15 Best Alien Movie Deaths

With Alien: Covenant leaving bloody mayhem in its wake, horror fans everywhere are aching to be placed in stasis as we continue to wait for Ridley Scott’s prequel series to link up with the story of his 1979 masterpiece of deep space terror.

Over the course of the space-faring series, the odds of any given character making it to the end in one piece haven’t been great. Indeed, some of the most memorable moments in the saga are the colourfully grisly death scenes that inevitably follow encounters with the titular alien beasts. Ranging from the terrifying to the shocking, the bloody brush which illustrates the still-unfolding tale has plenty of different shades at its disposal.

Before we even met the latest batch of Xenomorph-fodder, then, we couldn’t lie about their chances, but they had our sympathies. Now, the Covenant’s doomed expedition to paradise is firmly entered into the annals of Alien history.

t’s a list that includes macabre moments from each of the main films from a series running strong for almost 40 years and counting. Keyword there being strong, meaning no Alien vs Predator.

Acid-soakings, mutilations, facehuggings, and bodily explosions are just some of the gory sights we’ve endured over the decades, but in space, no one can hear us scream.

The first onscreen death in James Cameron’s action-packed sequel to Alien harkens back to the iconic first death in the franchise. Making the cut for the escalating dread and terror it creates, it sets the tone for the bloody, horrible carnage the naive Marines are about to experience.

It’s an unnerving moment when Mary is find cocooned to the wall of a hellish Alien hive, an innocent caught in the midst of a horrible fate. The image of her convulsing in agony triggers a visibly distressed Ripley, her nightmare returned to the world of reality.

Quite unlike the very first time this happened in Scott’s original film, we’re now fully prepared, bracing ourselves, but that hardly lessens the awful sight of the infant alien punching its way out of Mary’s chest.

It’s the death that sets the remainder of the film’s near-constant onslaught in motion, with the hordes of furious Xenomorphs roused from their slumber. It took a while, but this was the point where the Marines learned what Ripley knew all along: this won’t be another bug hunt.