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In space, no one can hear you scream… not unlike in the empty theater screens that aging horror franchises play to when the lustre has gone and their final installments limp to the public. It is perhaps little wonder that some horror franchises go to space to die… or take long breaks, at least.
In celebration of Halloween, we’re running down some horror franchises that made the journey to the final frontier, resulting in films that range from the sublime and outrageously campy fun to just pure awful.
Absent from the list are space horror movies that have space baked into their natural fabric. So no Event Horizon, no Alien, and no Critters 4 (they were aliens, so they just went back to space; that doesn’t count).
1. Jason X (2001)
2001 was a really weird time for the Friday the 13th franchise. New Line had acquired the series in the wake of the terrible box office returns and critical panning of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Known as “the house that Freddy built,” New Line’s plan was clear: pit Voorhees vs. Kruger in a battle of horror icons for the ages.
However, the studio had to keep Jason in the public eye to ensure the eventual crossover lived up to expectations. The first move in that effort, 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, was an odd start. The movie apparently kills Voorhees, with his iconic hockey mask seized by the equally iconic bladed glove of Freddy Krueger at the end of the film and dragged into the dirt.
Fun bit of trivia: the hand wearing the glove isn’t that of Freddy actor Robert Englund but belongs to Kane Hodder, arguably the best Jason Voorhees, meaning Hodder played both Jason and Freddy!
Still, the crossover has stalled in the preproduction process by 2001, as a script couldn’t be agreed upon. New Line wanted a new Friday film but in a different environment than the typical Crystal Lake setting. After rejecting a winter-themed movie that would see Voorhees killing cross-country skiers in a snow-covered Camp Crystal Lake, New Line decided to put Jason on ice in a different way, cryogenically freezing Pamela Voorhees’ baby boy and sending him to space in Jason X, the tenth movie in the series.
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Jason X would see the Crystal Lake Killer slaughter David Croenberg, get his ass kicked by a feisty robot, and double up on his iconic sleeping bag kill from Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (one of my favorites, massively underrated), all on the way to getting a major upgrade from some very unhelpful nanobots to become Uber Jason.
Jason X has a mixed reputation and isn’t regarded as one of the better entries in the series, but the movie has a load of positives going for it.
The kills are super inventive, the nitrogen head smash being arguably one of the best in a series known for over-the-top brutality; Kane Hodder is great during his final shift as Jason, and there are a load of laughs. Jason X isn’t as tongue-in-cheek as one of the following movies on this list, but it is definitely self-aware and so much better for it.
In honor of arguably the best of these space-relocated horror movies, we’ll rate this and the following movies in Uber Jasons out of five. For campy space-based horror featuring a character that is a fish out of water, Jason X is near perfect.
4.8 Uber Jasons out of 5. Hail to the king, baby.
2. Amityville in Space (2022)
Alien is often referred to as “a haunted house movie in space.” The elements are all there: isolation, a hidden, poorly understood danger lurking in the shadows, victims picked off one by one. Of course, that is figurative, but Amityville in Space shows why filmmakers should never make things too literal.
Amityville in Space is bad. Not so bad that it is good. So bad, it is bad.
Your opinion on Amityville as a franchise likely depends on your tolerance for utter hogwash. The first movie, The Amityville Horror, released in 1979, is an effective, often quite creepy horror. Since then, the loose Amityville Horror franchise spans nine core Amityville movies and between 50 and 90 low-budget independent additions to the franchise.
Amityville in Space is definitely at the cheapest end of the low-budget spectrum, and as the name suggests, it takes 112 Ocean Avenue further than ever before, to the year 3015 and the edge of a distant black hole.
Literally, the only thing worth watching in Amityville in Space is the hilarious opening that sees a failed exorcism attempt cause the Amityville house to literally blast off the surface of Earth like a rocket.d
Unfortunately, Amityville in Space isn’t a corny “so-bad it’s good” movie. It’s just frustratingly bad. Perhaps disappearing into a black hole is the fate Amityville deserved all along, though with the name being in the public domain, Amityville movies will just keep coming. At least I didn’t have to watch Amityville Death Toilet (yes, that really exists).
0 Uber Jasons out of 5. Avoid like a demonic pig called Jodie
3. Leprechaun 4: In Space (1996)
Leprechaun 4 sees the franchise that launched the career of Jennifer Aniston blast its titular antagonist into space. The Leprechaun, played by the unparalleled Warwick Davis, makes the voyage to the final frontier with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and the results are bloody glorious.
The film sees the Leprechaun’s attempts to woo a space princess rudely interrupted by space marines and the minor inconvenience of being blown apart by a grenade.
The Leprechaun then exacts his revenge on the spacecraft of the marines, an impressively realized set for a straight-to-video horror movie in the mid-90s.
If you want some camp horror fun on Halloween, the sight of the Leprechaun emerging fully formed from the pants of a space marine is probably going to be unbeatable.
Fans of British sitcoms will be equally delighted by the appearance of Guy Siner (‘Allo ‘Allo’s Lt. Hubert Gruber) as Dr. Mittenhand. While the rest of the cast play the ludicrousness of a leprechaun rampaging through a spaceship offing space marines relatively straight, Davis and Siner don’t just chew the scenery; they suck it in like thespian black holes.
As Mittenhand says: “Thank you, Harold, I do the jokes!”
Of course, there is plenty of ropey CGI, as is standard for a 90s genre movie, but there is a wonderful practical creature at the movie’s conclusion that pays tribute to David Cronemburg’s The Fly. Less Brundle-Fly, more Mitten-Spider. Plus a death that is pure Looney Tunes and a Kaiju-sized leprechaun. Take that, Uber Jason.
4.5 Uber Jasons out of 5. Thank your Lucky Charms
4. Hellraiser 4: Bloodline (1996)
Another horror franchise heading to space for its fourth installment, and this one also came out in 1996. Hellraiser 4: Bloodline marks a real downturn in the fortunes of Hellraiser, being the last in the series to receive a theatrical release and the last to benefit from input from creator and horror maestro Clive Barker.
The film has a portmanteau style beginning in 2127, as Dr. Paul Merchant attempts to solve the mystery of the Lament Configuration, then flashing back to its creation by Merchant’s ancestor Phillip LeMarchand in France in 1796. The movie then jumps to 1996, when the Lament Configuration has inspired a skyscraper built by another of Merchant’s ancestors.
This second section also sees the franchise’s figurehead Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley, come into conflict with the demonic Angelique. A conflict that is carried into 2127.
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Arguably, the CGI in Hellraiser: Bloodline is no better or worse than that of Leprechaun 4; the problem is the latter isn’t taking itself seriously, but the former really is.
You can’t really expect a “fun” Hellraiser movie; that has never been their vibe, and they are better for the serious tone. But it means a poorly realized move to space really doesn’t work.
Arguably, the biggest crime of Hellraiser 4: Bloodline is that it’s a bit dull. The in-depth investigation of the Lament Configuration is only going to appeal to hardcore Hellraiser fans who will probably just end up wishing they’d watched Barker’s original 1987 magnum opus movie instead.
And it was all downhill for Hellraiser after this. The franchise became the poster boy for straight-to-video horror, with some later installments developed from scripts that initially had nothing to do with Hellraiser at all. A real insult to a franchise that felt fresh, daring, and even dangerous at its outset.
Pinhead probably wished he’d stayed in space.
2 Uber Jasons out of 5. You’ll need your eyes pinned back to finish it
5. Dracula 3000 (2004)
When you have been around since 1897, it is pretty hard to keep your routine fresh. By 2004, Dracula had pretty much exhausted gothic horror; a relocation to a modern setting hadn’t saved Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the 1970s and had arguably resulted in the worst entries in the Hammer series.
Where else to take the Count in a new millennium but into space? That’s the approach taken by Dracula 3000, which doesn’t connect to any other Dracula cinema outings but features character names and locales that pay homage to Stoker’s original novel.
The primary protagonist is Captain Abraham Van Helsing, played by Casper Van Dien, fresh from battling space bugs in Starship Troopers. Dracula — here bizarrely called Count Orlok in an unnecessary nod to Nosferatu — is found on the abandoned ship Demeter by Mother III salvage crew member Mina Harker. Unfortunately, the connections to the source material and the infinitely better Nosferatu are present in name alone. The gothic goodness is gone.
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However, something strange happened to me as I was watching Dracula 3000. I found myself enjoying it. Dracula 3000 is… fun?
The acting is more wooden than a stake, the dialog is cringy, the characters are so 2D that it is a wonder Drac could draw any blood at all, and the effects are poor. But there is so much here I found myself wanting to show my friends.
Vampire Coolio is a show-stealer; Dracula looks like he has wandered in from a neighboring studio, swanning around a sci-fi setting in full Victorian cape and collar garb. The Demeter hails from the planet Transyvannia, known to be populated by vampires. Drac had no issue procuring oak coffins for his thrall in space. It’s all wonderfully silly, and I loved it.
Dracula 3000 isn’t as fun as Leprechaun 4, but it definitely isn’t boring like Hellraiser 4: Bloodline, and it isn’t whatever the heck Amityville is Space is.
3.5 Uber Jasons out of 5. Livin’ in a vampire’s paradise.
For my money, Leprechaun 4, Dracula 3000, and Jason X would make a cool triple-header of space-horrors for Halloween night. But only ’cause we didn’t get the following franchise entry….
Dishonorable mention: Howling IV: Werewolves on the Moon (1988)
OK. Don’t Google it. This isn’t the Mandela effect at work. The Howling franchise never went to space.
The Howling IV was released in 1988 under the tagline “The Original Nightmare,” and though in modern parlance that would indicate a prequel to Joe Dante’s 1981 classic, this film is actually a far inferior remake of that first entry in the series.
What a missed opportunity! Though the trope of a fourth film in a franchise going to space, or returning to space in the case of Critters 4, wouldn’t be firmly established until 1996, The Howling could have set the ball rolling with its fourth installment.
After all, few horror franchises had suffered the drops in quality seen between the first Howling, a stone-cold classic, and Howling III: The Marsupials (they aren’t even werewolves, guys!), with the awful Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf between the two.
The Howling was dying like a werewolf with a silver bullet in its guts already by the fourth film; so an early move to space would have been justified. Come on, at least give us werewolves on the moon!
The franchise would limp on for another four films after the Original Nightmare, including a lame duck reboot in 2011, never answering the question: what would happen to a werewolf on the moon? Is the moon always full on the moon, or is it never full because the werewolf can’t see it?
Fans would forgive this missed opportunity. OK, maybe just me.
1,000 Uber Jasons out of Five. It’s werewolves on the moon, people. C’mon!
Happy Halloween!
