10 Movies That Perfectly Blend Horror & Sci-Fi

10. Pandorum (2009)

A deep space, ship-based horror that is neither Alien or Event Horizon, Pandorum manages to tread familiar territory while delivering a unique, and uniquely rewarding, experience.

The film opens on the Elysium, an interstellar ark sent to colonise a habitable planet across the universe. But something has gone terribly wrong: the power is out, most of the ship’s inhabitants are dead and gangs of monstrous mutant creatures roam the corridors. It's up to two members of the flight crew, Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) and Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) to find out what happened and get the ship back on course.

You can be forgiven for never having heard of Pandorum, as, despite starring Quaid and Foster, it released in 2009 to no fanfare and didn't even make its modest $33 million budget back. One half of the problem was the distributor's uncertainty in how to market it, as it doesn't seem a fit for either the Star Wars or Halloween crowds; the other half was the fact that both sci-fi and horror were stuck in a strange in-between at the time - untethered from big franchises and yet to find success in the indie revival. 

Nevertheless, the film expertly enmeshes its sci-fi and horror elements, making smart use of technology to keep the action contained and the characters lost in post-cryo fugue states, alongside consistently unspooling horrors pertaining to the creatures, the ship's fate and the space psychosis known as pandorum, which threatens to doom them all.