20 Horror Films Where Humans Are The Real Monsters

Vincenzo Natali’s Splice is a Dolly the Sheep story for the horror crowd, showing us what happens not only when humans tinker with the natural world, but what comes when we truly create something in our own image.

Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) work in genetic engineering, splicing animal genes and creating new beings designed to aid in testing and drug production. After being expressly forbidden to introduce human DNA into the process, they do just that, creating a human–animal hybrid called Dren, which ages and develops at a rapid pace. Focused on this new creation, the pair allow their other work to go to seed and become sloppy in the lab, ignoring all protocols for experimentation and treating Dren as something like a child, then a lover, then an enemy.

There is only one literal monster in Splice, and yet it’s merely a product of its surroundings. It is not exactly difficult to see who the real monsters are: Clive and Elsa engage in a litany of deceptions and amoral behaviour throughout, lying to their employers, creating an abomination, forcibly amputating its stinger, willingly having sex with it, burying it alive… the list goes on. Oh, to be human.