7 Creepy Lighthouses Featured In Horror Films

In Alex Garland’s 2018 sci-fi, Annihilation, Lena is forced to travel through the shimmer to find answers surrounding the strange anomalous zone. Her journey ends when she reaches a lighthouse.

Science fiction films featuring monsters/aliens usually use an isolated location to trap their characters with a creature, for example a spaceship in Alien and Life, an underwater base in The Abyss, and an Antarctic research facility in The Thing.

Lighthouses are lonely places. They take up residence in areas without much light, and therefore, without many people. They are nestled into a rocky coast that most would not build a structure on. This makes them incredibly isolated.

As Lena approaches the lighthouse, she is completely isolated from the world she used to live in. This place has separated itself from regular earth life. The lighthouse represents an unsettling otherness to what we know.

Its function, which used to be guiding ships to safety, is long gone. Like the creatures in the shimmer, it has evolved and found a new purpose – the nesting ground for an alien creature.

To add to the uneasiness, the structure of the lighthouse is tipped on its head. They rarely vary in design from a room at the top of a spiral staircase, yet here, the asteroid has created a tunnel buried underneath its foundation. As Lena crawls in, the last shred of familiarity the lighthouse held is gone. Just like the familiarity of her existence.