The vast majority of aliens depicted in movies and TV shows are humanoid. Why? Well, because it's way cheaper to put a dude in a rubber suit than it is to design a totally new life form form scratch. Thankfully, some cool people don't take the easy way out and design some truly, non-humanoid alien life forms that are like nothing we've ever seen before. In this feature, we'll run down the major categories of non-human aliens and spotlight some of their best appearances.
Non-Humanoid Aliens
Outer space is big - like, really big. So why do we assume that intelligent life has to look like us? In this feature, we'll showcase some of the most bizarre non-humanoid aliens that don't look like us at all.
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By K. Thor Jensen December 2, 2011 |
Credit: 20th Century Fox
| 11 | Energy Aliens |
The best way to avoid looking humanoid is to not have a body at all. Energy aliens are non-humanoid aliens that exist as vibrational frequencies of incorporeal energy. The best, recent example is in this year's The Darkest Hour, but it has a long and storied history. The first appearance of the concept comes in H.P. Lovecraft's The Color Out Of Space, where a bodiless creature crash-lands to Earth in a meteor and drains the life from everything around it. Interestingly enough, the Metroid aliens in Metroid, even though they look like giant parasitic jellyfish, are actually composed of pure energy as well.
Credit: TriStar Pictures
| 10 | Insect Aliens |
They say that cockroaches will still walk the earth long after nuclear war has wiped out humanity, so it's not surprising that Insect aliens are a popular choice of non-humanoid alien. Starship Troopers is probably the most literal interpretation of this type of alien, as the Bugs that declare war on humanity are based on a broad spectrum of insect forms and operate in a hive-like structure controlled by an autocratic intelligence. The Zerg from StarCraft are another good example, especially when they start rushing.
Credit: Universal Pictures
| 9 | Viral Aliens |
One of the biggest things keeping humans from any kind of real space travel is the restrictive nature of our bodies - we're just too much of fragile, bags of meat to make that kind of trip. For viral aliens, that's not a problem. The essential character of these critters is the ability to transmit their intelligence through a single cell of their body. The best example of this is, of course, John Carpenter's classic The Thing, where the creature can mimic the forms of what it eats and needs to be burned to be killed. The Black Oil virus from The X-Files is also an alien life form used as a transitional stage for the Colonists.
Credit: TriStar Pictures
| 8 | Amorphous Aliens |
While sort of related to the viral aliens, the amorphous aliens are a little more down-to-earth. Obviously, the most popular example of this comes from the horror classic, The Blob, where one crashes down in a small town and immediately starts wreaking havoc. The thing about an amorphous alien is that it tends to grow by completely dissolving its victims, increasing in size as it does. Some can take other forms - a good example of this is the Venom symbiote from Spider-Man, which the hero originally picked up in an alternate universe.
Credit: Activision
| 7 | Mechanical Aliens |
Who's to say that life on other planets has to be carbon-based like us? Mechanical aliens use silicon as the essential building blocks of life, and often this leads to some very strange non-humanoid aliens. Although the space robots in Transformers took humanoid form, it was simply an imitation of humanoid forms they had previously encountered. In comics, a variant of this is the techno-organic species that New Mutant Warlock hails from - they're also capable of changing shape at will and can drain energy from other living beings by touch.
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