Abandoned, possessed, or infested spaceships in sci-fi films, books, and video games are usually not a welcoming place to hang your helmet and kick back inside.
Many are distinctly marked as DO NOT APPROACH zones and equipped with clearly articulated warning messages to keep your distance, but that doesn’t ever seem to stop scavengers, space pirates, or evil industrial mega corporations from waving off these dangerous signs to board anyway.
Other creaky craft are apt to contain nasty alien hitchhikers or biological hazards not exactly conducive to a pleasant star-trekking voyage. Whether these nefarious neglected craft have just reappeared from the other side of a black hole or have been lying dormant for eons on a hostile planetoid, visitors are usually infrequent.
So ignore those distress beacons at your own peril and step into this alarming armada of 9 nightmarish sci-fi spaceships before orbits decay.
Happy Halloween!
1. USG ISHIMURA — “DEAD SPACE” (2008)
It’s basically a perfectly good interstellar mining vessel owned by the Concordance Extraction Corporation if you forget about the nasty reanimated corpses found lurking on nearly every deadly deck.
The pesky Necromorphs are a resilient crop of creatures and are extremely inhospitable when it comes to having uninvited guests, yet they don’t mind if you’re staying for dinner.
This plague of hungry zombified corpses is a real drag, unless you happen to have a flaring plasma cutter in your back pocket and your name is Isaac Clarke.
2. THE GRENDEL — “JASON X” (2002)
Things would be much more peaceful aboard the Grendel if a notorious undead slasher named Jason Voorhees wasn’t stashed in the cargo bay, but when scientific discovery enters the equation, many questionable choices follow.
The Grendel is a 25th-century medical research vessel on a field trip from hell to an overly polluted Earth, where the frozen Jason is kept at the Crystal Lake Research Facility and shipped back home to Earth 2 for cellular research.
Once thawed, the ship becomes his private killing field with an ample supply of student bodies until the fiery finale when Jason becomes an inhuman meteor in the sky. Next time, take the school bus.
3. RAMA — “RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA” (1973)
This spooky classic novel written by “2001’s” legendary author, Arthur C. Clarke, focuses on a massive alien spaceship entering Earth’s atmosphere.
The 31-mile-long cylindrical spaceship does not parallel park easily and is quite spacious inside. In fact, it’s primarily hollow at first and likely offers up a fantastic location for some echoey yodeling. As we later learn, Rama aliens are apparently collecting forms of intelligent life from around the galaxy, employing their ginormous Rama spacecraft.
As an ice ring thaws and forms a vast ocean, astronauts explore the ship’s cavernous confines, only to find automated bio-machines and weird metallic towers, curved alloy cliffs, and fantastic geometric city-like structures. The myriad mysteries that unfold are enough to drive sane humans to absolute madness!
4. THE SCOPULI — “LEVIATHAN WAKES” (2011)
Ignore that glistening brown protomolecular goo, and come on in and sit a spell in the Scopuli, a light Martian freighter used by the Outer Planets Alliance for clandestine missions and ransacked by the evil security firm Protogen in an attempt to hijack its alien cargo.
Hailing from James S.A. Corey’s first book in “The Expanse Series”, the Scopuli was found moored to an asteroid by James Holden and his Canterbury crew. The amber-brown mess discovered inside the rigged ship is not to be trifled with, let alone inhaled, eaten, or touched.
Come to think of it, it’s probably much wiser to get out while you can and move along!
5. THE DERELICT — “ALIEN” (1979)
Anything that looks like an organic hammer-headed horseshoe lying canted in a rocky ravine on a hostile, uncharted planetoid is best to avoid. Especially when its repeating SOS beacon is translated into its true message… a dire warning to keep curious rubberneckers the hell away!
Once its strange, sexually suggestive openings are penetrated by Nostromo crew members, seeing fossilized giants and oceans of squishy egg pods in the cargo hold would make most reasonable people flee in terror.
We’re better off leaving this sleeping nightmare in its resting place.
6. CHALLENGE 142 — “IT, THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE” (1956)
One of the inspirations for Ridley Scott’s “Alien”, this Golden Age goodie brings us aboard the sleek silver rescue rocketship, Challenge 142, and locks us inside after a bloodthirsty reptilian alien from Mars decides to catch a lift back to Earth with its new astronaut friends in the far-flung future of… 1973!
Mute, clawed monsters with insatiable appetites for human flesh are never good travel companions in the confines of a steel spacecraft. A wiser choice would have been to have stayed on Mars and used the Challenge 142 as a stylized red planet potato farm.
7. ICARUS 1 — “SUNSHINE” (2007)
Need a glowing golden suntan? This vessel was launched from Earth to detonate a nuclear payload within the sun’s fury to keep its fusion furnace burning and was never heard from again.
A sister rescue vessel, the Icarus 2, was dispatched as a last resort and encountered this long-abandoned ship drifting near the scorching star. Inside the Icarus 1, its over-tanned Captain Pinback has been caught in an addictive ritual of basking in the sun’s brilliant embrace and has gone quite insane.
Back out quietly and toss him a nice bottle of aloe vera lotion.
8. THE EVENT HORIZON — “EVENT HORIZON” (1997)
Lawrence Fishburne’s Captain Miller thinks this place is a tomb! Well, that’s not a very polite way to describe what I think is one of the most ominous spaceships ever seen on screen.
The fact that this foreboding vessel, designed after the cathedral of Notre Dame, has appeared in Neptune’s orbit following its disappearance after entering a black hole should be enough to keep the crew of the Lewis and Clark from steering anywhere close. Nothing good can be happening on that doomed craft considering the seven-year absence.
One second after discovering that the craft punctured a route straight to Hades and returned with some extra baggage, I’d be running for the exit hatch! The welcome mat is out, but there’s no need to knock on this airlock.
9. THE SHENANDOAH — “CREATURE” (1985)
Basically an “Alien” ripoff, this low-budget cult sci-fi flick has its following, but only from those midnight runs to the video store in the ’80s to grab the tape with the craziest-looking alien on the cover.
The Shenandoah is a prospecting explorer sent by a ruthless corporation to claim an alien archaeological site on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Assorted chaos ensues when a rival West German spaceship is discovered at the dig site, only for our protagonists to find the crew slaughtered.
The carnivorous monster that creeps onto the Shenandoah suffers from little monster syndrome, but its bite is impressive. Best to have never touched the metallic pods in the subterranean cave and just skipped this homicidal mission entirely.