10 scariest plagues from sci-fi and fantasy

10. The Xenomorph from Alien

Let me paint you a picture. You and your crew of fellow spacefarers land on an abandoned planet in response to a distress beacon. After exploring a huge, dank subterranean cavern, you stumble across a clutch of thousands upon thousands of what appears to be giant eggs. Slowly, one of them begins to open with a sickening squelch. Spidery limbs quest over the edge of the plant-like egg, searching…

Suddenly, out pops a hideous creature with a prehensile tail that sticks itself to your face, shoves a tube down your throat, and lays an embryo in your stomach.

It then proceeds to fall off and die. Wow, that was weird. Big relief, right?

WRONG. This is what happens next. Be warned, it is the stuff of nightmares:

Okay, so I might have gotten a bit carried away there, but really, the alien from Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie of the same name is about as terrifying as plagues come. It’s a parasitic organism that has several phases. The “facehugger” phase I described above is how the alien “impregnates” hosts. But the real horror is what happens several hours later, when a deadly creature with two sets of teeth, a whip-like tail, and a hard exoskeleton literally tears its way out of the host’s stomach, killing them in the process. I thought I’d describe it just in case you didn’t watch the video. Because there’s no escaping the alien.

It’s pretty strongly hinted that the xenomorph aliens have wiped out planets before, and it’s said over and over again throughout the Alien movies that if they get back to Earth, humans are all but doomed. The fully grown aliens have acid for blood, are nigh unstoppable, and vicious to a fault. There’s no reasoning with the aliens, no begging for mercy. They are apex killing machines, and kill just as indiscriminately as any pathogen.

Good thing we had Sigourney Weaver to keep us safe, otherwise it would have been game over for humanity. Now where was she when all those other plagues hit?

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