The Scariest Things In The Alien Franchise Ranked
Chestbursters and facehuggers are just the beginning of the "Alien" franchise's nasty surprises. In our view, these are scariest things outer space has to offer, ranked.
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00:00What's up everybody, Griffey here.
00:02Alien Romulus has brought the Alien franchise back to theaters and it's scary good.
00:07So I thought we'd make a list of the top five scariest moments in Alien franchise history.
00:12This is your warning, spoilers, all the spoilers.
00:17Number five, Burke turns off the camera.
00:20I love this scene.
00:22I almost had it much higher on the list.
00:24It perfectly exemplifies one of the main tenets of the Alien franchise,
00:29which is human beings are the scariest monster.
00:32That moment, while small, right?
00:34We see Sigourney Weaver's Ripley and Newt sleeping in a medical bay.
00:38They're trying to rest.
00:39All of a sudden, the doors are locked.
00:41The lights go red and a face hugger has been set in there with them, right?
00:45Pretty scary Alien scene.
00:47What makes the scene really scary is when we cut back to the command room.
00:51Everyone's making plans except for one person, Burke, the company stooge who was sent along,
00:56we find out later, to insure company bottom dollar assets, right, the Xenomorph.
01:01Watching Burke watch Ripley, who is our hero from the first one who we love, and this poor
01:06little girl who had survived on her own until she made contact not with Xenomorphs but with
01:11other greedy humans, about to be sacrificed to the face hugger, is terrifying.
01:18Then watching him take his little money-grubbing finger and turn off the TV so no one else
01:23can see the crime he commits perfectly solidifies that humans will always be scarier than Xenomorphs.
01:30Burke isn't a raving maniac.
01:32He is a spreadsheet.
01:33He's doing the math on who matters most, and the company always chooses not human.
01:40Number four, test tube Ripley's.
01:43Now, I can imagine there's a fair number of you saying, how the hell did Alien Resurrection
01:48make this list?
01:49Let me tell you.
01:51Alien where we find ourselves at the start of Alien 4 Resurrection, right?
01:55And I know many of you don't want to, but think about it with me for a minute.
01:57So you're Ripley.
01:58All you've done, your whole life, you went from a background character to the leading
02:03star of this franchise.
02:05All you have ever done, your whole life has become about the nightmare of fighting the
02:08Xenomorphs, and even more terrifyingly, the nightmare of fighting the company that once
02:13was your employer and your lifeline, now set and determined to turn these monsters loose
02:20on all of mankind, right?
02:22Ripley makes the ultimate sacrifice.
02:24She destroys herself, hoping to destroy the monster.
02:27What makes this scene in Alien Resurrection so scary is that death is not a relief.
02:32Even in death, Ellen Ripley is pulled back from the void, and not only pulled back from
02:37the void, finds that she's Ripley number eight.
02:40She even sees a terrifying The Thing style Ripley seven, right?
02:44Kind of a voiceless creature, just moaning in pain.
02:48As a chestburster has been birthed from it, and left there as a husk, an empty Ellen Ripley
02:54husk that was nothing more than a way to shuttle a Xenomorph into the world.
02:59Watching Ripley take in this version of herself is the purest form of nightmare.
03:04Imagine what must be going through her head.
03:06Imagine then turning and seeing test tubes full of mutated, horrifying abominations of
03:11yourself, mixed with the one thing that you spent your whole life trying to save mankind
03:16from.
03:17This is one scene in a movie that almost everyone hated.
03:20This one scene so perfectly describes the nightmare scenario that is Ellen Ripley's
03:26life.
03:27Spoilers!
03:28Spoiler alert!
03:29If you haven't seen Alien Romulus, stop the video now, because number three, Xenobaby.
03:35Essentially, Alien Romulus is a road trip movie with annoyed teenagers.
03:40They just happen to live in really bad condition.
03:42One of said teenagers, who makes their way aboard this station, happens to be pregnant.
03:49She is on this ship, trying to find a better life for herself.
03:53The idea of finding a young woman who doesn't know the dad, who is facing an unknown future
03:58with this baby they have yet to see, it becomes this ticking time bomb.
04:03Through the course of the movie, she finds herself injured by a Xenomorph.
04:07The most likely scenario is that she will die, and her unborn child will die.
04:12Enter Primordial Black Goo.
04:14So we meet Ian Holm again, horrifyingly deepfake backed into the movie as what's left of
04:20the synthetic Rook, right?
04:21Who looks like he is from the exact same line as Ash, Ian Holm's character in the original
04:26Alien.
04:27Somehow, Rook has discovered that through futuristic milking technologies, he can take
04:34to facehuckers and get this black ooze, right?
04:36This black ooze, he describes, whatever enters it mutates, makes them stronger, can adapt.
04:42Which we learn, later through footage of a mouse, is not exactly true.
04:45There can be horrifying consequences, right?
04:48So we find ourselves at an ethical conundrum, which is where good horror happens.
04:53This woman is facing potential death of her and her child.
04:57Rook comes on the screen, and he tells her that with this magical drug, right?
05:01This one injection, her and her child will be saved.
05:04Now, I can imagine there were people in the theater like me, screaming, don't take it!
05:08Don't do it!
05:10What would you do?
05:11If you had a chance, 90 plus percent chance, you were about to die anyways.
05:16Or this drug may save your unborn baby.
05:19The beacon of hope in your terrible post-apocalypse sci-fi landscape, I'm taking the drug.
05:26And we see what happens.
05:28One of the gnarliest births, right?
05:29When they're just ripping cords with bare hands, it's very brutal.
05:33There's some kind of like packaging that the Cabbage Patch kids came in with the little
05:37Xeno baby.
05:38It's a lot, right?
05:39And this scene, to me, captures another real horrifying idea in the Alien franchise, that
05:45our bodies are simply vessels for other things to consume.
05:49And this sequence of the film was real white knuckle tear to me.
05:55Number two, Ash's turn.
05:57So, synthetics have become such a staple in the Alien franchise, I think it's hard to
06:03go back and imagine how shocking it was for audiences of part one, when Ash was revealed
06:09to not be a human scientist, but a synthetic, right?
06:13Throughout the movie, Ash never acted robotic, artificial.
06:17He was just the science officer, right?
06:20And there is something about that turn that so solidifies one of the horrors of the Alien
06:26franchise, right?
06:27Which is the inadequacy and weakness of human beings in this absolutely unforgiving black
06:33destructive maul that is space, right?
06:35By the time it's revealed that he's actually a full synthetic, and that his directive is
06:40to protect this possibly valuable new biological asset at the expense of all the other biological
06:46assets, the space truckers, that is a horrifying calculation, right?
06:52Anytime in Alien you have a synthetic choosing anything over human life, that's scary.
06:57When we see Ian Holm's terrifying performance as he watches the dinner scene, right?
07:03As he then starts fighting people, you're like, why can't they beat up this tiny little
07:06science officer?
07:07Oh my God, what's he doing with that newspaper?
07:10Ash plays as this kind of guy who got bit by a zombie, but won't tell anyone because
07:14he's a scared character.
07:15There is an explanation for this, you know.
07:19We have no idea why he's doing what he's doing.
07:21We can see his brain working and beginning to get a little suspicious, right?
07:26As Ash begins to break bad, we start to see all the other characters looking around and
07:32not trusting each other.
07:34And when you're in an environment like space where you're so isolated and so far away,
07:38and you start looking at people next to you that were your crewmates and your friends,
07:43but hours before, now as possible deranged murderers and monsters themselves, that absolutely
07:50is terrifying.
07:51There's no other word that describes that than horrifying.
07:54Two words.
07:55It is two words.
07:57I'm not a word scientist.
07:58Me fail English?
07:59That's impossible.
08:00Number one, Chessburster.
08:05I'm sure as soon as you turned on this list, this video, there is no possibility that you
08:10thought the number one scene wouldn't be the Chessburster.
08:14It's the most iconic moment in Alien franchise history.
08:17It is one of the most famous scenes in movie history.
08:20It is still as terrifying and impactful as today.
08:24Every single moment in this dinner scene is so perfectly tuned and crafted.
08:29To build the suspense to an unbearable amount, until we finally get our giant punctuation,
08:36the cymbal crash moment that is that sound of the ribcage cracking.
08:42Watching the Chessburster try to come out many times before it explodes out.
08:46It's a slow ... That repetition, the fact that it's not fast, it's not clean.
08:53The fact that the actors' reactions are real moments of shock and awe, because they did
08:58not know what to expect when they were filming this.
09:01Everything we talk about when we say the phrase movie magic, right?
09:05Every choice they made in this scene comes together to make something that is so much
09:11more significant than the sum of its parts.
09:14There might not be another scene in the history of movie that better summarizes to me the
09:21term body whore.
09:23This something inside of us, right?
09:25We go somewhere and we catch a bug, a parasite, right?
09:29A lot of what is really scary about Alien to audiences of the time that people forget
09:34is the kind of penetrative nature of these xenoboards.
09:37The fears of Alien are myriad, right?
09:41The fear of the dark, the fear of nature, the fear of self, the fear of others, the
09:45fear of the future.
09:46They're all there, but they're all there especially in that dinner scene.
09:52That's it for the Top 5 Scariest Moments in Alien Franchise History.
09:55Game over, man!
09:56We're some real pretty s*** now, man!
09:59This is Griffey, the Last Survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.