to go to that part of the spaceship and die there

or are you going to go to that part of the spaceship

and die over there.

You can't go outside the spaceship

because you're going to die out there.

If it was me, I'd be like, man, just

put me in the chute and eject me out of here, y'all.

I ain't going to make it. I ain't the one.

[ominous music]

TANANARIVE DUE: We already feel like little pinpricks

in the course of history and space just makes it so obvious

that we are so insignificant in the vast scheme of things.

And it's just unfolded around you with this darkness

everywhere.

I would never be caught dead in space.

[laughs]

[thunder rumbles]

[screams]

[projector whirring]

[eerie music]

[ominous music]

RICHARD RIDDICK: I absolutely believe in god

and I absolutely hate the fucker.

MAN: We have been attempting to summon you here for centuries.

We're all part monsters in our subconscious.

WEIR: A dimension of pure chaos.

Now let me show you.

WOMAN: [screams]

MAN: You're on the express elevator to hell.

Going down.

HAL 9000: It can only be attributable to human error.

My mind is going.

MAN: It's got a wonderful defense mechanism.

You don't dare kill it.

[screams]

[eerie music]

[audio logo]

[screams]