10 Best "What's Around The Corner" Horror Movie Moments
2. The Derelict - Alien
Ridley Scott's Alien is the ultimate in existential terror, something that is made immediately apparent through its excellent opening titles sequence and then amplified again through a submersive opening few scenes.
Said scenes see the crew of the Nostromo respond to a beacon from a nearby planetoid (named LV-246 in James Cameron's sequel, Aliens), with Scott packing in plenty of suspense as they round corner after corner, and encounter a derelict spacecraft, the famed Space Jockey, and of course, a Xenomorph egg chamber.
The secret ingredient to this smorgasbord of terror is Alien's incredible set design and VFX work. H.R. Giger developed a unique visual language for the film that lent itself perfectly to Dan O'Bannon's screenplay and Scott's direction, lending a distinct, organic terror to space as opposed to the mechanical motifs of earlier space horrors like War of the Worlds. This in itself signals a primordial kind of existential dread - that we're even smaller in the vast, infinite depths of the universe than we can ever really comprehend.
Although Alien would arguably ascend to greater heights of terror with the chestburster scene and the crew tracking the Xenomorph through the Nostromo's tunnels, those opening 30 minutes will always be scarier to me. The fear of not knowing, and being confronted by Giger's monstrous architecture, is terrifying enough.