The Most Underrated Sci-Fi Horror Movies Of The 2010s
- 124 VOTESPhoto: Toho
Leave it to one of the creators of Neon Genesis Evangelion to make Godzilla scary for maybe the first time since the 1954 original. In the hands of Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, Shin Godzilla becomes something other than pure tokusatsu spectacle, transmuted into a dark comedy about the failings of bureaucracy in the face of disaster, one that seems to shapeshift as much as the eponymous big lizard does throughout the course of the film.
Never has Godzilla been weirder, wilder, or more destructive than in this unusual flick that nonetheless spends much of its time in meetings and phone calls, as we watch the inadequacy of government responses to a calamity play out. Shin Godzilla received seven awards at the Japan Academy Film Prize, the nearest national equivalent to the Academy Awards, including picture of the year when it was released in 2016, but it remains sadly underseen in the States.
- 237 VOTESPhoto: OTL Releasing
Two years before his 2020 hit, The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell - co-creator of Saw and Insidious, to name a few - had already dabbled in sci-fi horror with his "one part The Six Million Dollar Man, one part Death Wish revenge fantasy" film, Upgrade. While that's certainly one logline for this bonkers combo of sci-fi, action, and horror, our take is that it's actually probably a better Venom movie than the Venom movie, as Logan Marshall-Green plays a mechanic who, after an attack that leaves him as a quadriplegic, is "upgraded" with an experimental new computer chip that not only allows him to walk again but that can speak inside his mind and even take over the use of his body.
The often bravura set-pieces that showcase our lead using this new chip - and vice versa - prefigured some of the more impressive stuff that Whannell would do a few years later in Invisible Man and make the film a blast to sit through.
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- 339 VOTESPhoto: Warner Bros. Pictures
Adapted from M. R. Carey's acclaimed novel of the same name, The Girl With All the Gifts may have appeared as little more than yet another in a vast sea of similar zombie movies. It takes a very different look, however, at not only the nature of zombies but the central conflicts that these kinds of pictures explore. Melanie (Sennia Nanua, in her feature film debut) is a second-generation "hungry," fast zombie created by a fungal infection. Unlike the other hungries, who seem largely mindless, Melanie and the other second-generation children can speak, think, and reason, though they still crave human flesh.
Educated as part of an army experiment, Melanie escapes when the lab that has been her home is overrun, along with a handful of soldiers and her teacher. While The Girl with All the Gifts was almost universally praised, it remained under the radar for many, washed away beneath a sea of other zombie pictures that have come out in the last few decades.
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- 456 VOTESPhoto: Paramount Pictures
Is it kind of a spoiler to call 10 Cloverfield Lane a sci-fi horror movie? Sure, but also this flick, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman, has been out for half a decade now, so if the fact that it's about aliens comes out of left field for you, well, you probably only have yourself to blame. Of course, you couldn't prove it by the film itself, at least not for most of its runtime.
Winstead plays a woman who survives a car crash and awakens to find herself held prisoner in an underground bunker. Her captor, played by Goodman, claims that she's there for her own good, as the surface has been decimated by some unknown attack, though his more sinister motives eventually come to the fore. Of course, when Winstead's character finally reaches the surface, she finds that the "attack" part, at least, wasn't a put-on - in the film's particularly wild final act.
- 553 VOTESPhoto: Paramount Pictures
Adapted from a novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation can perhaps most easily be summed up as a modern riff on H. P. Lovecraft's classic short story "The Colour Out of Space." After a meteor crashes to Earth somewhere along the coast of the southern United States, the entire area around the impact site becomes known as "the Shimmer," affected by some sort of distortion effect caused, presumably, by the meteor, which seems to be literally capable of rewriting DNA.
After a Green Beret team disappears inside and only one returns - prompting more questions than answers - a new team is put together to explore the effects of the meteor, encountering strange mutations and perhaps even some questions about their own identities - and even the very nature of the self. Alex Garland directed the 2018 film, which veers between stark, visceral horror and heady questions of science and philosophy with surprising ease.
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- 635 VOTESPhoto: Dimension Films
The early part of the 2010s saw a spate of flicks about disastrous space missions, and one that flew under the radar for many was this found-footage horror film that posited a secret 18th Apollo mission that landed on the moon and found some not-so-friendly lifeforms there. Set in 1974, the film takes the form of fictitious footage recovered from the (equally fictitious) moon mission, which encounters spider-like alien creatures that camouflage themselves perfectly as inert rocks.
While it didn't exactly receive rave reviews at the time, a found footage space movie is still enough of a novelty, even today, that such a weird premise probably deserves at least a second look or two - and that ending stinger is worth waiting for.
- 722 VOTESPhoto: Lionsgate
Barry Levinson, director of such films as Rain Man and Good Morning, Vietnam, may seem an odd choice to helm a found footage horror movie about mutated examples of the (unfortunately very real) tongue-eating louse wiping out a town on the Chesapeake Bay, but here we are. In fact, Levinson's film actually started as a real-life documentary, before he abandoned that idea in favor of directing a horror film to hopefully draw attention to the challenges facing the Chesapeake Bay - mainly from pollution.
The film, which essentially cobbles together the last moments in the life of the town from an array of cellphone videos, security cameras, and so on, posits a situation in which toxicity in the bay causes the tongue-eating louse to mutate into something that can jump on land and start knocking off people, with predictably disastrous (and grisly) results.
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- 831 VOTESPhoto: Vertigo Films
Before he tackled Godzilla or Star Wars, Gareth Edwards kicked off the 2010s - and his directing career - with this lo-fi flick about tentacled monsters that crash down in Mexico and are contained by elaborate border security. Look, we didn't say that the metaphors were necessarily subtle here.
Setting an extremely human-scale story against the backdrop of an almost apocalyptic incursion of extraterrestrial life certainly set up the leitmotifs that Edwards would bring to his take on Godzilla, and even though this indie sci-fi horror picture helped to catapult his career, it hasn't exactly received the same number of eyeballs as his later, bigger-budget efforts.
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- 927 VOTESPhoto: StudioCanal
Jonathan Glazer's 2013 film may be best known, among those who know it, for the fact that Scarlett Johansson does full frontal in it. But the flick has a lot more to offer than titillation and, indeed, it uses those very moments of seeming exploitation to twist the knife of its unflinching story about an unearthly woman who seduces and preys upon men in Scotland. Not a film that's long on plot, Under the Skin trades instead in dreamy scenarios and bizarre imagery.
It's haunting, but not always coherent, which means that it hasn't always been everyone's cup of tea. Still, it's worth watching for its strange meditation on, well, you can read any number of things into it - and many have - but whatever it's meditating on, exactly, you can bet it's taking you along for the trip.
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- 1018 VOTES
Honeymoon
Photo: Magnolia PicturesSure, this 2014 feature debut from director Leigh Janiak, who more recently helmed all three movies in the Fear Street trilogy, may not ever actually say that it's about alien abductions, but when you've got mysterious lights in the woods and the people who follow them becoming impregnated by silhouetted figures that come from the lights, you don't really need someone to draw you a map.
With a cast of only about four characters, this extremely intimate horror drama goes to some pretty squicky places before all is said and done, and relies heavily on the performances of its young couple, who encounter the aforementioned "aliens" while on their eponymous honeymoon. To say that things go poorly for them after that is a serious understatement.
- 1118 VOTES
Frankenstein's Army
Photo: MPI Media GroupThere are worse things than to have your film compared to the likes of Frank Henenlotter, Stuart Gordon, and Shinya Tsukamoto. Such is the case with Frankenstein's Army, the feature debut from director Richard Raaphorst who, as it happens, had previously worked as a concept artist on, among others, several films by Gordon. Set during the closing days of World War II, Frankenstein's Army is a found-footage film following a Soviet platoon as they infiltrate a secret lab where a descendant of the original Victor Frankenstein has been creating "zombots" by fusing human beings with machinery.
The film's obvious highlight is its dizzying funhouse array of bizarre creatures, taking the basic premise of Frankenstein and duct-taping it haphazardly to the metal fetish aesthetics of Tsukamoto to produce wildly inventive and deeply weird monsters brought to life almost entirely through practical effects and people in suits.
- 1228 VOTES
Europa Report
Photo: Magnet ReleasingThere's something waiting for us on one of Jupiter's moons. At least, that's the premise of Philip Gelatt and Sebastian Cordero's 2013 thriller. Shot in mockumentary style, the film spends most of its runtime on the trip to the eponymous moon, which is replete with the sorts of setbacks and near-disasters that we're accustomed to in our movies about astronauts. Once the crew arrives on the surface of Europa, though, the real horror begins.
Lurking in the water beneath the ice of the moon's surface is a bioluminescent, tentacled lifeform that is the last thing several of the crew sees before their demise. It's not a typical creature feature, saving the monster reveal for the film's final minutes, which led to many people missing this thoughtful and carefully crafted take on the space mission thriller.
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- 1318 VOTESPhoto: Magnet Releasing
Nearly a full decade before the cult hit Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage, director Panos Cosmatos showed his chops with this hallucinatory flick about a woman with ESP attempting to escape from a mysterious institution. It's a plot that's been done before (by Stephen King, many times, and on Stranger Things, to name just a few), but you can bet that in the hands of Cosmatos, it doesn't look or feel quite like any of the other stories with similar loglines.
The resulting cocktail is as strange and intoxicating as fans of Mandy could ask for, and combines elements of science fiction - including psychic powers - with occult and New Age imagery to create a film that is perhaps more vibes than plot, but anyone who is coming here from Mandy probably expects nothing less.
- 1414 VOTESPhoto: XLrator Media
Taking as its jumping-off point the real-life secret CIA experiment Project MKUltra and drawing inspiration from a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, this bizarre found-footage tale about secret government projects, otherworldly entities, numbers stations, and a Hunter S. Thompson-esque counterculture journalist played by Ted Levine, is something of a hodgepodge, but there are plenty of effective moments throughout, especially for those who like their sci-fi a little more on the weird horror side.
The idea of a drug that allows people to not only see otherworldly beings but actually be directly affected by them, coupled with the broadcasts of the mysterious radio stations, makes for a compelling update of Lovecraft's "From Beyond," with loads of creepy imagery and more than a dash of conspiracy theory paranoia thrown in for good measure.
- 1514 VOTESPhoto: Alliance Films
When it comes to weird sci-fi horror, Brandon Cronenberg has some big shoes to fill. As the son of the legendary David Cronenberg, people naturally come to his work with certain expectations, and his feature debut doesn't disappoint in the big ideas department, positing a not-so-distant future in which viruses and pathogens are harvested from celebrities who become ill and then sold to their fans, who want to feel a connection.
It's an idea that aligns with Cronenberg's more recent sci-fi horror feature, 2020's Possessor, exploring a future that holds a mirror up to our present, our feelings of alienation, and our desire for connection in a world where we can be in touch with more people than ever, but have, in many ways, never been further apart. To say that Antiviral isn't exactly an easy watch is an understatement, but for those who like their sci-fi visceral as well as cerebral, there's plenty for you here.
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- 1612 VOTESPhoto: A24
The first English-language film by acclaimed French director Claire Denis, High Life is told in a chronologically disjointed fashion and follows a group of condemned prisoners who are sent on a mission to explore novel ways to extract energy from the environs of a black hole. The film utilized actual astrophysicists as advisors, but it's really in the decaying relationships of the characters that the horror comes to the fore.
Juliette Binoche plays a sadistic scientist who uses the other prisoners like guinea pigs while Robert Pattinson and Mia Goth, among others, fill out the rest of the cast. As the prisoners' interactions begin to grow worse and worse, the body count begins to climb, though this is more a feel-bad movie than a gory slasher. While it was released by indie darling studio A24, it seems that High Life didn't garner quite as much acclaim as some of that shingle's bigger hits, and so not as many people have seen this unusual science fiction shocker.
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