10 Movies That Perfectly Blend Horror & Sci-Fi

The first of the Riddick trilogy (soon to be a tetralogy), and an indie gem, Pitch Black introduces Richard Riddick (Vin Diesel), the last of the Furyan race, an infamous criminal, and an all-out badass.

Long before Diesel was making his name synonymous with the Fast movies, he was getting grubby in the dark on a remote planet whose shadows hide something sinister. Riddick escapes his confines when a transport escorting him to prison crash lands, and he must use his combat and survival skills, along with his now-iconic pair of enhanced eyes, to take on an array of monstrous creatures.

David Twohy’s film may have attracted comparisons to the hammy Starship Troopers on arrival, but it soon entered a league of its own, demonstrating that neither the slapstick nonsense of Troopers, nor the epic intergalactic landscapes of Star Wars, nor even the claustrophobic bottle scenarios of Alien were necessary to make a great picture out in the darker parts of the galaxy. Instead, he creates a nightmarish world of savagery where alien creatures hunt Riddick and his companions in bloody fashion, and restricts them only by what is at once the most obvious and yet ingenious device: they can’t come out in daylight.

Thus, when an eclipse arrives, the film kicks the horrors up to a whole new level…