Movies
Ring in the New Year with 10 Futuristic Horror Films
The beginning of a new decade is always a great time for reflection – both on what’s come before and where we’re headed. Cinematically, countless writers and directors have given us their visions of the future, both near and far – some dystopian and rugged, others shiny and overflowing with astonishing new technologies. We’ve learned from past experience not to take their ideas all that seriously (weren’t we supposed to have flying cars by now?), but it’s a lot of fun to entertain the notion of a future world bearing little resemblance to our own. In the horror genre, this future world is almost uniformly presented as a dark, hostile place, filled with malevolent organisms that would sooner rip your head off than engage in a “meaningful dialogue”. To celebrate these films, and to mark the new decade, I’ve listed ten of the best. Let’s just hope our real-world destiny is a lot more hospitable.
10 Best Futuristic Horror Films
Future Year: Unspecified
This little-seen sci-fi horror from Mario Bava is rather hokey in spots, but it’s got loads of atmosphere and merits a definite watch. The story concerns a crew of astronauts stranded on a strange, mist-shrouded planet after crash-landing there. What they encounter is a race of disembodied aliens who possess and reanimate the dead in order to stalk and kill the living. Frankly, the film has nothing to do with vampires and is more akin to fare like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing. That being said, it’s a lot of fun and showcases the celebrated director’s ability to create an evocative mood with a miniscule budget (the film was reportedly shot for about $100K). It’s a B-movie all the way (complete with awkward dubbed dialogue), but better than most.
Future Year: 2047
Ok, let’s just tell it like it is: for all its cool visuals and inspired set design, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon is kind of a cheese-fest. In the hands of a more subtle director, the truly scary premise (space ship goes to Hell and back, literally) could have made for a genuinely disturbing and provocative film; what Anderson gives us is loads of gore and cheap shocks. Nevertheless, sometimes gore and cheap shocks are just what horror audiences are in the mood for, and on that front Event Horizon delivers. The way the film unfolds is nothing short of preposterous, but that’s part of its charm – Anderson is nothing if not a blunt-force director, with little time for mere suggestion; the images we get here are straight out of an exploitative B-horror picture. God bless it for that, and for a few moments of inspired absurdity (most of them courtesy of our beloved Sam Neill).
Future Year: 2078
Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, Screamers was a flop upon its release but has since gone on to become a minor cult classic. In the early going it comes across as a futuristic Tremors, but it ends up evolving into something quite a bit more ambitious than that. The story involves a “race” of artificially intelligent beings that are essentially miniature killing machines that burrow under the sand, slicing and dicing any humans unlucky enough to cross their path. The ever-reliable Peter Weller stars as the commander of an Alliance military base set on an arid planet called Sirius 6B. The Alliance was responsible for developing the machines to ward off attackers, but now they’ve begun to mutate into other forms and turn against their creators. There’s nothing all that mind-blowing here; just a nifty little entertainment with some inspired special effects, a game cast and a neat premise.
Future Year: Thousands of years in the future
The sequel to 1985 cult anime classic Vampire Hunter D (based on the novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi) improves in every way upon the original. Better animation, more identifiable characters, a greater sense of scope. In some ways it’s less a sequel than a re-imagining of the first movie, only with greater layers of character complexity and a more fully-immersive visual landscape. It’s also a bold imagining of a far, far, far-future world that blends elements of horror, sci-fi, American westerns, and folk mythology. “D”, the eponymous vampire hunter, is hired to rescue a young girl from the clutches of a vampire intent on making her his bride. Only problem is, the girl’s father has also hired a team of tough-talking bounty hunters to complete the job, so “D” must get to her before they do if he’s to reap the rewards. The film is beautifully rendered in the best anime tradition, with compelling action sequences and a human heart at its core.
Future Year: 2179
Alien 3 is the least effective of the iconic series; which is to say, it’s still pretty damn good. Stories of the troubled production are now legendary, with Fincher alleging constant interference by the studio during filming and even walking out during the editing process. It’s easy to see why – the studio-butchered theatrical cut is confusing, does next to nothing to delineate any of the prisoners before they’re slaughtered, and overall comes off as a deeply flawed (albeit visually stunning) creation. Which is why I’m going to suggest now that instead of watching the theatrical version, you should check out the “Assembly Cut” (released as part of the Alien Quadrilogy box set), which is as close to Fincher’s vision of the film as we’re ever likely to get. While still far from perfect, this edition of the movie is much, much better, fleshing out the characters and establishing a more coherent chain of events and motivations. It’s just as dark (if not darker) than the theatrical version, but with the benefit of the added scenes all that gloomy atmosphere actually serves to underscore the film’s thematic aspirations.
Future Year: 2154 or later
Sometimes I just don’t get the critics. This nifty sci-fi horror (sort of the The Descent in space, but way more ambitious than that sounds) was almost universally panned on its release as a junky Alien clone. Which is absurd, given that Pandorum shares very little in common with that film other than the fact that it takes place on a claustrophobic spaceship. If this movie would have come out 20 or 30 years ago, it would have been applauded as a superbly directed, well-acted study in isolation and paranoia. I’m not saying there are no derivative elements; of course there are. But for god’s sake, this is loads better (and smarter) than 90% of the sci-fi product Hollywood routinely churns out. I can only hope audiences will discover this film on DVD – it deserves way more attention than it got.
Future Year: 2379 (roughly)
Gripe if you must, but I consider Alien: Resurrection a sadly underrated sequel that boasts some intensely stimulating visuals crafted by City of Lost Children director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I’ll admit that I found the justification for Ripley’s return to be almost laughable in its absurdity, but Jeunet directs the whole thing with such ingenuity and conviction it ends up making a strange sort of sense. And really, what would an Alien movie be without our beloved Sigourney? Many saw this entry as the death of the franchise; I viewed it as a bold new beginning, in a series that should be applauded for its willingness to take risks. Enough with this Predator crossover nonsense – bring on Alien 5!
Future Year: 26th Century
Pitch Black comes off rather ordinary in the early scenes, as a spacecraft bearing a few dozen civilian passengers crash-lands on a desert-like planet and strands them in the midst of some particularly nasty winged beasties. However, it evolves into something truly special in the later going. That’s because unlike most sci-fi directors, David Twohy (who also wrote the film) doesn’t lose sight of his human characters along the way. The arcs of the two leads (played deftly by Vin Diesel and Radha Mitchell, both excellent and underrated actors) are genuinely compelling, with an unexpected pathos emerging over the course of their chaotic fight for survival. Working with a limited (for the genre) budget, Twohy nevertheless crafted a great-looking film as well, utilizing blue and red camera filters to give the alien planet a disorienting beauty. The CGI is a little underwhelming at times, but no matter; these creatures only come out at night.
Future Year: 2122
If not for its first sequel, Alien most definitely would have been number one on this list. This is the standard-bearer, the movie that spawned a new era in sci-fi horror (not to mention a raft of inferior copycats). The film is famous for its (still cringe-worthy) chest-bursting scene, but that’s merely the centerpiece of a movie so perfectly calibrated that it holds up just as well today as it did over 30 years (!) ago. Scott’s direction rightly gets the majority of the praise, but one of the main reasons for the movie’s timeless appeal is the design of the creature by surrealist Swiss artist H.R. Giger. The phallic, terrifying, strangely alluring Alien ranks alongside vampires, werewolves and mummies as one of film-doms most enduring movie monsters.
Future Year: 2179
The first film is an artful, claustrophobic nightmare whose main strength is its slowly-enveloping sense of dread and heart-catching suspense. Aliens is a different beast altogether, a balls-to-the-wall action movie with loads of firepower and Sigourney Weaver (who was nominated for a freaking Oscar for this movie, lest we forget) in full warrior mode. At the end of the day, it’s tough to distinguish which is the better film, since they’re both such excellent and visionary works utilizing very different approaches. I give the edge to Cameron’s sequel, if only for its endless re-watch-ability factor and the fact that it so effortlessly melds the foreboding atmosphere of the first movie with the breathless pyrotechnics of a full-throttle action film. It also has that bad-ass Alien Queen, one of the most magnificent creations in sci-fi history. With Aliens Cameron not only made the rare sequel that lives up to the original (and then some), he created one of the greatest films ever made in three different genres (action, horror, and sci-fi). No small feat.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
4 New Horror Movies Releasing This Week Including ‘Late Night with the Devil’ at Home
Spring 2024 Horror Preview: 12 Horror Movies You Don’t Want to Miss
The ‘Scary Movie’ Spoof Franchise Is Getting a Reboot at Paramount!
‘Ready or Not’: Radio Silence Filmmakers Tease the “Absolute Banger” of a Sequel That’s Taking Shape
“We Built Every Creature” – ‘Alien: Romulus’ Goes Heavy on the Old School Practical Effects!
You must be logged in to post a comment.