10 Movies That Perfectly Blend Horror & Sci-Fi

2. Timecrimes (2007)

Eighteen years ago, director Nacho Vigalondo took a two-and-a-half-million-dollar budget and turned out an indie time travel feature that made inroads at the festivals and then failed to find distributors for global release. As a result, Timecrimes is one of the forgotten gems of international cinema, sitting astride science fiction and horror, employing commonplace tropes from each in new, exciting and devastating ways.

The film follows Héctor (Karra Elejalde), a man living the quiet life out in the Spanish countryside, who witnesses a woman undressing in the forest by his house, and is unwittingly drawn into a game of cat and mouse involving a mysterious bandaged man, a time machine and a seemingly irreversible series of disasters.

A cautionary tale for the ages, Timecrimes uses time travel to unwind a man’s life, providing a litany of horrors - violence, murder, ruin, etc. - that all stem from the improper use of technology and an absent reverence for the immutability of the future and past. As Héctor travels back in time to try and maintain his own continuity and repair the mistakes of his future and past selves, he is ensnared by fate itself – and, as we realise with each subsequent time-based disaster that that he couldn’t have done differently, the true dread of the picture sets in.