Could an obscure astronomical theory explain how in the world Nicole Kidman’s Invasion ever got made?

Near the end of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Leonard Nimoy delivers one of the freakiest, skin crawling-est speeches in movie history. In a deadpan Dr. Spock-on-percocet monotone, he tells Donald Sutherland to quit making such a fuss about having all of his individuality and human feeling erased from him. “You’re evolving into a new life form,” he explains. He then goes on to fill in the backstory on the pod people: “We came here from a dying world. We drift through the universe from planet to planet, pushed by the solar winds.”

The Nimoy-Sutherland Snatchers was on TV the other night and when Nimoy said those words, I was suddenly eight years old again, sitting in front of my parents’ Betamax, just about wetting my drawers with fear. The rest of the flick hardly got my blood pressure up this time around, with its soundtrack of mini-moog bleats and all those half-silly chase scenes through disco-era San Francisco. But those lines about parasitic death spores wafting through the ether like cosmic dandelion seeds still made me want to hide under the couch, or at least take a long shower.

Hollywood loves the “apocalypse by aliens” storyline. H.G. Wells’s book War of the Worlds is the prototypical version of the tale. The 1938 radio version directed by the other Welles triggered panic all along the east coast. In the 1950s iteration, flying lily pads zap Los Angeles to rubble. 1996’s Independence Day gave us Walmart-sized dinner platters that blast the world’s architectural icons into smoldering heaps. More recently, the remake of Battlestar Galactica shows Cylons returning to exterminate their creators.

The common theme in these works, and countless others, is the abject malevolence of our otherworldly visitors. They don’t like us. They really don’t like us. And, to prove it, they expend huge amounts of energy, and screen time, trying to wipe us from the face of our planet. No good reason is given for their anti-humanism. They’re just mean ‘mothers from another’ and that’s all we need to know. Or, rather, we don’t care about knowing anything more about them. They’re from outer space and they want to kill us. Enough said.

Why is this theme so popular? Seriously people, Hollywood keeps making more or less the same movie and we keep buying tickets to see it. Often, they literally make the same movie again and again: Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds gives that flick two versions, as well as a short-lived TV series; and with the latest Kidman vehicle, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is up to three incarnations. (The 1978 installment was much better than the McCarthyism-soaked original, but this latest one is dreadful.) So what gives?

Well, after Leonard Nimoy re-traumatized me the other night, I started thinking about it. Pretty soon, Carl Jung, dinosaurs, Rainer Maria Rilke, and obscure astronomical theories were floating around in a half-cooked mental bouillon that I will now try to reheat and serve for you here. For my stoner friends, you might want to put away the bong for the rest of this…

The fossil record shows that every 26 million years or so, a lot of stuff on Earth dies. Not just dodo birds and spotted owls, but almost everything. We’re talking major cataclysm type deals. (The extinction of the dinosaurs took place during one of these die offs about 65 million years ago.) And, according to scientists, you can pretty much set your galactic watch to it.

Back in the 80s, this phenomenon got an insanely smart guy named Richard A. Muller and a couple of his colleagues thinking. They came up with an idea that would make Gene Roddenberry smile: Maybe our sun has another star orbiting it, they postulated, and every 26 million years, this second “Nemesis” star comes close to us. When it does, its gravity drags a bunch of comets and asteroids and other debris into our solar system like so many paper clips clinging to a magnet. These cosmic hangers-on then proceed to rain down on the earth, killing just about every living organism.

Carl Jung wrote about “racial memory,” also known in some circles as “genetic memory.” The basic idea being, we hold inside of our minds, and maybe even inside our very cells, vestigial recollections of common ancestral experiences. But the good doctor kept his “racial memory” theory limited to one race—as in species—as in Homo sapiens. But, if evolutionary biologists are correct and all life has descended from a single unicellular organism, might there not be a more ancient “racial memory,” one that links the primitive reaches of our brains and bodies to the entire four-and-a-half billion years of our planet’s existence?

Maybe we like stories about gnarly space aliens coming down and wiping out life on earth because, deep in the molecular fabric of our cells, those stories ring a bell. Faceless, motiveless, wanton destruction by extra-terrestrial forces makes a terrifying sense to us because—ding, ding, ding!—it’s actually happened to us. Not just once, but many times.

Notice how I’m not even bothering to talk about actual comet and asteroid films, like the Michael Bay-Jerry Bruckheimer wankfest Armageddon. First of all, some frozen piece of ice or space rock hurtling towards us is just boring. Also, it sounds way too easy to fix, or blow up. More importantly, by taking the whole subject so literally, those stories completely miss the point. The ‘creatures from the sky’ have to be ruthless beings, what Rainier Maria Rilke called ‘terrible angels’ because they have to dramatize, as in a dream, the quintessential nightmare that Nemesis represents— the nightmare of our own insignificance. Rilke’s angels are not terrible because they’re evil; they’re terrible because they don’t care about us.

Looking at these films in light of the Nemesis Theory, they’re not even sci-fi anymore. They’re the epitome of the horror genre. Leonard Nimoy’s drifting death spores, the weird lily pads with ray guns in War of the Worlds, motherships the size of Poughkeepsie in Independence Day, they tap into our fight or flight instinct better than any slasher or hobgoblin or zombie every could. We’re talking about the existential terror of living on a tiny planet in a giant dangerous universe. I mean really, that makes Freddy Kruger look like Ginger Rogers.