For Halloween io9 compiled its list of the 50 Scariest Movies Of All Time, with Alien taking the top spot.
A few weeks ago they discussed the “secrets” of the making of Alien, as revealed in Alien Vault:
- We owe Alien to the failure of Jodorowsky’s Dune.
- Roger Corman almost made Alien.
- There’s an actual blueprint of the Nostromo, as well as a detailed schematic.
- The Nostromo was a self-contained set.
- The Who’s Roger Daltrey gave us the weird light show when the facehuggers are awoken.
- Yaphet Kotto was so dedicated to improv, he thought he could change the movie’s ending.
- Sigourney Weaver wore thigh-high hooker boots to her audition.
- It’s a myth that the ten-minute self-destruct countdown unfolds in real-time.
I’m not too impressed with that list. I agree with the comment that this is a list made by people in their thirties and forties, and this means they’ll choose movies from about 30 years ago, when they were kids. They saw the movies when they were kids, and they remember how scary they were. Newer movies, they saw when they were older, so didn’t get as scared. Older movies, they just notice how lame the special effects are.
My list includes Jaws 2, which I find much scarier than even Jaws 1. I saw J2 when it first came out, I was young, I got scared. I didn’t go back and see J1 until I was older, and so it doesn’t impress me as much. Same thing for Alien and Aliens.
I found that the horror movies on the list were either quite recent or quite old.
Anyway, I was aware of Alien from a young age, but I didn’t watch it until I was an adult, after I’d watched the sequel, Aliens, repeatedly, and the original certainly qualifies as a scary film, even though, as an adult, I didn’t find myself looking under the bed or in the closet for face-huggers.