A Twist In Terror: Horror Franchises That Unexpectedly Go To Outer Space

Discussing slashers with a sci-fi twist

Horror fiction - specifically horror movies - haunt our collective imagination throughout each month of the year, but October is when it’s showtime for ghosts, zombies, and possessed cars. Halloween is a frighteningly fun holiday season to descend into the depths of lengthy franchise festivals - but just how many of these scary movies rise from the dead and fly like a bat out of hell and go all the way into the final (fatal?) frontier?

Evil never dies but it rarely ventures beyond our earthly realm in most horror flicks (the standard kind with haunted houses and exorcisms, that is). There are eerie exceptions, though. Terror strikes the stars in some of the most unforgettable classics with an undying popularity. In case you’ve been living in a tomb, here is a (very) brief list of some of the all-time astro-adventures:

Alien - Ridley Scott’s 1979 stellar masterpiece took suspense to an entirely new level. This extraterrestrial epic redefined sci-fi horror while launching a decades-long fascination with battles against not only the dreaded xenomorph, but also just how dangerous space can be.

Event Horizon - this 1997 interstellar thriller featured an all-star crew aboard its cast, and each of their characters went through hell - some possibly more literally than others. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect was the notion of eternal damnation being a universal threat/entity/dimension that spanned into the space/time continuum itself. In this picture, demons and devils entered the space race, tormenting unlucky explorers.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial - Okay, this 1982 Spielberg story about a boy and his alien isn’t a traditional horror movie. Despite not belonging in the same category as the likes of Pitch Black, Life, Virus, or Doom (the list goes on and on), E.T. scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Close Encounters of the Third Kind isn’t a shockless romp either, but something about the creature design of everyone’s favorite extraordinary extraterrestrial still gives me the creeps.

Horror in space is essentially a genre unto itself, with numerous titles that range in familiarity with fans, but many of these movies push the boundaries of our planetary limits. Pandorum, Apollo 18, Sunshine, Lifeforce, Ghosts of Mars, Galaxy of Terror - you could binge these until mankind actually builds a functioning colony on Mars and even then you’d still have some leftover cinema to watch. Earthbound tales like The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Fire In the Sky which at least begins on land, and Signs, all invoke uneasy feelings to put it mildly. What piques my particular interest are the freaky franchises that start out on terra firma but take a turn and blast off into infinity and beyond what anyone saw coming.

To clarify, here is a short list of famous horror series that lifted off into uncharted territory that are radically unlike their prior entries:

Hellraiser: Bloodline - 1996 saw the fourth offering from Pinhead and his pain-inflicting Cenobite pals. They travel to the cosmos in a futuristic fear-fest. Terrorizing through time, “Bloodline” showcases sequences taking place in the distant past in France depicting the creation of the puzzle box that unleashes hell amongst its unfortunate victims. Whilst in the future, Pinhead’s hellish wrath attacks the ill-fated crew of an honest-to-goodness starship. Not only is this bonkers in general, but the penance-pedaling presence of Pinhead kinda-sorta spoils subsequent films in the franchise. Pinhead is an immortal being, I suppose, but him existing in our relative future implies that he does not get vanquished at any point, not truly. With a total of ten movies before the Hulu-raiser reboot, people continued to try to nail the protruding villain, but the Cenobites just can't be pinned down.

Jason X - this space odyssey was released in 2001, and while not sharing the fan-favorite Friday the 13th title, this subspace slasher is technically the tenth in the series - hence the “X.” Weird licensing and IP rights issues aside, Jason X is a hilariously ultraviolet, spacefaring bloodbath that takes camper-killer Jason Voorhees into the next generation of evil. With an upgraded hockey goalie mask, the machete-wielding man-menace wreaks havoc amongst humans and androids alike. Supernatural schlock has never been more crazy-fun.

Leprechaun 4: In Space - 1996 also bequeathed unto us another horror icon that beamed up to deliver scares among the (lucky) stars. Warwick Davis’ reprisal of the titular troublemaker finds him in a battle against alien warriors, facing off against a mad scientist, and abducting an alien princess. A natural progression for the franchise.

Dracula 3000 - 2004’s vampiric video venture starred Casper Van Dien, Erika Eleniak, and Coolio as cosmic corsairs who encounter a wayward craft that is - surprise, surprise - full of bloodsucking vampires. Count Dracula in the future is a premise anyone can sink their fangs into but I should note that this film isn’t technically a sequel. This version of the famous vamp is mainly more of a technological take on the universally-known movie monster. Drac may not be able to see his own reflection, but for anyone who saw this movie got to witness Van Dien portray a very distant relative of Van Helsing, which is neat.

Other cosmic creepers of note include Amityville In Space, Critters 4, and, of course, Venom, which I mention because it falls somewhere in the Sonyverse of Spider-Man-related MCU-adjacent spinoff solo villain movies. Not fully horror, Venom does involve an alien symbiote that likes to dine on brains (also see: Spider-Man 3).

Finally, while not anywhere close to a horror movie, perhaps the best example of an ongoing film franchise unexpectedly blasting off into outer space is F9: The Fast Saga, which saw two beloved characters taking, what else, a modified car and going faster than no person has ever gone before and into orbit. Maybe it wasn’t such a surprise; going into space may have been the only place left for this series to go. The tenth movie has already come and went with the promise of an eleventh. The sky's the limit, and, dare I say, the stars are their destination - the final frontier for the family.

Switching gears to literature, namely, my debut full length novel, Unsecret Identity: Eric Icarus - Book One soars to new heights of adventure and explores the boundaries of sci-fi as told in a young adult superhero setting. Will be main character one day fly off into space? Well, there’s only one way to find out. Read the ebook which is now available from the Amazon Kindle store.

https://a.co/2XAtxvH

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