On Vice's Motherboard blog today, there's a great piece about how science fiction does horror better than horror does. An excerpt:
"Typically, good sci-fi horror confronts the limits, frailties, and anxieties of the human body in a modernizing world. Serial killers can hack a person apart, sure, but science can contort, experiment, and confound the flesh in ways that we're only beginning to imagine. Sci-fi horror offers us a graphic visual language to process our most vivid and fantastical nightmares about what science might do to us.
Whereas most sci-fi epics take place on colorful interstellar quests or far-off dystopias, in sci-fi horror, humans are always front-and-center, uncomfortably cloistered in confined spaces, even as the aliens or our lab-grown hubris tear us apart. Sci-fi horror shoves our faces in the weakness and vulnerability of the human body, forcing us, as viscerally as possible, to consider the price of progress on these bags of meat we walk around in. Should we try so desperately to extend our lifespans, travel into uncharted terrains, prod that alien-looking life form when we find it?"