Now the highest-grossing movie of the year, Project Hail Mary is the latest in a long line of lonely space movies to isolate a megastar—in this case, Ryan Gosling—on a distant spaceship.

Every guy wants to be an astronaut growing up. But at some point, usually around the time we start recognizing our own mortality, the appeal really wears off, and the vastness of the cosmos begins to engender existential terror more than it excites us. It can’t get much lonelier than drifting among the stars, hence why loneliness and isolation have been go-to themes of space movies since time immemorial.

Project Hail Mary is very much the Ryan Gosling show, with the actor taking up 90% of the film’s screen time; never a bad thing with someone who is so charismatic and enjoyable to watch. He awakens on his spaceship with no memory as to why he’s there, and we learn alongside him about the bizarre circumstances that led him to take part in his lonely mission to the stars. (No spoilers.) When he comes across a fellow space traveller, from an alien race that has been similarly imperiled, the film takes on the air of buddy comedy, its existential stakes undercut by its light-hearted tone and popcorn-friendly optimism.

The box-office success of Project Hail Mary got us thinking about some of our other favorite examples in this sci-fi subgenre of lonely space movies. There’s The Martian, with Matt Damon farmer-maxxing on Mars; Brad Pitt in peak Sad Dad in Space mode in Ad Astra; plus, who could forget Gravity, with Sandra Bullock dodging space debris in glorious 3-D? Here, we’ve ranked the best lonely space movies in recent memory.

7. Event Horizon (1997)

Typically considered Paul W. S. Anderson’s best movie—released after his cult adaptation of Mortal Kombat and before the first of the Resident Evil films, schlocky action vehicles for his wife-to-be Milla Jovovich—Event Horizon literally brings hell to the void of outer space in a gothic sci-fi horror melange that is steeped in gore and psychological scares. With dollops of John Carpenter, Hellraiser and a little Alien, the film stars Laurence Fishburne as the captain of a rescue vessel that is sent to investigate the distress signal from a spaceship which has apparently reemerged after disappearing seven years prior. What he and his team find aboard is a bloodbath; from thereon in, the horror begins, with the crew members experiencing disturbing visions as they descend into insanity, chiefly Sam Neill’s Weir, who is overcome by a demonic presence and goes full slasher-mode.