The horror movie that terrified Sigourney Weaver: “Probably the scariest I’ve ever seen”
Sigourney Weaver spent nearly 20 years playing roles designed to terrify audiences as Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise. Well, maybe not quite that long—after Ridley Scott’s 1979 inception of the series, the sequels gradually shifted from sci-fi horror to action films.
The first Alien film follows a traditional monster movie structure. Watching it for the first time—having heard the tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream” (or seen it on a poster in the theatre if you’re of a certain age)—you meet the cast knowing that most, if not all, are doomed. Ripley isn’t the obvious survivor, which is what makes her special—she’s the hero you don’t realise is the protagonist until the very end. And she wasn’t even supposed to live.
This is not the case for the sequels—enjoyable though some of them are—where you know Ripley’s going to make it through to the end. There’s no sense of jeopardy when she confronts her ten thousandth xenomorph. She doesn’t die, and we know she doesn’t die, so they’re going to make another one. And another, for so long as they’re profitable and Sigourney Weaver hasn’t gotten bored (which she did, eventually). A lot of the sequel films like Prometheus, Alien: Covenant and most recently Alien: Romulus all have some analogue to Ripley, someone who is so clearly going to survive the other characters. And they’ll say, “Get away from her, you bitch!” at some point.
Weaver almost reprised the role of Ripley in 2018, though it fell through. She had a cameo in The Predator from the same year, however. It promised some kind of franchise crossover sequel with Ripley back from the dead (again), but nothing seems to have come from it. But when it comes to Hollywood franchise films with a hale and healthy IP, never count the possibility out.
For her part, Weaver said that the scariest movie she’d ever seen wasn’t in the Alien sequence, old nor new, but praised her co-star from 2024’s The Gorge Anya Taylor-Joy for her work in David Eggers’ The Witch in 2015.
Weaver said of The Gorge that “Anya’s part is very much in the tradition of Jim Cameron, who always wanted to present women as these kickass, take-care-of-business characters”, which might recall her experience slowly remodelling Ripley into an action hero. She goes on to say, “I’ve watched Anya Taylor-Joy since The Witch, which is terrifying, probably the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, and it was great fun to see her take on this kind of part.”
Scary is subjective. Whether something is frightening, boring, or just uncomfortable and eerie is dependent on the person watching the movie, the period of its release and whether or not the effects have gone stale. Eggers doesn’t make fun or pleasant movies. But he isn’t famous for jump scares, his movies are meant to make you feel the weight of existential dread. To disquiet you. But for some, that’s scarier than the slightly implausible notion of being chased around a spaceship by a monster.
