Planet of the Vampires is a low-budget, Italian, sci-fi movie, from 1965 — that may have influenced a high-budget, American, sci-fi movie, from 1979:
Several critics have suggested that Bava’s film was a major influence on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), both in terms of narrative details and visual design. Derek Hill, in a review of the MGM Midnite Movies DVD release of Vampires written for Images Journal, noted, “Bava’s film (along with It! The Terror from Beyond Space, 1958) was a direct influence on Ridley Scott’s 1979 big budget B-movie Alien. But where Scott’s film tried to mask its humble drive-in origins, Planet of the Vampires revels in its origins. The film literally feels like a pulp magazine cover come to garish life…”[15] Robert Monell, on the DVD Maniacs website, observed, “[M]uch of the conceptual design and some specific imagery in the Ridley Scott screamer undoubtedly owes a great debt to Mario Bava’s no budget accomplishments.”[16]
One of Vampires‘ most celebrated sequences involves the astronauts performing an exploration of an alien, derelict ship discovered in a huge ruin on the surface of the planet. The crewmembers climb up into the depths of the eerie ship and discover the gigantic remains of long dead monstrous creatures. In 1979, Cinefantastique noted the remarkable similarities between this atmospheric sequence and a lengthy scene in the then-new Alien. The magazine also pointed out other minor parallels between the two films.[17] However, both Alien’s director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon claimed at the time that they had never seen Planet of the Vampires.[18]