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NASA has released several posters inspired by classic horror movie art to tie in with Halloween and some creepy real-life facts. Space travel and tales of ghoulish creatures in the farthest reaches have enthralled movie-goers for decades, from early efforts by Georges Méliès through Ridley Scott's atmospheric classic horror Alien. More recent efforts focus on human attempts to colonize space like The Martian and George Clooney's upcoming Netflix movie The Midnight Sky, which just released a trailer revealing the film will drop in December.

NASA has also been the subject of many documentaries, films, and TV shows, from the classic movie The Right Stuff, through Apollo 13 up to the new Netflix series Challenger: The Final Flight. The space agency is even getting into the movie business by sending Tom Cruise up to space to the International Space Station to film an upcoming movie with Doug Liman. The film world has always used space to inspire awe and tell chilling stories of the unknown, but now NASA is using the world of movies to encourage people to learn more about their real-life work.

The space agency has launched a Galaxy of Horrors site, which features several horror movie-style posters by illustrators. The twist is that each poster is inspired by a real-life space fact or tells a story about the horrors of space. NASA provided high-resolution posters to download for six destinations and tells a short story about each. From Galactic Graveyard to Gamma Ray Ghouls and Rain of Terror, each poster imagines a movie about real-life phenomena that are just as scary as anything you've seen in the movies. You can see all six posters below, as well as a comment from Jason Rhodes, an astrophysicist who was part of the project:

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The initiative is incredibly creative, timed as it is to coincide with Halloween this weekend, and is likely to stir the imaginations of both children and adults alike. In recent years, the wonder of space travel has dimmed somewhat, given the troubles on earth, but these posters are a reminder that there is a vast amount of space out there, full of fascinating facts and terrifying realities. The art, too, is fantastic, evoking classic horror movies.

The artists, including Ken Taylor (Galactic Graveyard), Ross Murray (Dark Matter), and Shan Jiang (Gamma Ray Ghouls), were specially commissioned to create the posters and managed to combine facts with movies in a unique and engaging way. With the likes of Fred Armisen's NASA comedy Moonbase 8 debuting soon, and Cruise set to jet off into space, NASA is using their moment in the spotlight to share some facts on space travel and remind people that space in real life can be even more terrifying than the movies.