Movies
‘Under the Skin’ Has the Scariest Alien Scene Since…
A24’s Under the Skin has been out long enough that I consider the image above to be a minor spoiler from what I believe to be the scariest scene from an alien-themed horror film since Fire In the Sky.
In Robert Lieberman’s 1993 Fire In the Sky, a man is abducted by aliens and subjected to awful experiments. The imagery is haunting, chilling, and terrifying. Ultimately, his inability to move is what sent the chills straight down my spine. You can watch the sequence for yourself in the below video.
Last night I finally caught Jonathan Glazer’s masterful Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson plays an alien seducing men into her lair where she strips them of their skin (presumably for other aliens wear to Earth reader Philip Hansen tells me that, in the book, they eat the meat). There’s a lot of build up to this mortifying sequence, which is carries heavily by the score, that I consider to be the scariest thing I’ve seen since Paranormal Activity. Clearly this is just my opinion, and some of you will probably disagree, but I was severely affected by the moment in which we see how a human’s skin is obtained. The above photo teases this scene, which I hope lives up to the hype that I’m dropping right now…
Check out the film this weekend and drop back here to share your thoughts. Is it the scariest alien scene since Fire In the Sky?
Photo source: A24 and Lionsgate.
Updated July 8, 2014
From director David Ayer (Suicide Squad, Fury), Heart of the Beast will hit theaters on September 25 from Paramount Pictures, and GQ shares first look images this week.
In the film, a former Army Special Forces soldier and his retired combat dog attempt to return to civilization after suffering a catastrophic accident deep in the Alaskan wilderness.
Brad Pitt stars in the survival thriller Heart of the Beast, with J.K. Simmons (Whiplash) and Anna Lambe (“True Detective: Night Country”) also starring.
Cameron Alexander wrote the screenplay for Heart of the Beast. Academy Award winner Mauro Fiore (Avatar, Spider-Man: No Way Home) serves as director of photography.
“I’ll just be really honest: it made me cry,” Ayer tells GQ of the script. “Reading the script, it’s like a tone poem, in a sense. It’s so sparse—just a guy, a dog, mountains, and the calamities and triumphs that unfold, but what’s fascinating about the script is they’re constantly rescuing each other. It’s not like a guy and his pet—they felt like co-equals in this story. Brad wanted to be No. 2 on the call sheet, and rightly so. There was just something profound in the script. It felt like a study in grief, in healing, and of the human heart. So I had to do it.”
Ayer promises, “Don’t worry, the dog lives.”
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