Alien

The commercial spacecraft Nostromo diverts to investigate a distress signal and returns with an unexpected passenger. What follows is one of cinema’s most sustained and perfectly executed exercises in dread as the alien creature — H.R. Giger’s nightmare made flesh — picks off the crew one by one. Ridley Scott’s masterwork is simultaneously a haunted house film in space a feminist thriller and a body horror classic. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is one of cinema’s greatest heroes and the alien itself remains the most terrifyingly designed creature in film history.