We’ve all watched Night of the Lepus for Easter a million times. (“We” = horror fans who are really into seasonally themed viewing.) Killer rabbits are nightmare-inducing, but we’re shifting our attentions to a different symbol of the holiday for 2022: KILLER EGGS. Maybe don’t read this list while you’re eating breakfast.
Easter may be over, but that doesn’t mean these flicks aren’t worth the watch any time of the year.
Alien (1979)
Alien has so many lessons to teach us (always observe quarantine! Always inquire about the bonus situation! Always go back for the cat!), but maybe the most salient point it raises is the one about never, ever, ever getting your face anywhere near an alien egg. Your helmet will not protect you.
Queen of Blood (1966)
John Saxon and Basil Rathbone star in this campy tale about an alien ship that crashes on Mars and the astronauts from Earth who fly in to assist… not realising the alien they’re trying to save is a space vampire! Even worse, the alien vampire queen stealthily lays a bunch of gooey eggs aboard the rescue ship, knowing that Earth will be the perfect hunting ground for her kind to repopulate (no surprise, Queen of Blood is often cited as an influence on Alien). The movie ends on a spectacular note of doom, with one astronaut declaring they should destroy the eggs, while another takes a more Weyland-Yutani point of view: “Scientists from all over the world have been waiting for us to bring back something living! They’ll keep them under control! They’re scientists, they know what they’re doing!”
Q – The Winged Serpent (1982)
From the late, great Larry Cohen, this unhinged delight imagines that Aztec god Quetzalcoatl — a giant dragon-bird-monster-thing rendered in the best low-budget special effects the early ‘80s could offer — builds a nest atop the Chrysler Building and sets about unleashing death from above on hapless Manhattan residents. There are two big-arse eggs in this one: the first is cruelly destroyed in the nest, not long before the creature itself gets taken down — while the second is revealed to be hatching (with a scream!) just before the credits roll. Unfortunately we never got a sequel to see its rampage of revenge.
Jurassic Park (1993)
They’re so cute when they’re little! Don’t be fooled though, that thing will grow up and then eat you with zero hesitation.
Hatching (2022)
Disclaimer: we haven’t seen this one yet; after earning raves at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, it’ll be in theatres April 29 and on digital and VOD May 17. But Hatching clearly deserves a spot on this list. It’s about a young gymnast who wants nothing more than to please her perfectionist mother — until, as the synopsis tells us, the girl finds a peculiar egg in the forest, and “the creature that emerges becomes her closest friend and a living nightmare.”
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006)
Not Poltergeist. Poultrygeist! This Troma flick is set in a fast-food chicken joint that was carelessly built atop an ancient burial ground. Zombie chickens and a whole lot of other shenanigans, all of it raunchy and/or repulsive, ensue, including a scene in which the movie’s thinly veiled Colonel Sanders parody poops out an egg which then hatches into a zombie chicken that attacks him… and things only go sliding enthusiastically downhill from there. Did we mention Poultrygeist is also a musical?
Contamination (1980)
It’s not a sequel to Queen of Blood, but it almost could be: a ship filled with alien eggs (hidden among coffee grounds, cocaine-style!) drifts into New York harbour with the help of astronauts recently returned from Mars — one of whom is acting under the influence of a giant extra-terrestrial cyclops with designs on taking over the world. The green slime inside the eggs makes human beings explode on contact, so it goes without saying that Contamination — directed by Italian horror and fantasy mainstay Luigi Cozzi, who also made Starcrash and co-wrote the screenplay for Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet — gets mighty sloppy, mighty often.
Dreamcatcher (2003)
Yet more alien larvae — hatching vicious murder worms! — this time couched within a truly bonkers Stephen King adaptation, directed by Star Wars stalwart Lawrence Kasdan. Four childhood pals (played by The Expanse’s Thomas Jane, The Mandalorian’s Timothy Olyphant, Jason Lee, and Damian Lewis) who share a telepathic link reunite for a winter getaway. Unfortunately they encounter a nascent alien invasion that’s also on the radar of an anti-ET military unit (led by a wild-eyed Morgan Freeman, in a rare villainous performance), meaning any semblance of R&R goes out the window before act one’s over.
Xtro (1982)
Released the same year as E.T., British import Xtro (which was labelled a “video nasty”) offers an entirely different take on a sci-fi family story. After he’s abducted by aliens, a man returns home years later — except now he’s very much an alien, too, and is interested in a) reconnecting with his young son and bringing him back to space, and b) depositing gobs of eggs on Earth. And, well, he succeeds.
Critters 2: The Main Course (1988)
Horror comedy Critters 2 made a past Gizmodo list of “Strangest Science Fiction Movies to Watch This Easter,” with good reason. Not only is it set on Easter, it also shows why you should avoid mistaking Easter eggs for eggs that are incubating insatiably horrid, pocket-sized, chomping-the-privates-of-a-guy-in-an-Easter-bunny-costume alien monsters.