Pod People
Unlike the modern schience fiction horror films (disgusting things they are!Actually I don't like the horror genre at all but this is an interesting topic) that focus on blood and violence, the classic sci fi horrors were focused at a more psychological level. What was frightening about these films was not the gore, but the idea that surrounded them. The original The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a chilling (if unbelievable) tale about a young man who returns to his town to discover that something is disturbingly wrong. People are acting different and a strange hysteria has hit the town. People claim that their loved ones are imposters. What our antagonist discovers is something he would never have dreamed of! It seems that the people of the town are being killed and replaced by copies formed out of alien pods. The source of these pods are not explained but they don't need to be. The frightening thing is that something unseen is creeping up on the town unnoticed. We are all afraid of invasion, but even more terrifying is the thought of an unseen invader creeping in and taking over our lives. This invader could take many forms. It could be communism, cults and other such things. Or perhaps it is even the fact that technology seems to be taking over our lives. In this artificial age everyone seems to be becoming "Pod People". Or is it something personal? What is your invader?
Lost Fanatic
Day Break TV
Passionate Apathy
One thing that always sends chills down my spine is the removing or alteration of our very being; putting wires and machines in our heads to change us into... what? That was what made Captain Picard's assimilation by the Borg so affecting; the idea that one's basic self could be rewritten by an outside force. Deeply creepy.
Passionate Apathy
Researchers have been able to directly connect nervous systems to artificial implants; the next step is to directly connect human brains. I remember the engineer on Andromeda had a jack in his neck to plug his very brain into computer systems. I remember thinking "He has way too much faith in his firewalls."
Horrorphile
Guess I won't be seeing over in my dark neck o' the woods any time soon then, huh?
For the record, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a truly brilliant sf-horror ... Philip Kaufman's remake ain't bad, nor is Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers
The two greatest sf-horrors are Ridley Scott's Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing ... but you'd probably find them too splattery ...
Passionate Apathy
That's part of what made Kill Bill so funny: the parody of the ultraviolant spatter flick. When I realized they were using a shower head to spray the "blood" up from the severed neck I laughed my ass off.
Horrorphile
you've only seen part of Alien??
Come back to me when you've seen the whole movie!
Film & TV on DVD
I love the Don Siegel original Body Snatchers...the remakes are pretty good too. (Though I'm dreading the new one with plastercine faced Nicole Kidman).