The 11 Movies That Paved The Way for Ridley Scott’s Alien

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Forbidden Planet (1956)

Finally, we get into space! Not that Hollywood hadn’t ventured into the cosmos before, but Forbidden Planet established in a big way the concept of deep space exploration by a crew traveling faster than light, with the entire film set in another solar system. It was also the first sci-fi movie to feature a robot as a major character with its own defined personality, and also included plot points like the mysterious remains of an ancient alien race. It likewise featured a menace that lurked in the shadows and seemed unstoppable. All of these elements would make their way into not just Alien, but other sci-fi milestones like Star Trek, making Forbidden Planet one of the genre’s most influential films, period.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)

This is one of two movies (we’ll get to the other shortly) that has, for many years, been widely cited as a direct influence on Alien. The plot is simplicity itself: a spacecraft launches on a mission to Mars with the crew determined to learn what happened to a previous ship that crashed on the same voyage. Only one survivor, the captain, is found, and no one quite believes his story that his crew was killed by a hostile Martian creature—that is until the monster stows away on the second ship and begins knocking off another crew one by one. Make no mistake: this was and is a cheap, janky, black-and-white B-movie with visual effects and performances on a par with the film’s overall quality. But there are some atmospheric moments while the crew is being stalked through multiple levels of the ship until they finally blow the monster out of an airlock. You do the math on that.

The Haunting (1963)

What does Robert Wise’s Gothic horror masterpiece about the mother of all haunted houses—the first and still best adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—have to do with a sci-fi movie about an alien creature murdering the crew of a spaceship? Well, in theory, not much really, but there is one thing that both films share: the idea of a place as a character. Hill House is very much a major character in both the book and movie of The Haunting, breathing and whispering, and shifting with a life of its own. Conversely, the Nostromo, with its dangling chains, dark, constricted corridors, and dripping, shadowy machine rooms, is also a vast haunted house in its own right, a sort of industrialized labyrinthine cathedral with who-knows-what lurking in its deepest recesses. Scott himself has called Alien “a haunted house movie in space,” and that doesn’t even refer to the far more sinister and bio-mechanical spacecraft the Nostromo’s crew finds an alien egg on. Whatever walks there, walks alone.

Voyage to the End of the Universe (aka Ikarie XB-1) (1963)

This Czechoslovak film, based on a novel by Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem (Solaris), details the voyage of a spaceship on its way to a mysterious “white planet” orbiting the star Alpha Centauri. Various challenges are hurtled its way, including the discovery of an abandoned Earth ship and a crew member’s breakdown, before the ship arrives at its destination and an ambiguous ending. This may be the most obscure title on this list, but director Jindřich Polák’s atmospheric gem is astoundingly cerebral. It’s literary science fiction that with its emphasis on the effects of a long-term space voyage impacted creatives on both Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

Directed by Italian horror auteur Mario Bava (Black Sunday), this is the second film on this list generally considered to have an undeniable influence on Alien, as well as similar films that followed in the latter’s wake, including Pitch Black, Event Horizon, and Scott’s own Prometheus. When two ships on a mission to explore deep space pick up a mysterious signal from an unknown planet, they land on the surface only for the crew of one ship to become possessed by a strange presence and begin killing the others. The force turns out to be the disembodied inhabitants of the planet, who wish to take control of the humans and their ships before heading to Earth. The scene where the human astronauts come across the remains of an alien vessel that crashed on the planet before them was almost directly transplanted into Alien.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stanley Kubrick’s landmark film elevated the sci-fi genre (alongside Planet of the Apes, which came out the same year) as a serious form of cinema, opening the door for the fruitful science fiction films of the 1970s. At the same time, it did examine what it was like for humans to spend long, lonely months and years in space (just like Ikarie XB-1, which Kubrick reportedly screened while working on 2001). And in the character of HAL 9000—the supercomputer that runs the deep space vessel Discovery—this landmark film introduced an artificial intelligence that not only began to exhibit psychological stress, but was capable of actual murder. Sounds to us like a direct predecessor to Ash (Ian Holm), Alien’s android science officer whose job is to keep the xenomorph alive, even at the cost of the crew. Although what is scarier, the AI that malfunctions or the one that works perfectly fine as it undermines employees deemed expendable assets?