Halloween: 10 Terrifying Things From The 90s
10. Bloody Aliens
In the mid-90s, footage emerged of a supposed alien autopsy, recorded in the aftermath of a UFO crash near the New Mexico town of Roswell in 1947. The grainy black and white film was quite clearly a hoax, but proved convincing enough to fool the likes of, er, Fox News. As has always been the case, the media (and the hoaxers) was responding to the cultural mood of the time. And that mood was aliens. Lots and lots of aliens. Everywhere. By the end of the 80s, pop culture aliens were dopey, loveable figures, more likely to spout wisecracks or waddle around in your mother's hat than pose any serious threat to all human life as we know it. This began to change when President Clinton took office. He wasn't an alien, but it was about the only thing he wasn't accused of. A belief persisted that the President had made a deliberate effort to obscure certain facts about his personal life, namely his sexual and financial dealings. It wasn't such a leap to suggest the political establishment was suppressing other potentially sensitive information, such as the existence of UFOs. One of the most iconic shows of the 90s, The X-Files, took this notion and ran with it for nine series. In turn, it led to a boom in flying saucer sightings and Roswell literature and, eventually, the aforementioned tape, which pre-dates Danny Dyer's 'I Believe in UFOs' by about fifteen years and still has a more convincing alien puppet. What did it all amount to? Not very much. A Mars Rover was launched in 1997 and managed to find some rocks. Alien rocks, but rocks all the same. The UFO fad had peaked a year earlier, when Babylon Zoo released the magisterial 'Spaceman'. 74 million copies were sold off the back of a Levi's advert, even though it only used the intro. Hopelessly cheesy as it is, I still defy you not to be a little unsettled by the sped-up vocals such things never sound right. If that doesn't have you reaching for the skip button in abject terror, then the following three minutes of sub-Pumpkins dirge rock should do the trick.