Alien was a revolutionary movie at the time it was released, and it’s still considered to be one of the best movies ever made since it came up with a story that still gives people chills to this day. Horror hasn’t been a new idea for a long time, but the manner in which this movie delivered its most surprising and grotesque design was so great that people have been copying and taking inspiration from it for a long time. There are a lot of movies that are similar in certain ways to Alien since the elements used are hard to miss even if they didn’t take from the movie in the first place. But it’s hard to state that the movies listed below didn’t take anything from this movie since they all have some sort of similarity to Alien in some way. It’s possible that the directors of each movie had never seen Alien, but as it’s been noticed more than once over the years the influence is still there since even those that have never watched a movie like Alien might have picked up the idea somewhere.
Here are a few movies that are kind of similar to Alien.
5. The Shining
This is one of the picks that a lot of people might not understand at first since it’s possible that they might not see the connection. The sheer isolation though, and the certainty that the characters aren’t alone in the hotel kind of hearkens back to the Nostromo. Imagine being so isolated that one can’t get away from the imminent danger that’s getting closer and closer, feeling out every nook and cranny of the space they’ve found themselves in, until one way or another, they know just where everything is and where to go looking when they’re ready to strike. Okay, it’s a little melodramatic, but it’s still creepy.
4. Predators
It’s almost as though someone looked at Alien and said ‘Pssh, we’ve gotta find something even worse than that’. The truth is that the predators are worse since they actively hunt the xenomorphs and have had something to do with them for a very long time. There’s no telling if the predators have anything to do with the engineers that were revealed to have perhaps created the xenomorphs, or if any of that is going to become a united canon. But watching enough Predator movies makes it clear that these hunters have little to no fear of the xenomorphs and see them as a challenge instead of a terror.
3. The X-Files
Whether or not it happened this way, the black oil that eventually formed into an alien that would come bursting out of a person did kind of take the idea from Alien in a sense. It was innovative to be certain since the creatures didn’t come from an egg and they were much different in form. They were every bit as aggressive though and to be certain it’s kind of interesting to think of a fight between one of them and a xenomorph, but I would put my money on the xenomorph without question since the sightless creatures have a slightly better array of natural weaponry and could do some serious damage.
2. Starship Troopers
Due to the sheer number of creatures that are seen in this movie and the fact that they are a hive mind that clusters around a central figure, it’s easy to see how the elements line up. It’s also easy enough to think that the marines from Aliens are just as aggressive if not quite the same as the mobile infantry units from Starship Troopers. Of course, those aboard the Nostromo weren’t nearly as well-trained as the mobile infantry and while they only had to deal with one creature in a ship that they should have known inside and out, they were also ill-prepared for a creature they knew nothing about. But hey, they still lasted longer than some of the MI in Starship Troopers.
1. The Thing
The sheer danger that comes from allowing a single organism that’s hostile and definitely lethal is the common element here since the Thing apparently had no intention of being peaceful as assimilation was the only goal. There was no greeting, no formalities that might have made its intent any clearer, since the moment it started killing people by absorbing them into itself it was kind of obvious that this was a creature that was bent on domination, and it didn’t really feel like explaining itself or even bothering to back up a minute to explain its intentions. Like the xenomorph, it was all predatory instinct and killing power wrapped into a single package, but it was hard to know what the package looked like in this movie.
It’s great to see how various elements of a movie can inspire people to do such great things.
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