The aliens, as monstrous and destructive as they are, for all the harm they cause, deserve a certain amount of, for lack of a better word, respect. They are what they are, and say what you will about them, they stick together. Whatever it takes for the survival of the species.
It's a stretch to call them evil. Evil implies choice. As horrific as they are, the xenomorphs are fundamentally animals. Vicious and deadly but animals with no control over their nature.
By contrast, humans demonstrate evil throughout the Alien series. Weyland-Yutani, the company pulling the strings behind the scenes, finds these creatures and decides to do whatever it takes to profit off them, knowing what they're capable of. Greed motivates the company to sacrifice employees, innocent civilians, and anyone in their way to find and harness what it thinks will be a valuable weapon.
I use the Alien series to illustrate my point: my favorite stories about monsters tend to be the ones in which the monster(s) is not the source of evil. It might be the vessel or weapon of evil, it might be carrying out the will of evil, but the monster must be the consequence of evil, not the cause. Something human - whether it be greed, pride, arrogance, what have you - should be the fountain from which evil flows. Monster stories are morality tales.
Take Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs kill and eat many people, but is it their fault? They're doing what dinosaurs do. It was overreaching man that resurrected them. It was greed that said humans should create dinosaurs and display them in a theme park. It was arrogance that said humans could control animals they've never encountered before. If John Hammond and his company had left nature alone, none of the death and destruction would have followed.
There's also Godzilla. Going back to the original Gojira, Godzilla is a horrific, fire-breathing beast that levels Tokyo and kills who knows how many people. But what created Godzilla? Nuclear radiation, the fallout from humans splitting the atom and testing nuclear weapons without fully considering what the long-term consequences would be. Nature has been mutated by mankind's experiments, and it will come back to bite us.
By the same token, I appreciate it when the monster has admirable traits, or at least characteristics that inspire some sympathy and understanding. Frankenstein's Monster, as portrayed by Boris Karloff, is essentially a newborn in an imperfect, disfigured adult body. He doesn't understand right and wrong, and when abandoned by his creator - who thought he could defy the laws of nature by conquering death - the monster rampages in a lost, confused state. The monster is strangely innocent.
Even the killers from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre have features we can appreciate in a perverse way. While Sally treats her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin like a burden and uses the potential vandalism of her grandfather's gravesite as an excuse for a road trip, the Sawyers - inbred cannibals they be - show respect to their grandfather, carrying him to the dinner table and including him in the ... uh, family pastime and taking pride in his legacy.
Leatherface kills less out of bloodlust and more out of panic and fear: who are these strangers coming into his home? The fact the corpses are turned into barbecue feels less like preference and more driven by economic desperation and poverty. The family is made up of unemployed slaughterhouse workers, abandoned and isolated by a nation mired in a recession. What else can they do with that skill set? Where can they go?
This is when I think monster stories are most interesting, when they reflect something back about human nature. As ugly, horrific, and frightening as a monster can be, the scary part is what a monster tells us about ourselves.
Monsters are a mirror.
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