Most of my favourite books/movies/TV shows are Sci fi - I love Mary Shelley, slaughterhouse five, annihilation (both the book and the movie), The Thing, x files, the invasion, and the OA. This feels like a pretty wide variety of writing styles when I line them up but 90% of the sci fi I read/watch I just don’t enjoy at all. It’s a shame because when I love something sci fi I feel like it’s changed my whole life, but when it comes to finding new things I can just enjoy its easier to go through other genres. Is anyone else like this? Does anyone have reccomendations based on what I do like?
The common factor seems to be more grounded Earth-based sci-fi with a smidge of horror and perhaps some mystery, rather than space battles.
In that case, films and TV:
- Early Cronenberg up to eXistenZ (perhaps Crimes of the Future, if you really like that)
- Society
- The Faculty
- Save the Green Planet
- Under the Skin
- They Live
- The Mist
- A Quiet Place
- Cube series
- Slither
- Splice
- Splinter
- The Reanimator series
- From Beyond
- Phantasm series
- Tetsuo
- Cloverfield (and 10 Cloverfield Lane)
- The Host
- Predator series
- The Void
- Fringe TV series, as you liked The X-Files. I presume you have watched Millennium?
- BrainDead (2016 TV series)
- The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker TV series
- Truthseekers (2020 TV series)
- Lovecraft Country - book and series
- Eerie Indiana
- Ultraviolet (1998 UK TV series)
- Tokyo Gore Police and others by the same team, like Meatball Machine and Machine Girl
- Gantz
- The Girl With All the Gifts - book and series
- Timecrimes
- Pi
- Bad Taste
- Grabbers
- Body Melt
- Wild Zero
- Pontypool
- The Objective
- District 9
- Firebase and have a look at the others they have done, especially Zygote
- Love, Death and Robots
- Matango
- Xtro
- John Dies at the End - read the books first
- Frankenstein’s Army
- Overlord
- Quatermass and the Pit, as well as other Quatermass films and series
- The Deadly Spawn
- The Man With X-ray Eyes
- Village of the Damned (1960)
- The Illustrated Man (1969)
- Take Shelter
And one with spaceships in it: Starship Troopers
That goes a little too hard into horror, so also try:
- The Truman Show
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Looper
- Source Code
- Minority Report
- 12 Monkeys
- Donnie Darko
- Vanilla Sky
- Dark City
- Being John Malkovich
Although they are all pretty obvious. Might have to ponder this more.
edit: also:
- The Arrival (1996) - instead of Arrival that I’ll assume you’ve seen
- Resident Alien - TV series and comics
- How to Talk to Girls at Parties
- Rupture (2016)
- The Watch (2012)
- Alien Raiders (2008)
- Threshold (2005 TV series)
- Invasion (2005 TV series)
- The Forgotten (2004)
