Nightmarish body horror sequences. Directors secretly filming people without their knowledge.
Though we all expect sci-fi movies to be outlandish and sometimes disturbing,
there are times when we get a little more than what we bargained for.
Here are times when sci-fi movies went too far.
"Fire In the Sky" was one of a spate of alien abduction movies
possibly released to tie-in with the success of "The X-Files" TV series.
“Well isn’t it nice to be so highly regarded.”
When a group of loggers encounter a UFO in 1975,
one of them is abducted after being a little too curious for his own good.
Much of the film concerns the subsequent questioning of the missing man's colleagues
and the skepticism of their accounts of what happened on that fateful night. It’s when the
missing logger Travis Walton is found and recounts his own series of events that a decidedly average
science fiction thriller becomes absolutely gripping — with an incredibly intense alien
experimentation sequence that makes even the most desensitized of movie buffs squirm in their seats.
These aren't the benevolent aliens of Close Encounters,
happy to communicate with humanity by means of a jolly little ditty — but rather sadistic
torturers. There's no sterile gleaming white lab but a dingy operating theater.
Walton is partially suffocated before having alien goo bolted into his throat
to stop his futile screaming. The rest of the process is left to our imagination.
With incredibly effective practical effects — especially for the uncaring
alien observers — it's as effective a scene of horror as you'll ever see.
It's also a violent and visceral tonal shift that'll cause you to recoil with whiplash.
Imagine being the sort of person who goes into movies completely blank — the sort of
person capable of avoiding teasers, trailers, and spoilers. While this was possible back in
the '90s, it’s safe to say that this is almost impossible now. Imagine the perfect surprise of
viewing "From Dusk till Dawn" in 1996 and watching as a fun and violent heist movie
suddenly mutated into an amazingly over-the-top vampire movie. Then imagine that same lucky soul
watching the 1989 movie "Society," being entertained by a film that feels like a
David Lynch remake of "Beverly Hills 90210," and then being plunged headlong into that final act.
Imagine being confronted with that orgiastic depraved mass of writhing,
entwined bodies from the fevered imagination of the appropriately named special effects pioneer
Screaming Mad George. "Society" had already been a far from subtle satire of the upper class,
but it's this last gleeful segment that hammers the theme home with a
sledgehammer that the upper class is literally feeding off the poor.
It's as surreal as it is disgusting and will brand itself onto your prefrontal cortex forever.
With both the movie and Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign occurring in the
early nineteen-eighties, the former First Lady's message seemed to have missed an obvious trick.
Although perhaps the catch-phrase "Just Say No or your experiments with psychoactive drugs may
cause you to devolve into a proto-consciousness" might not have looked as good on the posters.
In "Altered States," scientist Edward Jessup experiments with a combination of
narcotics and sensory deprivation to tap into different states of consciousness,
but his experiments take him to the brink of disaster. Firebrand British director Ken Russell
might have seemed an odd choice to helm this William Hurt-starring science fiction body horror,
but his sense of surrealism and spectacle turned out to be the perfect fit.
“It’s too late. I don’t think I can get out of it anymore.
I can’t live with it. The pain is too great.”
Rather than a particular moment standing out, the whole movie is unnerving from start to finish.
Feeling as much like a bad trip getting progressively worse as a cinematic experience,
it's an amazing debut for the sadly missed William Hurt.
In a movie where a far-fetched premise will succeed or fail based on the strength of its lead,
"Altered States" is a surreal nightmare of a movie, discomfort imprinted on every frame.
Loosely adapted from the "unfilmable" 2013 Michael Faber novel of the same name, "Under
the Skin" features Scarlett Johansson as the unnamed lead, an enigmatic woman picking up men
from the streets of Glasgow, Scotland to lure them into an inky black pool where they are devoured.
It's a loose plot, more concerned with atmosphere than story,
but is a compelling and disturbing watch. There's a delightful ambiguity to it all;
is Johansson's alien malignant or benign? Is the black void her homeworld, or a different
dimension? An unconventional narrative and an abrupt ending mean that your questions will more
than likely not be answered to your satisfaction, but — like the book — it'll keep you thinking.
What makes the movie chillingly effective is the fact that some of the cast aren't
professional actors. In fact, many of the scenes were shot with hidden cameras.
This grants the movie an almost documentary-like appearance,
bringing a mundanity to the extraordinary sights the film will present you with.
The title has a dual purpose, appertaining to the true form that lurks under Johansson's earthly
form as well as the fact that this film, like a splinter, will well and truly get under your skin.
It's one of the most memorable scenes in science fiction and is as effective now
as it ever was — a moment that cements "Alien" as a truly terrifying piece of sci-fi cinema.
Executive Officer Thomas Kane, seemingly recovered
from his close encounter with an overly friendly face-hugger,
settles down for a meal with his fellow crew members. The mood is light, but the eighth
passenger onboard the USCSS Nostromo is about to make its presence known, bloodily and messily.
So, what makes the scene work and prevents it from being gratuitous gore? A believable world, a
stellar cast of believable characters, and genuine human reactions. The stage directions merely state
"the alien emerges." The crew — having set up the shot — knew what this would entail,
the cast, less so. None of them were quite prepared for how much blood there would
be — especially Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, who passed out after the cameras stopped.
“Oh god!”
Director cruelty, perhaps, but undoubtedly cinematic magic.
According to critics at the time, the whole movie went too far. Admittedly, many of the scenes from
John Carpenter's remake of the 1951 B-Movie "The Thing from Another World" could be considered
extreme and therefore worthy of consideration on this list — but one in particular stands out.
Quite understandably, considering all the stress of being stranded in an
Antarctic base with a shapeshifting alien, geologist Vance Norris has a
heart attack. The fun really begins when he's being defibrillated by Doctor Copper
that Vance's chest opens up wide, revealing a gleaming set of extra-terrestrial incisors.
As an armless Copper staggers backward, Norris' chest erupts like a Las Vegas fountain,
spewing out another alien form. Culminating with the reveal of a head with spider legs
that subsequently becomes a close encounter of the flambéed kind
thanks to the flamethrower of Kurt Russell's MacReady, it's a scene that barely comes up
for air. Considering how the scene started, here's hoping your heart's okay after it all.
Another in a lengthy line of adaptations of the works of Rhode Island's own H.P. Lovecraft,
cosmic horror is par for the course. In many,
humanity is but an insect beneath the regard of godlike beings that could destroy us with
a whim — but this isn't the most disturbing thing about this 2019 Nicolas Cage adaptation.
When a meteor falls into Nathan Gardner's farmland,
it brings madness and horror, as a reality and sanity-wrenching organism has arrived with it.
Struck by energy from the titular Color out of Space — which is primarily a pink purple,
incidentally — Gardner's wife and son are horrifically fused together.
Rather than be killed outright — the smallest of mercies — this new hybrid form survives.
Believing this hideous abomination can be cured, the unstable Gardner locks them away.
The form continues to mutate, the son slowly being absorbed into the mother's mass,
both conscious and aware of their predicament. Those gurgling utterances will stick with you
long after the rest of "Color out of Space" has faded from your memory.
“Tell it to stop.” “I’ve gotta get off this farm. Tonight.”
A film that opens with a fetishist obsessed with embedding pieces of scrap metal into his open
wounds was never going to be accused of subtlety or restraint. With the protagonist — known only
as the salaryman — dragged into a world of techno-fetishism and biomechanical horror,
it's as much a frenzied fever dream as it is a movie.
"Tetsuo: Iron Man" is a hyper-energetic, chaotic,
and experimental film — part art-house, part low-budget horror. On the rusted metal surface,
it owes a debt to David Cronenberg's penchant for body horror and the melding of flesh and
metal — but it's just as beholden to the work of Tomoyuki Tanaka, with many of the
fights between metal-imbued twisted cyborgs feeling like clashes between scaled-down Kaiju.
The film contains plenty of scenes that the average movie-goer would
cringe at — in particular, ones involving an appendage with drill-like qualities.
And though it was filmed in high-contrast black and white, it’s safe to say its grisly,
nightmarish images will color your subconscious thoughts for days after watching it.
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