Editorials
Five Sci-Fi Horror Movies Featuring Aliens to Stream This Week
Among the new releases this week is Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You, a home invasion with an alien twist starring Kaitlyn Dever and debuting on Hulu on September 22. With it comes the realization of how scarcely populated the sci-fi horror subgenre gets regarding the iconic Gray aliens. These quintessential aliens have emerged recently in the news, but their cinematic counterparts are rarer. That’s a shame, considering how effectively they induce terror, as evidenced by M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (on Max).
This week’s streaming picks are dedicated to the quieter alien invasions. These sci-fi horror films revolve around the Grays and similar extraterrestrials that are more content to invade and toy with their prey quietly.
Here’s where you can stream them this week.
For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.
Fire in the Sky – Max
This film mostly plays out as a sci-fi drama about friends coping with their friend’s sudden disappearance caused by an unidentified flying object. The friends are ridiculed and suspected of murder until their missing pal reappears days later, in the nude and traumatized. When the truth finally gets revealed, it’s genuinely disturbing. While much of the runtime is light on alien action, Fire in the Sky viscerally makes up for that in the cryptid climax. If you’ve already seen it, you know the truth behind the disappearance delivers nightmare fuel that sticks with you.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Max, Prime Video
This update of the 1956 sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is regarded as one of the best remakes, for good reason. Strange pods land on Earth, grow, and invade San Francisco. They take over humans while they’re asleep, creating emotionless duplicates to take over the world. It’s a story that should feel quite familiar at this point, considering it’s been remade so many times, but it’s hard to shake the imagery from this version. The botched duplicate that spliced a man’s face over a dog’s body, the horrific scream of the mindless copycats to alert the alien hive, and the eerie reveal of the pod’s body takeover all contribute to an unnerving invasion flick. The cast is stacked here, too: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Art Hindle, Leonard Nimoy, and Jeff Goldblum star.
The McPherson Tape – Plex, Pluto TV, Tubi
The late ‘80s saw the release of writer/director/producer Dean Alioto’s The McPherson Tape, a lo-fi found footage precursor centered around an alien abduction during a family’s birthday celebration. Also known as UFO Abduction, the early found footage flick offers a brisk runtime packed with eerie Gray alien-induced chills. That it was meant to emulate a 1983 home video means that The McPherson Tape is only for the found footage completionists and Gray Alien aficionados. Still, it remains a fascinating genre experiment with a few creep-out scares.
Pod – AMC+, freevee, Peacock, Roku Channel, Tubi, Vudu
Pod might draw its name from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it’s used as an intentional misdirect for what’s a Twilight Zone-inspired paranoid conspiracy thriller. Siblings Lyla (Lauren Ashley Carter) and Ed (Dean Cates) stage an intervention for their brother, Martin (Brian Morvant), a veteran deep in the throes of psychosis. Martin claims to have found a pod in the woods and, believing it part of a government project, keeps the creature hatched from it in the woods. He refuses to let his siblings see it, though, breeding tension and paranoia as they attempt to get Martin psychiatric help. The commitment to the paranoid conspiracy thrills gives way to something far more unexpected, though appropriately grim. Frequent Keating collaborator Larry Fessenden appears in a minor supporting role.
Save the Green Planet – Kanopy
Byeong-gu believes Earth is on the verge of an alien invasion and that he’s the only one who can save it. With his loyal girlfriend’s help, he kidnaps and brutally tortures corporate execs and politicians he believes to be aliens in disguise. A complete genre mashup, from sci-fi to comedy to horror with paranoia and extreme violence, Save the Green Planet has many shocking moments and unexpected twists. It’s a genre-bender that features one unreliable narrator. Or is he?
From child-eating witches to village-burning dragons, fairy tales have always had a foot in the horror genre. That’s why it makes sense that, for every The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia, there are also darker and more adult-oriented stories about magical worlds inhabited by ravenous monsters and cruel villains.
Funnily enough, these sinister tales were precisely the ones that I gravitated towards back when I was a kid, and I was reminded of this while watching Netflix’s recently released I Am Frankelda, Mexico’s first ever feature-length stop-motion animation and one hell of an entertaining parable about the intersection between fiction and reality.
In honor of this special kind of horror-adjacent fairy tale, today I’d like to share this list recommending six Dark Fantasy films that horror fans might enjoy.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be defining Dark Fantasy as fantastical stories that don’t shy away from the more macabre elements that fuel classic fairy tales. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own grim favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
I’m fascinated by bizarre attempts at blockbuster filmmaking – especially when the resulting movies are somehow still fun despite their corporate-mandated origins. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is precisely one of these strangely compelling studio projects, as this surprisingly successful action-thriller boasts a lot of heart (and tongue-in-cheek humor) for a CGI-heavy creature feature.
Directed by Dead Snow’s Tommy Wirkola, Witch Hunters re-frames the classic fairy tale as an origin story for a duo of badass monster-slayers. Of course, it’s the flick’s anachronistic aesthetic and overall visual flair that make it stand out from other action-horror endeavors from around the same time.
5. The Wolf House (2018)
Made in the tradition of faux cursed films in the same vein as Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made, the eerie backstory to 2018’s Chilean animated flick The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo in the original Spanish) already makes it a nightmarish experience before the flick even really begins.
After all, the movie is presented to us as a faux propaganda film produced by the leader of a death cult (heavily inspired by the real life Colonia Dignidad), with this hybrid animated feature using complex movie magic to simulate a single uninterrupted shot as it tells the story of a lazy young girl who runs away from an isolated colony and encounters a creepy old house in the woods.
4. The Brothers Grimm (2005)
Out of all the Monty Python alumni, Terry Gilliam has had the most interesting career outside of the original comedy group. From fascinating canceled projects (such as his scrapped adaptation of Watchmen) to dystopian parodies that feel more relevant by the minute (1985’s Brazil), even his “lesser” films are still intriguing in their own way.
2005’s The Brothers Grimm is one such project, with this peculiar movie attempting to combine the comedian-turned-filmmaker’s unique visual style with a more blockbuster-oriented plot reimagining the titular brothers as con-artists rather than mere writers. The end result isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but it’s still a legitimately fun ride with plenty of memorable monsters and wonderful performances by both the late, great Heath Ledger and Matt Damon.
3. Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010)
2010’s Dante’s Inferno game may have a reputation as something of an unapologetic God of War clone, but I’d argue that the now-obscure game was aesthetically unique enough to deserve a bigger fanbase. However, while the title remains trapped on the seventh console generation, its highly underrated anime adaptation is a lot easier to get a hold of!
Animated by 6 different studios in order to make the 9 circles of hell feel unique from each other, this may not be a completely faithful adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s poem, but it’s still one heck of a great (not to mention gory) time that I’d highly recommend to fans of Netflix’s take on Castlevania.
2. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
My personal favorite entry in the Underworld franchise, Rise of the Lycans, is a highly ambitious prequel that actually works better if you haven’t had the story spoiled to you by the previous Underworld films.
While the rest of the series features plenty of urban fantasy elements as the movies combine machine guns and modern environments with gothic storytelling, Patrick Tatopoulos’ prequel fully embraces its fantastical origins and tells a classic tale about a doomed romance between a werewolf and a vampire amid a medieval uprising.
And the best part is that we get a lot more Michael Sheen as the fan-favorite Lucian.
1. Solomon Kane (2011)
One of my personal favorite movies on this list, MJ Basset’s criminally underseen adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s other iconic warrior is thoroughly steeped in horror ambience and features plenty of memorable monsters. However, it’s also a classic origin story for a swashbuckling hero that wouldn’t feel out of place in a tabletop RPG.
While I’ve already written about how the film deftly combines both horror and fantasy elements without breaking the bank, I’ll never pass up an opportunity to recommend the bizarre movie where James Purefoy expertly plays a puritan John Wick.
It’s just too bad that we never got the other films in this intended trilogy.
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