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Do aliens exist? Based on how many alien invasion movies there are, you'd be forgiven that there's gotta be some proof of extraterrestrial life—and that the aliens are out to get us here on Earth. But, for now, attacking aliens are just the stuff of fiction. (Barring any funny business at Area 51, of course.) Makes for some great movies, though!
Aliens are an ideal threat for a sci-fi flick or an action romp. They're a strange, unknown menace—and they typically lend themselves to exciting special effects, too. Often, these alien invasion movies can have elements of the horror or action genres, too. One thing that's (almost) always true? When aliens come in these movies, it's usually bad news for Earthlings. Some ground rules before we start listing: In an alien invasion movie, the aliens need to be invading Earth, specifically. That means that fantastic sci-fi featuring strange worlds don't qualify, nor do movies like the Alien franchise, where the Xenomorphs are attacking, but they're not attacking Earth. (Honorable mention to Alien vs Predator, which does qualify on this front but is not good enough to make the list.) Invading aliens also need to have some semblance of an army—a one-off alien monster from outer space does not an invasion make.
Article continues below32. Plan 9 From Outer Space
Year: 1957
Director: Ed Wood
Widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made (if not the worst film ever made), Plan 9 From Outer Space is the masterpiece of Ed Wood, a '50s genre filmmaker whose passion was huge but whose talents were, ah, lacking. Made famous in the '90s when it was X-Files protagonist Fox Mulder's favorite film and by Tim Burton's funny and sympathetic biopic of the maligned director, Plan 9 From Outer Space probably doesn't deserve the label of the worst film of all time. It's certainly not good—it's a confused, haphazardly made tale of aliens who bring corpses back to life to invade Earth—but there's something charming about the inept gusto.
31. Space Jam
Year: 1996
Director: Joe Pytka
That's right! Space Jam is an alien invasion movie! Danny DeVito voices the owner of an amusement park in outer space, and in order to turn business around, he sends his minions to Earth to try to abduct the Looney Tunes—who in this fictional universe are cartoon characters but are also real and live inside the Earth. Bugs Bunny and Co. won't go without a fight, so naturally it comes down to a basketball game where the Tune Squad has Michael Jordan on their side and the alien "Monstars" have stolen the ballin' abilities of several of the NBA's best players. You know… normal stuff!
30. The Tomorrow War
Year: 2021
Director: Chris McKay
The Tomorrow War, Amazon Prime Video's expensive, high-profile sci-fi action flick, could've benefited from either being a notch more serious or a tick more silly. As it is, the Chris Pratt-led movie is stuck a bit in the middle; fun but not really funny, exciting but not really engaging. Still, the action isn't bad, and the premise—mankind is drafting people from the present day to fight in a losing war against invading aliens in our future—is novel.
29. Battleship
Year: 2012
Director: Peter Berg
Tremendously, breathtakingly stupid, Peter Berg's adaptation of the iconic board game is in some ways a nadir of cinema as an art form, but in other ways it's a total hoot and a holler. Reimagining the board game's World War II ship vs ship naval combat as a sci-fi actioner that pits some plucky young Navy cadets (including one played by Rihanna) against aliens whose peg-shaped weapons look conspicuously like the game's playing pieces, Battleship is enjoyable trash (complimentary).
28. Save Yourselves!
Year: 2020
Directors: Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson
John Paul Reynolds and Sunita Mani star in this clever sci-fi comedy about a millennial couple who attempt a digital detox, only for aliens to invade while they're off the grid in upstate New York. Far from grotesque big-brained extraterrestrials or imposing robots from outer space, these invaders appear to be nothing more than fuzzy poof balls—yet they're still quite dangerous. Save Yourselves! doesn't do that much more beyond its premise or offer more than unlikely aliens, but it's a new spin on the subgenre, and it's pretty funny.
27. Encounter
Year: 2021
Director: Michael Pearce
It's hard to describe this under-seen streaming movie without spoiling it, so skip ahead if you're interested in seeing Riz Ahmed lead a very grounded sci-fi inflected movie and don't want to know the twist. The film follows Ahmed as Malik, a Marine veteran who goes on the run with his two sons because he claims there are alien parasites that have invaded and are taking over the world. The reality is that there are no aliens; he's having a mental episode. Despite having no real aliens—or rather, because it doesn't—Encounter has a real sense of stakes, and the danger Malik poses to himself and others because of his illness (which the movie treats with respect) is as gripping as any flying saucer could hope.
26. Evolution
Year: 2001
Director: Ivan Reitman
Intended by director Ivan Reitman to be a sci-fi equivalent of Ghostbusters' horror-comedy blend, Evolution stars David Duchovny (hot on X-Files at the time) and Orlando Jones as college professors who discover a meteor carrying extra-terrestrial life in the Arizona desert. When the alien life on the meteor starts evolving very, very rapidly, this discovery soon becomes a threat to the planet. Evolution was not a Ghostbusters-level success by any means, though it's an enjoyable genre romp with some funny bits and plenty of cool alien critters.
25. Monsters vs Aliens
Year: 2009
Directors: Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman
If Shrek was a sarcastic parody of fairy tales, this DreamWorks Animation movie is a fun homage to genre movies of the '50s. Reese Witherspoon voices a woman who is hit by a meteor and grows to be 49 feet and 11 inches tall (a riff on the classic B-movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman). Now a "monster," she's recruited by the government to join forces with other monsters (whose ranks include spoofs of Mothra, The Blob, The Fly, and The Creature From the Black Lagoon), to battle invading aliens.
24. No One Will Save You
Year: 2023
Director: Brian Duffield
This sleek, almost dialog-free Hulu movie combines the alien invasion sci-fi genre with the home invasion horror genre, and the result is one of the best thriller movies of 2023. Kaitlyn Dever stars as Brynn, a young woman living alone who is seemingly a pariah to everyone else in her small town—meaning she is very much on her own when aliens start poking around in her home. The alien designs in No One Will Save You are top-notch, innovating on the standard, "generic" visual of big-headed, little gray aliens but warping their limbs into geometric shapes in a way that makes them both iconically familiar and totally, well, alien.
23. Monsters
Year: 2010
Director: Gareth Edwards
Few working directors have a better grasp of visuals and production design than Gareth Edwards, who has a knack for creating fully realized genre worlds on relatively tiny budgets. His directorial debut, Monsters, is a good example of what was to come. The movie stars Scoot McNairy as a photojournalist tasked with escorting his employer's daughter home from Central America, meaning they'll need to cross through Mexico, which has become a gigantic quarantine zone since huge tentacled aliens overran it after a NASA probe carrying them crashed. Monsters may stretch the definition of alien invasion, but it's worth putting on this list because the vibes are very similar—the aliens are already here, it's just a matter of trying to keep them contained.
22. Little Shop of Horrors
Year: 1986
Director: Frank Oz
This theatrical version of this musical—an adaptation of an off-Broadway show that was itself an adaptation of a non-musical horror comedy from 1960—doesn't have a full-fledged alien invasion. Seymour (Rick Moranis) realizes that the talking, man-eating Venus flytrap he found after it mysteriously appeared during a total eclipse of the sun is, in fact, a "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space" and manages to stop it and live happily ever after with Audrey (Ellen Greene). However, in the spectacular original ending—which is also the end of the stage musical and was replaced when movie test audiences hated it—Seymour gets eaten, and the plants become a sensation that eventually takes over the Earth. Don't feed the plants!
21. Slither
Year: 2006
Director: James Gunn
James Gunn, now better known for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and heading DC's Cinematic Universe, got his start in gnarly genre movies, and it shows in 2006's Slither (aka one of the best horror movies that you've likely never seen). A sci-fi comedy horror that's plenty gross, Slither is about an invasion of alien parasites in a small South Carolina town. There's body horror aplenty as these slug-like extra-terrestrials slither and infect the townsfolk while Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks attempt to stop them.
20. District 9
Year: 2009
Director: Neill Blomkamp
The aliens don't exactly "invade" in this 2009 movie, which was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars—a rarity for sci-fi movies! Instead, the alien "prawns" kind of showed up over Johannesburg… and then their mothership just stayed there, with the prawns eventually being relocated to a township in a metaphor for South Africa's Apartheid era. District 9 does an excellent job of capturing the aftermath of a war, even though in this case, the war didn't happen. (Or at least it hasn't happened yet. District 9 ends on a note of uncertainty.)
19. Earth vs the Flying Saucers
Year: 1956
Director: Fred F. Sears
This classic '50 sci-fi flick isn't the best alien invasion movie, but it might be one of the most iconic. Boasting special effects from the legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, the film tells a pretty standard tale of attacking aliens and seemingly unstoppable destruction until an intrepid scientist works with the military to invent a device that stops them. Earth vs the Flying Saucer tells that familiar story with style, managing to be familiar and a little cheesy without being silly. There's a reason why Earth vs the Flying Saucer is so frequently seen playing on TV in newer sci-fi movies, as it's the platonic ideal of a competent yet, in retrospect, quaint alien attack.
18. The Faculty
Year: 1998
Director: Robert Rodriguez
When you're in school, sometimes it seems like your teachers might as well be from another planet, and in The Faculty, a cult classic bit of '90s sci-fi horror, they are. Starring an impressive cast whose ranks include Jordana Brewster, Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall, and Josh Hartnett when they were all young, The Faculty is pulpy fun, following a bunch of students as they begin to suspect that aliens are taking over the staff of their high school. Outsized teen drama makes an alien invasion even more over-the-top.
17. 10 Cloverfield Lane
Year: 2016
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
John Goodman is exceptional (and quite terrifying) in this loose spiritual sequel to the found footage kaiju flick Cloverfield. When Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) gets in a car accident, she wakes up inside of a bunker, and Goodman's unstable survivalist, Howard, assures her that they need to stay inside because aliens have invaded and the air outside is poisonous. While the film does eventually tip its hand, so much of its power comes from the uncertainty, as Michelle can't be sure whether or not to believe Howard—and even if she does, who is the bigger threat? Aliens, or this strange man?
16. Invaders From Mars
Year: 1953
Director: William Cameron Menzies
A young boy who begins to suspect that his neighbors are being taken over by something, and that it probably has something to do with the flying saucer he swears he saw land outside his bedroom window. The first alien movie ever to be in color (it was rushed so it could beat War of the Worlds, which came out the same year), Invaders From Mars could easily have been cheesy like so many '50s movies, but there's a lightly surreal, dreamlike quality to the movie that makes it earnestly unsettling. Other films would use many of the same plot beats and tropes as Invaders From Mars did and improve on them, but the 1953 movie is an enduring cult classic for a reason.
15. A Quiet Place
Year: 2018
Director: John Krasinski
The first A Quiet Place movie is set after the aliens have invaded; if you want the chaotic moment of first contact, the prequel A Quiet Place: Day One has got you covered. But John Krasinski's post-apocalyptic horror movie, which follows a family (played by Krasinski, his real-life wife Emily Blunt, and child actors Noah Jupe and Millicent Simmonds) is the best of the pack. It's thrilling watching the family silently struggle to survive because the invading aliens are essentially indestructible and hunt based on sound. The long stretches of silence inherent in the premise allow for plenty of tension and moments of explosive release.
14. Attack the Block
Year: 2011
Director: Joe Cornish
John Boyega stars in this cult classic sci-fi action flick from the United Kingdom. Moses (Boyega) is the leader of a teenage gang of street hooligans in South London, and when alien creatures suddenly start falling from the sky, they have much deadlier things to deal with than coppers. Brisk, exciting, and featuring a unique alien design that doesn't really resemble any other creep from space moviegoers have seen before, Attack the Block is a breath of sci-fi fresh air. Jodie Whittaker and Nick Frost co-star.
13. Invasion of the Astro-Monster
Year: 1965
Director: Ishirō Honda
Plenty of Godzilla movies feature alien kaijus and several of them feature evil aliens who are unleashing monsters on Earth, but Invasion of the Astro-Monster, the sixth of the franchise, might feature the best. The Xiliens from Planet X appear and tell mankind they will offer a cure for all disease if we let them take the monsters Godzilla and Rodan to their planet so they can defeat the three-headed King Ghidorah, which has been terrorizing them. Sounds like a win-win, right? Instead, the Xiliens just baited Earth into giving them two more monsters, which they can use to take over our planet. Invasion of the Astro-Monster is definitely a highlight of the Godzilla series, especially the sillier '60s movies.
12. The Day the Earth Stood Still
Year: 1951
Director: Robert Wise
The alien who lands his flying saucer on the National Mall in Washington DC didn't come to invade—but he does come with a warning that Earth better get its act together now that we've entered the atomic age. If we don't, the other worlds he represents will have to take action. The Day the Earth Stood Still is a classic sci-fi film that's more concerned with ideas than action, though the alien Klaatu (Michael Rennie) comes with backup; if he's threatened, his imposing robot, Gort, can and will shoot a laser at any soldier who gets the wrong idea.
11. The World's End
Year: 2013
Director: Edgar Wright
The first two films in Edgar Wright's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, riffed on horror movies and action flicks, respectively. The World's End is a take on sci-fi and alien invasions. Simon Pegg stars as Gary King, a middle-aged man who tries to relive the glory days by organizing a pub crawl with his old mates, never mind that he probably should've put the bottle down and grown up. As they do their ill-advised bar-hopping, they begin to suspect that something weird is going on—an alien invasion.
10. They Live
Year: 1988
Director: John Carpenter
The Thing is undoubtedly John Carpenter's best alien movie, though it really comes across more as a monster horror movie than a sci-fi alien invasion tale. They Live, a cult classic, definitely qualifies, though. Starring pro wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, They Live takes place in a world that has been secretly overtaken by aliens who control the population by subliminal messages getting people to embrace conformity, capitalism, and consumption. (Carpenter? Not a fan of Reaganomics!) Only special sunglasses, which Piper's protagonist finds, show the world for what it really is.
9. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Year: 1997
Director: Steven Spielberg
The aliens in Steven Spielberg's film ultimately come in peace, but that doesn't mean there are moments of unsure dread alongside all the awe and Spielbergian wonder. Richard Dreyfuss stars as Roy Neary, a family man who becomes obsessed with visions of a mountain (at the expense of his family) after he has an encounter with a UFO. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is ultimately a beautiful movie about possibilities beyond the stars; it's not without darkness and costs, too.
8. War of the Worlds (1954)
Year: 1953
Director: Byron Haskin
The first film adaptation of H. G. Wells' seminal 1898 sci-fi novel is a classic of the genre. The beats are familiar; strange cylinders crash outside of a small town, opening up to reveal Martian invaders who are all-but-unstoppable and wreak havoc on the world before they're felled by the common cold. The '50s War of the World swaps the novel's iconic tripods for flying triangular ships and moves the main action from England to California, in doing so creating a pretty harrowing depiction of alien onslaught that holds up just as well these many decades later.
7. Mars Attacks!
Year: 1996
Director: Tim Burton
A mean and irreverent parody of alien invasion movies that nonetheless hits all the plot beats with outsized, outlandish enthusiasm, Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! had the misfortune of coming out the same year as Independence Day. That film was also a special-effects-driven alien invasion extravaganza, but it took itself somewhat seriously, while Mars Attacks! simply wanted to have a gleeful good time playing with genre and the boundaries of taste while Martians with huge brains scream "Ack!" and disintegrate people into skeletons with laser guns.
6. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Year: 1956
Director: Don Siegel
A paranoia-inducing sci-fi political allegory, the first filmed version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (there was a remake in the late '70s) takes place in a small, all-American town whose residents are slowly being replaced by alien pod people. It's a chilling premise that preys on common fears—that the people around you aren't who you think they are and that you might not be yourself—and it applied itself well as a metaphor for McCarthyism and conformity at the time.
5. Signs
Year: 2002
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
The "twist" in M. Night Shyamalan's alien invasion movie is not that twisty (it's debatable if it's big reveal is even really a twist), but that's not the point of this extremely effective movie about strange happenings in cornfields, the bonds of family, and regaining one's faith. Mel Gibson is fantastic as a former pastor whose stoicism masks the grief he feels about his wife's death, and the reveal of the first alien is one of the all-time great movie scares.
4. War of the Worlds (2005)
Year: 2005
Director: Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg's 2005 take on the H.G. Wells' novel only seems to be growing in esteem, placing higher and higher when people are ranking the director's best films. A movie that is pretty overtly inspired by 9/11 and the fears the attacks left in its aftermath, War of the Worlds is a visceral, intense, and thrilling tale of chaos as the tripod aliens lay waste to the world while Tom Cruise tries to get his family to safety. Not even an ending that is, admittedly, a bit too neat and happy can take away from how impactful the rest of the movie is.
3. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Year: 1978
Director: Philip Kaufman
The '70s remake of 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers traded the McCarthyism allegory for a then-current fear of Yuppies and the supposed death of counterculture in a rapidly conforming San Francisco. It is also much, much creepier than the original, as Philip Kaufman gives the pod people's slow, nefarious takeover of the population a quality that's at once dreamlike and grimy. Donald Sutherland leads the remake's fantastic cast, and he delivers one of the most iconic final scares in horror history for a tremendously upsetting and nihilistic ending.
2. Arrival
Year: 2016
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Amy Adams—who should've won an Oscar for Arrival and she wasn't even nominated—plays Louise Banks, a linguist who is called upon to help try to communicate with the squid-like aliens inside of massive floating spacecraft that have touched down in a dozen spots on the Earth. Arrival is a beautiful movie about communication and time (and the blurring of those two concepts) that is one of the most profound alien "invasion" movies ever to be made. Who needs lasers and action when you can have cathartic tears running down your cheeks?
1. Independence Day
Year: 1996
Director: Roland Emmerich
"Welcome to Earf." The greatest alien invasion movie ever made—and, if we're being honest with ourselves, one of the greatest movies of any sort ever made. Independence Day is a spectacular sci-fi action movie with plenty of explosive disasters, killer special effects, and an all-star cast whose likes include Will Smith, Bill Pullman, and Jeff Goldblum giving their all. It's the platonic ideal of a summer blockbuster, and while a few movies (both within the alien invasion subgenre and outside of it) attempt to go bigger than Independence Day, none can really hope to do it better.
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