***Spoiler Alert***

There have been a lot deaths in the past 45 years, between 7 movies in the Alien franchise. I excluded the two vs. The Predator due to time constraints, but it feels like those movies should have their own list anyway.

It may seem a bit morbid to cheer on death scenes, but who doesn’t love a great villain, or a great hero, depending where your love for the Xenomorphs lie. Besides, some knucklehead characters definitely deserved to have their faces melted off.

Every fan has their favorites, but these are my picks for most memorable deaths in th Alien Franchise:

10. Ripley (Alien 3)

Picking up immediately after the sequel, Alien 3 starts out with the tragic demise of survivors Newt and Hicks by a stowaway chestburster. Ripley survives, but the ship crash lands on Fiorina 161, a planet housing a penal colony for violent male criminals. The alien, now a quadrapedal runner continues its rampage after the stowaway chestburster morphs with a dog named Spike. At some point, Ripley realizes the reason she’s been surviving all these attacks is because she’s hosting a queen alien embryo, something that apparently happened during thrilling finale fight with the Queen Mother in Aliens.

Faced with a grave choice, Ripley eventually chooses to throw herself into the furnace to end the Queen’s hopes in keeping her species alive. It’s the kind of sacrifice we expect from one of cinema’s greatest heroines, but it was still sad and shocking to let Ripley go after cheering her on for three whole movies.

9. Engineers (Alien: Covenant)

Alien Covenant saw the return of Alien creator and Director Ridley Scott who expanded the Xenomorph universe and attempted to answer the burning questions left by Promethesus. In a brief flashback scene, we see the synth David, who now believes himself a god, in pursuit of the perfect organism, unleash the terrible black goo on the unsuspecting engineers, wiping out the entire colony in mere seconds. If this isn’t an indicator that AI can’t be trusted, I don’t know what is.

8. Ripley7 and the clones (Alien: Resurrection)

Set 200 years after Alien 3, Ripley is back, but this time as a cloned human-Xenomorph hybrid named Ripley8. Turns out the military has been doing experiments with Ripley’s blood and Xenomorph DNA in its lifelong search to create the perfect super soldier. Sadly, it took 8 interations before getting a decent clone of the original Ripley, and who knows how many failures.

Ripley8 comes across the ship lab and can barely control her emotions when viewing some of those failed abominations that came before her. She finds a badly disfigured mutant hybrid Ripley7 still alive but begging to be killed. Someone hands Ripley8 a flamethrower and she destroys every tortured creature in the entire room, providing the only decent scene in the entire movie. Well, at least until evil Dr. Wren loses his head (see best death #3).

7. Ovomorphs (Aliens)

After losing the protection of the space marines, Ripley and the lone colonist survivor Newt are on the run trying to escape. A wrong turn leads Ripley right smack into the Hive Monarch, the Queen Mother, and a brood of freshly laid eggs. Ripley blasts the flamethrower over the tops of the eggs as a warning, scaring the Queen Mother into telepathically communicating with the other grown Xenomorphs to back off and let them go, however, just as Ripley and Newt are in the clear, a pod opens. Knowing full well what comes next, Ripley uses the flamethrower to destroy the entire nest, infuriating the Queen Mother, and setting up one of greatest showdowns in cinema history.

6. Kay (Alien: Romulus)

Set after the events of first Alien film, Weyland-Yutani finds the wreckage of the Nostromo and collects a Xenomorph cocoon. Months later, a group of space miners led by Rain (inspired by Ripley heroine) who is shepparded over by a synth named Andy. The miners decide to improve their lives by raiding what they think is an empty space station, except it’s not. It’s filled all kinds of aliens, from facehuggers to warrior Xenomorphs, and while the crew manages to snag a good haul, no one is gonna collect a big payday if they don’t escape the ship. One by one, the miners are picked off.

After surviving an attack, a pregnant miner named Kay, against Andy android’s advice, chooses to inject herself with mysterious black goo, hoping it will only heal her wounds, but this black goo is actually filled with Queen alien DNA! Now, anyone who saw Alien: Covenant knows this is gonna get bad. Kay gives birth to the stuff of nightmares and this creature wastes no time trying to get a little protein from mama. I dont want to spoil anymore. Just know that motherhood is a killer.

5. Thomas Murphy (Alien 3)

A planet dedicated to violent inmates, sounds like a dream (that’s sarcasm, kids). With a demanding movie studio hellbent on capitalizing off the success of the action packed Aliens, young budding Director David Fincher only had to produce enough blood, guts, and acid baths to repeat box office numbers. Unfortunately that led to Fincher completely disavowing his own film and he might not have it wrong. Alien 3 is pretty abysmal and one of the most openly talked about problematic movie shoots in history. One of most glaring problems was the characters were all unredeemable bad guys, totally unlikable, uninteresting, and completely expendable. To no one’s surprise, the Xenomorphs become every bit the heroes that Ripley was.

Luckily, the movie did have some entertaining deaths, like when inmate Thomas Murphy looks for his missing dog Spike down a dark hole. Spike is a goner, and the inmate gets a face full of acid from fidomorph, but that’s not what kills him. Gravity sucks the man down into one of those giant industrial fans, and viola, memorable death scene #5.

4. Ledward (Alien: Covenant)

After touching down on Origae-6, Security detail Ledward joins the expeditionary team to investigate their surroundings. It doesnt take long before Ledward gets exposed to black fungal spores and immediately fall ill.

Back in medbay, we learn those spores bore an alien organism that has been growing inside of Ledward, but instead of exiting through the chest like a normal chestburster, this alien came out Ledward’s back! It was particularly gruesome and shocking death, if nothing else because it changed 3 decades worth of knowledge about chestbursters. I guess we do learn something new every day.

3. Purvis/Dr. Wren (Alien: Resurrection)

In each Alien movie, there’s always at least one jerk, human or synth, who truly deserves a gory, nasty end of life, and in the 4th installment of Alien franchise, that jerk is Dr. Mason Wren, a manical military scientist who mixed Ripley’s DNA with Xenomorph DNA and tortured his subjects for years. While attempting to escape the Xenomorphs, Wren takes another crew member Call hostage, just as Purvis, one of Wren’s recent test subjects, realizes his own end is nye because he’s been impregnated by a facehugger. Purvis attacks Dr. Wren in a frenzy and when the chest burster arrives, let’s just say we get a two for one and it felt like justice was served.

2. Ash (Alien)

When fellow crew member Ash attacks and sabotages Ripley’s efforts to kill the alien, Parker steps in, fights and decapitates him. Only then do they realize Ash is really a synth! The betrayal runs deeper than that though, after reconnecting the head to get some answers, Ripley and Parker learn Ash has been directed by their evil employer Weyland-Yutani Corporation to bring back the alien organism for study, even if it means sacrificing the crew. As they leave, Parker takes a flamethrower to Ash for good measure, ensuring the robot doesn’t interfere with their escape plan, and honestly, it’s one of the most satisfying deaths in the entire franchise.

1. Kane (Alien)

One of cinema’s most shocking moments was the death of Kane, Commander of the ill-fated USCSS Nostromo, after being impregnated by an alien organism, now affectionately known as a facehugger. Up until that moment, we were just an innocent unsuspecting audience watching some unlucky space crew eat dinner, after answering a distress call from a derelict spaceship and finding nothing but creepiness. The emergence of new parasitic creature chest bursting into our consciousness totally rocked our world.

Even today, some 45 years later, that scene still terrifies new audiences. Chestburster deaths have been included in every film since and it never gets old; it’s never not a gory surprise and that’s why the very first death in Alien, is the most memorable death in the entire franchise.