Be it professors pontificating over the true architects of the pyramids of Giza on Ancient Aliens or Fox Mulder and Dana Scully continually contending with the unknown on The X Files, "aliens were behind it all along" is a relatively popular refrain in modern media. Though a somewhat played-out trope, there's still a certain thrill in attributing all things conspiratorial or otherwise to extraterrestrials.
It's a tough thing to get right; suddenly adding aliens in a plot twist ending can ruin a movie's credibility. However, if done with enough tact, it's possible to convince cinema-goers that E.T.s really are secretly pulling all the strings.
Dreamcatcher (2003)
When a group of friends takes a trip to a cabin, things quickly go haywire. After taking in a wounded man, they discover that, shortly before he died, he excreted some kind of worm into the toilet which directly leads to the death of one of their number and indirectly to the parasitic possession of another.
The extra-terrestrial element is revealed fairly early on in this oft-maligned Stephen King adaptation. That said, it's a unique take on the genre that'll have viewers checking twice before they do their business in the bathroom.
Fire in the Sky (1993)
When a group of loggers in Arizona encounter a UFO, one of them is taken, and a majority of the film then deals with the fallout of the event as suspicious townsfolk begin to suspect that the alien abduction tale was a coverup for foul play. Even after the abducted logger returns, it's still difficult to parse fact from fiction.
Aliens may be at the forefront of Fire in the Sky, but the tale was actually originally written by real-life alleged alien abductee Travis Walton. A huge part of the film revolves around the veracity of claims of alien abduction and could certainly leave some watchers wondering what's really out there.
The World's End (2013)
The capstone of Edgar Wright's Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy, The World's End is a 2013 sci-fi comedy that features Gary, a failure-to-launch forty-something who reunites with his old buddies for a pub crawl. The first half of the film dwells on Gary's failings and personality defects, but he earns a chance at redemption when a chance encounter reveals that the town is actually infested with alien-controlled androids known as Blanks.
Drawing parallels to the much more serious Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The World's End injects a hearty dose of comedy into the deadpan subject matter, making it an interesting watch for E.T. aficionados.
The Fourth Kind (2009)
Portrayed as an accurate reconstruction of strange events which took place in Nome, Alaska in the year 2000, The Fourth Kind lays out a series of cases, presents a bunch of grainy Blair Witch-style found footage, and asks viewers to speculate upon what they believe actually transpired.
Though the film's based-on-real-events framing was nothing more than a marketing device, The Fourth Kind is still fraught with all kinds of extra-terrestrial terror. Blending the sinister miasma of Paranormal Activity with the authority of a faux-Discovery Channel series, The Fourth Kind is a veritable must-watch for E.T. conspiracy theorists and fans.
Signs (2002)
Strange phenomena begin to plague the grief-stricken Hess family following the discovery of a series of crop circles in one of their corn fields. The Hesses must then overcome both personal tragedy and the onset of interspecies conflict in one of director M. Night Shyamalan's most controversial movies.
In the end, it turns out that an imminent alien invasion could be thwarted simply by throwing water on the encroaching creatures, which many fans considered to be something of a plot hole. Still, Signs is a staple of post-2000 E.T. cinema that's good fun for those who don't like to get too bogged down in the details of a film.
Chicken Little (2005)
Loosely based on the fairy tale of the same name, Chicken Little's eponymous anthropomorphic protagonist is continually ridiculed after an embarrassing false alarm incident. However, certain of his predictions that the "sky is falling," he sets out to clear his name, and, upon discovering that alien lifeforms are behind the strange occurrence he's experienced, Chicken Little quests to save his town from invading creatures from beyond.
Chicken Little was something of a hit for the Walt Disney Company in the mid-2000s, but it has since been forgotten in favor of more recent outings like Frozen, Encanto—and pretty much everything else the studio has produced.
Knowing (2009)
Guided by strange whisperings, a troubled girl scratches a series of dates onto a piece of paper and places it into a time capsule. Years later, the capsule is unearthed, and the dates are recognized to be moments of immense tragedy. The final prediction describes the total annihilation of humanity, and it's up to Nicolas Cage's John Kolster to discover what's really going on.
It turns out that these whispering voices—heard by many characters throughout the movie—belong to aliens who are trying to save humanity from a coming apocalypse. In the end, a few humans are rescued in arks of alien construct while the rest of the human race is eliminated by a massive solar flare.
The Forgotten (2004)
A grieving mother struggles to move on after a plane crash claims her young son. Others in her life advised her to let go, and, when video and photographic evidence of her son begin to vanish, she's caught in what appears to be a grand conspiracy against her.
In the end, it's revealed that this was, of course, the doing of agents working for an extra-terrestrial force. The film's finale does get a bit silly when the supernatural elements are fully unveiled, but the beginning makes for a tense and weird sort of drama that would appeal to fans of thrillers.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
A group of mild-mannered San Franciscans discovers themselves to be at the center of a strange conspiracy involving anomalous body doubles. Desperate to get to the bottom of things before they themselves are duplicated, the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers unfurls in a river of disquieting horror.
While the 1956 original has its place in horror history, the 1978 reprisal is often cited as one of the greatest alien invasion films of all time. Tense, unrelenting, and unremittingly mind-bending, it set the stage for many sci-fi thrillers to follow and did quite a bit to advance the "aliens did it" movie-making motif.
They Live (1988)
The quintessential "aliens were behind everything" movie, John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi thriller They Live has been the basis for many real-world conspiracies over the thirty-some years since it first debuted. The film focuses on a drifter who stumbles upon a pair of sunglasses that reveal the truth behind the facade of everyday life.
Armed with the knowledge that the rich and powerful are actually aliens from another planet, the drifter s a resistance group and unveils the truth to the masses. Anyone who has ever looked for hidden meanings or secret messages in their favorite films ought to check this movie out.
