There are some movies that are guaranteed cult classic status before they’ve even released, no matter how they end up faring among critics or with general audiences. Based on the unhinged synopsis alone, 1985’s Lifeforce was always going to find longevity.
It helped that genre legend Tobe Hooper of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist was directing, but that only tells part of the story. When an intergalactic expedition ends with British and American astronauts being welcomed aboard an alien craft, a mysterious and beautiful woman appears on Earth and begins literally sucking the life out of the public, turning her victims into half-dead zombies.
Did we mention the space vampires? There’s space vampires as well, which makes an already-deranged movie even more insane, but in the best possible way. An unmitigated disaster first time around, Lifeforce couldn’t even recoup half of its $25 million budget from theaters, but a sexually-charged sci-fi horror with shuffling hordes and hulking bat-like creatures was never going to be forgotten.
Almost 40 years on and it finds itself surging on streaming, too, with FlixPatrol naming it as one of the most-watched features on Prime Video’s worldwide rankings. Zombies, aliens, space vampires, gratuitous nudity, explosions, effects, body horror, cosmic carnage, and plenty more besides, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Lifeforce managed to overcome its reputation as a critical and commercial catastrophe to work its way into the hearts of die-hard dedicators everywhere.
If you like your genre-bending terrors to be as maniacal as humanly – or inhumanly – possible, then they don’t come much better.
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Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
