10 Movies That Perfectly Blend Horror & Sci-Fi

Adapted from Michel Faber’s livelier but far inferior novel of the same name, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin stretches the limits of what is possible in contemporary arthouse cinema, taking a big Hollywood star (Scarlett Johansson), making her small and unassuming, and spending nearly two hours of relative silence trawling the streets and coasts of Scotland.

While this sounds like neither science fiction nor horror, both genres are, appropriately, lurking just below the surface. Johansson plays an unnamed woman who picks up men on the streets of Glasgow, and takes them home to be submerged in a dimensionally impossible liquid abyss and relieved of their skin. The woman is an alien, working for others of her kind, towards a mysterious goal whose end is never made apparent, while struggling to locate herself between worlds.

This is precisely what makes Under the Skin so effective. That there are aliens among us, wearing our skins, luring us to our deaths, is bad enough; but that their purpose is so opaque as to seem pointless - and thus to render their violence and murder the same - is bleak beyond reproach. The film’s horror and sci-fi are thus inseparable; take away one and you take away the other, leaving only a film about a woman who travels around Scotland having brief affairs with average men.