Full acknowledgement here: I’m one of those girlies who finds certain horror movies soothing. For me, it’s generally slashers and supernatural/religious horror flicks that are soothing enough for me to nap to. The narrative beats are familiar and consistent; and, since I’m not afraid of serial killers, ghosts, or demons in real life, the violence feels contained to the screen. I’m safe, even though—maybe because?—the characters really, really aren’t.

The Alien franchise is a weird outlier for me, then. Because these movies contain some of the most viscerally terrifying cinematic moments and creations I’ve ever seen, but I still think of that whole world as comforting. Even the worst the franchise has to offer1 has an almost cozy familiarity to it, alongside the scares.

First, there are the creatures themselves. It’s hard to get a complete picture of the fully grown xenomorph in Alien, which is to the movie’s benefit. We can tell it has too many jaws, dripping with a liquid that we dare not ask too many questions about. We know its body is mechanical enough that it can blend in with the spaceship’s interior. We know it has a spiny tail like a scorpion, but the tip is even more fearsome. We know it’s taller than Yaphet Kotto.

Otherwise, we’re mostly left to fill in the blanks ourselves, which works because it’s just so many fears crammed into one creature.

And then, for all the fears that were left over, there’s the facehugger. A massive spider-looking thing with legs that are both fleshy and bony, and a mouth that is both vaginal and penetrative. Kane, the first and most iconic victim, says he remembers having “some horrible dream about smothering” while the facehugger was attached to his head and (unbeknownst to him) implanting an alien embryo in his chest.2 There’s no peace to be had once you cross paths with these creatures, even when you’re unconscious.

These creatures were designed by an entire madman (laudatory), to make us as viewers acutely aware of all our soft, squishy parts and how gruesomely they could be put asunder. It nearly goes without saying that the original creatures are a Freudian nightmare, with the explicit goal of triggering fears of penetration, unwanted pregnancy, and violent childbirth. They generate a downright limbic fear in me that I find quite thrilling.

And if these movies don’t agitate your sense of physical vulnerability, there’s always your structural vulnerability. Because the world that the galactic mega-corporation Weyland-Yutani has created in its image is utterly ruthless. Whether it’s the 70’s-era tech-pessimism of Alien or the glossy, Apple-compatible surfaces of Prometheus, the perspective is consistent. Whoever is benefitting from all this space colonization and scientific advancement is rarely onscreen. Instead, we’re situated with the people who get fed into the machine to make colonization and capitalism possible.

Weyland-Yutani is a corporation that calls its spaceship program Mother3, seemingly just to enforce a noxious power dynamic. One that is constantly tinkering with its synthetic workers, trying to bridge the uncanny valley enough to make humans’ impending redundancy more palatable to them. One that runs on brutal indentured servitude and considers all of its employees across the galaxy to be expendable.

From the original movie to the current Hulu series, the people aboard their diabolically named spaceships (naming your ship the USCSS Maginot is not asking for trouble so much as demanding it) are less concerned with discovery than they are with getting home and getting paid for their time. Every time I rewatch Alien, I find myself wishing the crew had a union, because I really don’t think they will get fairly paid for their time, nor for the risk to life and limb.

In Aliens4, Ripley’s reward for surviving the first movie is to be subjected to a lengthy inquiry about lost company property, and then struggle to find employment until that same company asks her to risk her life again, this time advising Marines on the very alien species that the company will not admit exists. The much5-maligned Alien3 keeps Ripley’s individual exploitation front and center, while also expanding the scope to show how this world shoves its incarcerated people to the sparest, coldest margins of the galaxy. No matter the specific context, Weyland-Yutani is happy to keep serving its workers, soldiers, and prisoners up to grisly fates. And, like, what exactly does Weyland-Yutani think it can do with these aliens? What is their best-case scenario for a double-jawed monster that bleeds acid? I don’t think they even know. There’s just a vague sense of profit that will satisfy the shareholders, and that’s enough for them.

If these movies were straightforward corporate dramas, I doubt they’d be as compelling (or as comforting). But the genre trappings let the franchise tell the truth about our real-life corporate overlords, but tell it slant. There’s enough of a distortion to give us some emotional distance, so we’re watching a version of how it feels to realize how utterly replaceable you are to the people who sign our checks and write our laws. I am not a space trucker, or a space Marine, or a space maximum security prisoner, but I have more in common with them than I do to the billionaire who thinks that alien life will bring him the key to immortality. In their world as well as in ours, it’s not just that we’re the cogs in an unfeeling machine. It’s that we’re the food.

So, back to me finding all of this comforting! I’ve written before about how you don’t always need catharsis in order to feel better. Sometimes you just need recognition—an acknowledgement that your experience is real, and really as terrible as it feels. Sometimes I do need the “fuck yeah!” thrill of watching Sigourney Weaver smack the shit out of the Alien Queen. But sometimes, I need to watch a synthetic Michael Fassbender unleash his genocidal fury against humankind with a chilly smile. Sometimes I need the bone-deep nihilism suffused throughout Alien3. Either way, this franchise can accommodate it.

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