Image: Under the Skin poster/A24
Alien abductions aren’t in the zeitgeist they were in the ‘90s, when The X-Files propelled little green (or gray) men into the pop culture mainstream. The age of the cell phone has highlighted the dubiousness of the idea that flying saucers are constantly buzzing the earth on the hunt for human rectums to probe: with everyone filming everything all the time, it’s harder to imagine that we’re missing so many extraterrestrial close encounters.
Aliens in movies, circa the 2020s, are far more likely to be superheroes (and villains) than outright monsters, which might seem like progress if we hadn’t decided that our fellow humans make equally good targets for our existential fears. Who needs invaders from the stars when humans seem poised to destroy the planet without help? We’ll probe our own rectums, thank you very much.
NOPE | Official Trailer
Bucking the trend, as ever, is Jordan Peele, whose new movie Nope opens this week. With the confession that I haven’t yet seen it and am avoiding spoilers, it certainly seems to be playing off the tropes of alien invasion films. He wouldn’t be the first filmmaker to futz around with our (oddly specific) ideas of what abductors from the stars might be into: The fear of outsiders coming to meddle in our settled lives, or to rip us away entirely from what’s known, is potent, and exciting. Here, in spoiler-light terms, are 15 more films about the unsettling horror of the aliens’ unknown designs for humanity.
