Top 10 Alien Invasion Movies: War of the Worlds, Mars Attacks!, and More

We love aliens, we love rankings, so here are the 10 best alien invasion films, according to Screen Large.

There is one thing almost as beautiful and uplifting as disaster movies where Earth and humanity are destroyed, annihilated, crushed, or burned to ashes. Those are the alien invasion films, where an extraterrestrial race comes to destroy us, wipe us out, or simply subject us to slavery and turn us into bio-meat.

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Screen Large has decided to pick the 10 best alien invasion films, with a few criteria: aliens that are openly evil (sorry The Day the Earth Stood Still, Night of the Meteor, Monsters, Annihilation, District 9, etc.), a story set on Earth (sorry Starship Troopers), and films that are actually good (not sorry Skyline, World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles, Darkest Hour etc.).

Obviously, this selection is 100% subjective and invites you to exclaim, “But you forgot this movie!!”.

NB: The feature is being highlighted ahead of Independence Day being broadcast on television this May 25 (even though it isn’t in the list)

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers

• Release: 1956
• Runtime: 1h20

The science-fiction film that seeded one of American culture’s deepest fears. Based on a novel by Jack Finney, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers perfectly captures the way Uncle Sam reads an adversary: an intangible but terrifying force that can possess individuals and align them with a monstrous collective. The premise is loaded with political weight as well as dread. Thus emerges the genre’s watchword: paranoia.

Is it a manifestation of a malevolence within us or a pure ideological fantasy? Regardless, the novel spawned three remakes (two genuinely chilling for different reasons) and scores of variations, which would have expanded this list to 30 films if we hadn’t left them out of this section. Among them are entertaining pastiches (The Faculty, Frissons), brilliant deconstructions of the concept (The Last Pub Before the End of the World), and absolute masterpieces (The Thing from Another World and its remake, The Thing).

A genuine artistic current proving that, despite the threat of an extraterrestrial invasion, humanity remains primarily terrified by itself and the prospect of totalitarian control whose physical consequences the viewer can only imagine. That is also where the genre’s punch comes from: if we can roughly picture what it feels like to be struck by a laser beam, it’s harder to imagine the torments of a mind being stolen. In the body snatcher scenario, the extraterrestrial hypothesis remains what it has always been: an existentially terrifying sword of Damocles. In the infinity of the universe, it’s better to be alone than in bad company.

Prisoner of the Martians

• Release: 1957
• Runtime: 1h28

We tend to automatically associate alien invasions with American cinema from the 1950s, and rightfully so. But on the Japanese side, there was no letting up. Tokusatsu certainly gave a prominent place to the subgenre, especially in its best-known saga: Godzilla. From the famous King Ghidorah to the Ixians of the charming Invasion Planeta X, the King of the Monsters and his subjects had plenty to keep busy — and not just a little.

But it’s not only on their side that invaders attack. Ishirō Honda, the legendary father of Godzilla and a trusted Toho figure, proved it with Prisoner of the Martians, which he considered his best film. Here, if the Martians in question (actually inhabitants of a distant planet who have taken refuge on Mars) first show off their strength by sending a giant robot to smash models, they actually just want the right to marry Earth women, their lineage having suffered from a nuclear war. But humanity will not let itself be played with.