By Joshua Tyler
| Published 1 hour ago
Setting a movie in outer space opens up an endless realm of possibilities. Franchises like Star Trek use it to explore hopeful what-ifs. Star Wars uses it as a background for high adventure and complex galactic politics.
In reality, the endless, airless void is a place where it’s a struggle to stay alive. When science fiction explores that, the results are often some of the most terrifying stories ever told on screen.
These are the scariest movies ever set in the dark, cold reaches of outer space.
11. Supernova
The 2000 movie Supernova is what happens when Hollywood tries to clone Event Horizon and ends up performing an autopsy on its own genre. It follows a rescue ship answering a distress call near a collapsing star, only to discover a glowing alien artifact that amplifies human instincts: greed, lust, and self-destruction.
James Spader and Angela Bassett float through the wreckage of a film that’s messy, ambitious, and strangely hypnotic. Supernova isn’t perfect, but it burns with the kind of reckless imagination modern sci-fi rarely dares to touch.
But, we’re just getting started, so hold on because the next movies on this list are about to scare the space pants off you.
10. Aniara
Aniara is a 2018 Swedish sci-fi drama based on a 1956 poem written by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson. It starts with a spaceship accidentally drifting off course while ferrying colonists from Earth to Mars. Cut off from all hope of return, the passengers slowly descend into despair, cultism, and madness as years stretch into lifetimes.
Critics praised Aniara’s haunting realism, minimalist design, and philosophical depth, calling it one of the bleakest space films ever made. What makes it terrifying isn’t violence or aliens, it’s existential horror: the realization that humanity’s optimism, technology, and faith mean nothing in the infinite void, where hope decays long before the bodies do.
9. Europa Report
Europa Report is a 2013 found-footage–style sci-fi thriller about a private space mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa searching for life beneath the ice. Told through recovered mission logs, it follows the crew as isolation, technical failures, and corporate secrecy unravel their mission.
The film was praised for its realism, scientific accuracy, and grounded tone, earning strong reviews despite its small budget. The creeping dread of discovery, silence, and death in a place utterly beyond rescue, where a crew’s curiosity becomes its own executioner.
Even in their final moments, as the movie’s heroes go to their certain death, they’re still striving, still reaching, still trying to learn all that there is to learn.
8. High Life
High Life is a slow, hypnotic descent into cosmic despair. Directed by Claire Denis and released in 2018, it stars Robert Pattinson as Monte, one of several death-row inmates sent into deep space toward a black hole under the supervision of Dr. Dibs, played with eerie sensuality by Juliette Binoche. She’s obsessed with creating life in the void, conducting fertility experiments that turn the ship into a sterile nightmare of isolation, sex, and violence.
The crew unravels, the mission fails, and Monte ends up alone, raising a child born from Dibs’s twisted science. As they drift closer to the black hole, time, sanity, and meaning collapse together.
Critics praised its haunting imagery and raw performances, but be warned, others found it nearly unwatchable.
7. Pandorum
2009’s Pandorum is a claustrophobic sci-fi horror that plays like Event Horizon crossed with Alien mixed with a dose of psychological collapse.
Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster star as two crew members who awaken from hypersleep aboard a massive colonization ship with no memory of who they are or what happened. The corridors are dark, the systems are failing, and the rest of the crew is missing, or worse.
As they explore, they discover the ship is infested with mutated, cannibalistic humans, the result of an experimental genetic serum gone wrong, and that they’ve been drifting in space for centuries. The ship’s true destination was already reached; it crash-landed long ago.
6. Life
Life is a sleek, nihilistic sci-fi horror that feels like Alien dropped in a more modern technology setting. Despite a star-studded cast, the movie was mostly overlooked when released in 2017.
It happens aboard the International Space Station, where a crew of six, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds discover a microscopic organism from Mars. They name it Calvin. It evolves fast, too fast, and soon reveals itself as a predatory, hyper-intelligent lifeform that kills.
As the crew fights to contain it, one by one they die, victims of their own curiosity. The final twist: the last surviving astronaut sacrifices himself to trap Calvin in an escape pod, but the pods get swapped, sending the alien safely down to Earth.
5. Alien: Romulus
In 2024, Alien: Romulus dragged the Alien franchise screaming back into the shadows where it belongs. Directed by Fede Álvarez, it takes place between Alien and Aliens and follows Rain Carradine, played by Cailee Spaeny, as a scavenger who boards a derelict space station with her synthetic “brother” Andy. They’re searching for freedom, but instead unleash a Xenomorph hive that turns the corridors into a meat grinder.
Every inch of the Renaissance Station drips with claustrophobic tension: flickering lights, wet metal, and the hiss of something breathing nearby. The movie’s stripped-down brutality and practical effects make every death feel disturbingly real.
4. Sunshine
Sunshine is normally described as the movie about “astronauts blowing up the sun to save humanity,” but that fails to capture the scope of Danny Boyle’s film. The Icarus II is crewed by a who’s who of today’s stars, before they were stars. Among them are Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, and Rose Byrne.
We created an entire video focused solely on Sunshine, if you’d like to take a deep dive.
It’s more about the crew struggling against the weight of their mission, the isolation of space, and what to do when the sun itself is trying to kill you. The first 45 minutes of the film focus on developing the crew and how they relate to one another, so that the last third of the movie hits the audience like a ton of bricks. The film’s turn into a full-on horror slasher set in space turned some off, but it’s totally effective and terrifying.
With its stunning visuals, smart dialogue, and an emphasis on the science in science fiction, Sunshine is either a cult classic or one of the worst films ever made, depending on who you ask.
3. Alien: Resurrection
Alien: Resurrection is the Alien franchise’s 1997 mutant offspring: grotesque, stylish, and weirdly alive. Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and written by Joss Whedon, it resurrects Ripley 200 years after her death in Alien 3 through cloning, giving birth to a half-human, half-Xenomorph version of the hero.
The military is breeding aliens for research aboard the USM Auriga, but predictably, containment fails, and the creatures turn the ship into a floating slaughterhouse. Ripley joins a crew of mercenaries, including Winona Ryder’s synthetic Call, to survive the carnage. It all ends with a grotesque “Newborn” hybrid creature that views Ripley as its mother and dies screaming through a hole in space.
Critics were divided, but Resurrection has aged into cult status.
2. Event Horizon
Event Horizon starts as a rescue mission and ends as a descent into Hell, literally.
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, the 1997 film follows a crew sent to investigate the lost ship Event Horizon, which vanished and then suddenly reappeared. They find no survivors, only blood-smeared walls and a gravity drive that doesn’t bend space, it rips through dimensions. What the ship brought back isn’t alien life, but pure chaos. A realm of suffering that possesses the crew and turns their guilt into hallucinations.
Sam Neill’s transformation from scientist to zealot is unforgettable, his final act of madness sealing the ship in hellfire. Critics dismissed it on release, but Event Horizon became a cult classic.
We did a deep dive into this one, too, if you’re looking for more Event Horizon.
The ship the movie is named after is so perfectly designed that it almost acts as a malevolent character in the movie. The Event Horizon looks like a baroque cathedral turned torture chamber, and it’s one of the scariest locations ever captured on film.
Anderson’s movie also earned a place on our list of the most extreme, graphic sci-fi movies, and it’s well deserved. Event Horizon is one terrifying ride to hell.
1. Alien
It’s almost impossible to overrate Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien movie. Every moment of the film is sci-fi horror perfection. There could be no other movie at number one on this list.
In Alien, the crew of the commercial spaceship Nostromo investigates a distress signal on a distant moon. The Nostromo is nothing special, and her crew are, in a sense, basically just space truckers. They don’t feel like future space heroes, but like normal people you might know.
These people discover alien eggs inside a derelict ship. One hatches, unleashing a lethal creature that stalks them through their corridors. The crew is slaughtered one by one, and they struggle to find a way to survive in space, where no one can hear you scream.
It holds up brilliantly, all these years later, thanks to still chilling practical effects and stunning camera work. It’s even better seen in a movie theater, where the cold, dark emptiness of space consumes the room you’re watching it in, and contrasts with the confined spaces aboard the Nostromo.
Sigourney’s Ellen Riley is the ultimate final girl and deserves all the praise, but the rest of the cast is every bit as good. They just don’t survive.
Watch it on the biggest screen in the darkest room you can find. There is no topping Alien.
Notably Scary Omissions
Wondering why the sequel, Aliens isn’t in this list? It’s just as good as the first movie, but it’s more of an action film than a horror movie, and so I’ve left it off.
I’ve also avoided great space movies with horror elements, but with less of a horror focus. For instance, Hal is at times terrifying in 2001, but it’s not really a horror movie. Instead, this has been a list of pure, outer-space terror.
