Alien

The filmmakers have come up with some images that are sheerest nightmare. The film earns its shudders honestly: Scott is too talented to need gratuitousness as a aid.

This gorgeous, leisurely horror film expresses a spectacularly British xenophobia, a parenthetical nightmare of invasion envisioned between an awakening (at the start of the film) and a return to sleep (at its close).

After 40 years, this sci-fi horror masterpiece still feels lethally contemporary.

Everything shrieks fit to burst, ignoring the poster tagline ("In space no one can hear you scream").

I adore this movie. It's a movie that has engaging characters, an incredible creature, and its incredibly scary. It's one of Ridley Scott's best films.

This is a screamingly spooky sci-fi tale with more than a few echoes of "The Thing" but echoes which enhance rather than detract.

Utilizing nothing more than the camera quietly panning around lengthy, isolated, ill-lit corridors is enough to muster chills.

Where 2001 explored mankind's place in the universe and Star Wars was a grand adventure, Alien depicted space as a frightening trap where escape was near impossible.

Even if you aren't a horror or sci-fi fan, you cannot deny the paragon of cinematic mastery that is Alien.

Alien helped redefine the Sci-Fi genre for a generation of moviegoers and became the bar that all other movies had to live up to or surpass.