10 Best "What's Around The Corner" Horror Movie Moments

2. The Derelict - Alien

Alien Derelict Ship
20th Century Studios

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.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.