Planning your next sci-fi alien disaster attack film? Chances are you’ll need a fateful first contact scene between your extraterrestrials and humankind at some point early on in your short or feature. While the location matters little compared to what’s actually being set up in contact scenes, it is interesting to see what places have been used in the past. You might want to evoke a specific homage, or just avoid any repetitiveness for your own unique story.
Let’s look at this neat graphic which maps out all the (United States) alien contact points in movie history.
Alien Contact Spots in Movies
First posted to Reddit by u/Dylan_Mq, the graphic has since been updated to include more films and a few minor revisions. This Alien Contact Spots graphic shows 35 first contact locations across a US map. It’s important to note that the map is meant to represent “first” contact locations, not always the location most featured in each film. It also takes some liberties with unspecified locations (e.g. “somewhere in Colorado”) based on research of where the film was actually filmed.
Famous alien movies with “global invasions” like Signs, The War of the Worlds, Battle Los Angeles and Arrival are not included as the locations are numerous and not specific to the United States.
If you see anything missing, or that you’d like to contest, you can follow the thread on Reddit here.
Otherwise, here are some articles on How DP Bradford Young Deconstructed Sci-Fi for 'Arrival', a Look at Rick Baker's Alien for Steven Spielberg's Scrapped 'Close Encounters' Sequel, and The Beauty of H. R. Giger's Grotesque Xenomorph Monsters in 'Alien' for your next alien sci-fi project.
Source: Reddit
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