The Cosmic Abyss: Exploring the Existential Horror of Sci-Fi Movies

Existential horror throws around more questions than it does answers. Are you real? Do you really control your life? Should you be held responsible for the choices you make? Does it even matter what choices you make? Are your thoughts and feelings actually yours alone, or imposed on you? When you die, do you really stop existing? Does life have meaning at all? And believe it or not, all those questions make for great ideas for sci-fi horror movies, especially when combined with space setting for a true cosmic vibe.

Solaris (2002)

Arguably the most definitive existential cosmic horror film ever, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002) is like a revisit for a 1972 classic Russian sci-fi film of the same name directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. While it might be true to some extent, Soderbergh’s version isn’t exactly a remake, but a renewed take on the same source material, the 1961 novel “Solaris” by Stanisław Lem. Also, Solaris is often regarded as an answer to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – now this is almost certainly correct. If Kubrick’s film is outward with human ambition for space exploration, Soderbergh’s work is inward as it delves into the question of reality itself.

The story is introspective in nature. A group of researchers went to space to study a planet named Solaris. Many of them die or disappear, but the remnants of their memories materialize before the surviving few. These memories take shape as orphaned children and a long dead spouse of a crew member wandering in the spaceship among the living. Of course, the crews are smart enough to notice that those figures are mere apparitions, but still they can trigger the same feelings of love and happiness as the personalities they represent do.

Memories of people differ from actual people. Solaris – the planet – exploits these memories and trick the researchers into believing that an alternate reality can coexist with the actual reality. Somewhere along the film, the planet is actually the one doing the research, using as its subjects the astronauts, instead of the other way around.

Event Horizon (1997)

In the near future of 2047, Earth reads a distress signal from Event Horizon, a spaceship that vanished seven years ago during the journey to the Proxima Centauri. When it suddenly reappears somewhere around Neptune, a rescue mission is sent to investigate the mysterious phenomenon. Once the rescue team arrives, they actually detect signs of life all around the spaceship, but strangely enough they find no sign of humans everywhere. What kind of life form is it, then?

Event Horizon also gives the “2001: A Space Odyssey” vibe from the get-go. The space vessels are properly detailed, and there’s even a sound effect that mimics a rumbling engine in the background. If you listen carefully, you should be able to catch some barely audible chattering noises, like someone or something is plotting something bad behind closed doors. Event Horizon is likely influenced more by Solaris. It even uses the same idea of hallucinations attacking the crew members of a spaceship that orbits a massive planet. They even hallucinate about the same things, too: family members.

No one knows what happened to Event Horizon, how the crew ended up missing, and what they did while the ship went out of radar for years. The film doesn’t even try to answer those questions, but there’s an assumption that when humans go too far beyond their natural realm and break the laws of physics, their fate is at the mercy of a mysterious and more powerful force.

Prometheus (2012)

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) is meant to be a prequel to the entire Alien franchise, which he started decades earlier. Prometheus brings the series back to 2089 when an Earth-based corporation sends an expedition to a distant planet hoping to find the origin of human existence. And as expected, it still doesn’t have an answer by the end.

The film opens with a brilliant scene of a humanoid deliberately drinking some sort of liquid before dissolving itself. This entity’s physical building blocks flow into the water below, where it appears to reassemble themselves into cellular structures. The film doesn’t explain where this place is supposed to be. Is it Earth, as hinted by the presence of water? Is the entity the predecessor of the human species, or an extraterrestrial life form that created humans in the first place?

Back to the expedition, the team arrives at the exact location suggested by two archaeologists, who deduce that some star maps discovered from ancient cultures on Earth point to the origin of humans on Earth. In this distant moon, they encounter an entity that looks almost identical to the humanoid in the opening scene. They call this creature the “Engineer.”

We think existential horror in sci-fi movies has to venture beyond the dreadfulness of scary monsters and killer robots. It’s all about human’s helplessness in the face of much more powerful forces, our inability to cope with the discovery of the origin of life, and the realization of our own insignificance in the greater scheme of things in the universe. Existential horror manifests itself as an acceptance that reality is actually beyond our control and that we’re nothing but playthings at the whims of incomprehensible power.

Outside the typical sci-fi trappings of extraterrestrial life forms and unexplored planets, what other genres can present existential horror perfectly? Do you think it’s possible to frame existential horror in a supernatural premise? We’d love to hear from you.

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