Alien (1979) is a wonderful showcase of a horror movie not needing many scares. Most of the horror is focused near the end, saving time for development for the characters, which makes the horror scenes later 10 times more tense as we actually worry for the outcome of their fate. The practical effects for a movie set so far into the future are completely seamless and impressive, especially for the time.

All of the scenes involving the alien, of which they are very few, not only barely show it in full, but also hold an impressively disgusting amount of gore, and has a sense of other worldliness, and a touch of reality, being designed after spiders and something vaguely human.

The designs of H. R. Giger are exceptional. Seeing the way the alien uses it’s own morphology mixed with human biology makes the alien seem more threatening, using both advantages from itself and us to hunt down and kill as many people as possible.

Overall a terrifying movie.