If alien invasion stories are often means to define or defend excellences that mark the human species, this chapter explores two contemporary popular alien invasion films – Nope (Jordan Peele 2022) and Prey (Dan Trachtenberg 2022) – that propose fear as one of those excellences. The humans in both films outsmart their alien invaders through instincts of fear – both rejection of bravado in the face of unknown threat and a commonsensical assessment of real risk and danger – that have been developed in the protagonists by their own experience of being “alien” to their human communities because of their racial and gender identities in the long arc of Western modernity, understood as a story of coloniality and colonial fantasy. Alien invasion represents both encounters with alternative species and parallels with domination and oppression within the human species. Fear, then, is both a defining human characteristic (in distinction to alien life) and a critique of the assumption that survival requires a form of dominance.