Four Recently Discovered Planets That Are Ideal Horror Movie Settings

There are literally billions of planets out there. And most of them, which we’re starting to dig up thanks to our favorite telescope, Kepler, are weird.

So weird, in fact, that we’re pretty sure a bunch of them are going to turn up in horror movies fairly soon. Here’s our list of four candidates.

TrES-2b

Find us a hack screenwriter who can resist setting a horror movie on a planet that is literally blacker than coal and gives off a faint reddish glow, and we’ll show you one who writes exclusively romantic comedies.

Fomalhaut b

Hey, we just discovered a planet that has no infrared signature and is surrounded by a protecting cloak of debris. We should totally send Sam Neill there! We bet there’s no cosmic horror living on that rock!

Event Horizon jokes aside, Fomalhaut b is actually an incredibly creepy planet. It was first discovered in 2008, but once scientists noted there was no infrared signature coming off of it, they dismissed it as a cloud of debris. The problem is that it shows every single other sign of being a planet except for the total lack of infrared signature. It really does seem like a planet that is literally trying to hide from human eyes.

So, Cthulu lives there? We’re betting Cthulu.

CoRoT-7b

Let’s see: It’s a lava world, literally. It’s tidally locked to its star. The temperature is a balmy 4000 degrees. And if that weren’t enough to make it a creepy place, it’s likely the corpse of a gas giant slowly burning away. If you can’t do anything with the corpse of a planet, we can’t help you with your screenwriting dreams.

WASP-18b

WASP-18b may sound a bit familiar, a planet with an orbital period of less than a day slowly falling into its own sun. In other words, the drama writes itself. Throw in a cheesy alien picking off the crew one by one and you’ve got at the very least a SyFy Channel movie.