There’s been a welcomed re-appreciation of John Carpenter‘s filmography over the last few years, in no small part due to the magnificent reissues Scream Factory has put out of such classics as The Fog, They Live, Prince of Darkness and the Halloween movies. Now Scream Factory has done it again with their new collector’s edition of 1995’s Village of the Damned, which includes a wealth of bonus features, including several new documentaries and a pristine transfer. They all make a great case for the remake to be appraised anew as a worthy entry in the master’s back catalogue, not merely a B-side.
Another thing Village of the Damned does is highlight that, rather than being simply a master of horror (which he certainly is), Carpenter is also a worthy science fiction director. Just as many of his movies could be categorized as sci-fi as can be labeled terror flicks, and the proof can be found simply looking at how many extraterrestrials populate his films, including his Village remake.
We went through seven of his features and found seven not-so-adorable E.T.’s and ranked them in order of the terror they inflict on our psyche. These are some baaaaaadass aliens you do NOT want to mess with… even the beach ball. Check out all 7 of the Scariest Extraterrestrials in John Carpenter Movies in the gallery below!
The 7 Scariest Extraterrestrials in John Carpenter Movies
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7. The Beach Ball - Dark Star (1974)
John Carpenter's inaugural effort as a feature director, expanded from a short film, concerned a group of slobs manning the title spaceship as they fly through the galaxy demolishing planets. A pesky alien they picked up (which resembles a beach ball) wrecks havoc onboard, and while its beach ball-like appearance makes it hard to be scared (or laugh, for that matter), writer Dan O'Bannon later used the "blue collar space crew with an alien on board" concept for his screenplay for Alien.
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6. Starman - Starman (1984)
Jeff Bridges got an Oscar nod for playing the title alien, who takes on the form of Karen Allen's character's dead husband Scott. While his monotone voice and mannerisms can be a little creepy, he's basically a benign visitor trying to make first contact. The resulting film is Carpenter at his most character-oriented and tender, showing that he could have been far more than a genre filmmaker if given the opportunity.
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5. The Ghosts - Ghosts of Mars (2001)
These miners inhabited by ghosts of an ancient Martian civilization are pretty silly, looking more like "Sons of Anarchy" rejects than intimidating ghouls. Still, the movie earns points for essentially being a sci-fi remake of the director's own Assault on Precinct 13, which was in itself a modern-day remake of Rio Bravo.
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4. The Cuckoos - Village of the Damned (1995)
Carpenter did very little to distinguish the alien children in this film from Wolf Rilla's 1960 original, and that was very much the point. In the new Blu-ray documentary "It Takes a Village: The Making of Village of the Damned," Carpenter insists it was his vision to make a throwback movie that used that original iconography, perhaps to the disdain of Universal Pictures. As it is, the Midwich Cukoos are quite eerie, especially Lindsey Haun as Mara, the self-appointed leader of the gaggle of glowing-eyed psychics.
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3. The Inter-Dimensional Monsters - In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Very few filmmakers have ever captured the oozy essence of Lovecraftian creatures, and John Carpenter is one of them. In this mind-bending ode to Lovecraft, an insurance investigator played by Sam Neill awakens a dimensional portal that allows a slew of nasty monsters, glimpsed in an ever-so-enticingly brief interlude, that are coming to reclaim the earth.
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2. The Thing - The Thing (1982)
For Carpenter's remake of Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World, make-up whiz Rob Bottin set the high-bar for practical monster effects that's never really been topped in the decades since. His shape-shifting alien conjures up horrors dredged up from the deepest recesses of the ID, creating an amorphous killer that was, is and will always be terrifying.
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1. The Republican Aliens - They Live (1988)
Okay, so this is a little slanted, but then again so is this movie. They Live is Carpenter's none-too-subtle broadside against Reagan-era consumerism and greed, and he only vaguely masks his "It's morning again in America" villains under the guise of invading aliens, but we know what political party they're really affiliated with. This one hits especially, frighteningly close to home these days...
