Obviously, not all scifi madness is space madness, but there are some great examples of this classic form of mental degeneration coming from being cooped up in a tiny place that is your only life support. Sometimes you're cooped up with a bunch of annoying people, like in the Michael Crichton book/movie Sphere, where the space madness is actually "undersea madness" but it's the basic idea. You're in a tiny, stinky space and you want badly to leave, but if you do you die. In Sphere, as in many "space madness" classics (including the best Ren & Stimpy episode ever). One of the basic signs of space madness is rampant hallucination, usually enhanced into something real by alien technologies. This also the case in the original Russian version of Solaris, where a mad spaceman starts seeing freaky visions of his mother and lots of macrame because the planet he's circling has some kind of power to manifest the unconscious.

You see a strange and gooey-disturbing variation on the theme of space madness in Donnie Darko, a cult film that may be slightly incoherent but wins the awesome award anyway for successfully depicting a genuinely scary cute bunny costume. In this film, which has about a billion interpretations, one thing is clear: our antihero Donnie has a potentially-fatal encounter with a jet engine that crashes into his bedroom. And then time goes out of joint, or maybe his imagination does, and he begins to have visions of an evil cute bunny and car crashes and a sky filling up with clouds like dark ink. Space doesn't drive teenager Donnie mad, his family does. And his suburban house is sort of like a spaceship in that he's still too young to leave home and survive. So he's stuck there, until his world is punctured by a giant piece of jet junk. Are his visions real? Can he change the future? You'll be creeped out by these questions and his mental anguish until the very last scene.

The novel and movie Mysterious Skin turn childhood trauma into space madness. It's the story of two boys who grew up together in Kansas, barely knowing one another, but connected by an incident that one of them is convinced was an alien abduction. The movie, an indie directed by Gregg Araki with Joseph Gordon Leavitt, is terrific — but the novel by Scott Heim is simply gorgeous and haunting and full of midwestern teen angst turned trippy. While one character pursues his theory that he was abducted by aliens, the other pursues gay hustling and moves to the alien city of New York. It's to Heim's credit that you don't know until the very end whether the aliens are real.

As I said in reference to Sphere and Solaris, one of the hallmarks of space madness is that your mad fantasies become real. That's certainly the case with one of the most tragic and beloved crazy creatures in science fiction: The Hulk. I'm not the first person to point out that Bruce Banner is basically a mutant with multiple personality disorder, whose dark alternate self has the unfortunate ability to embody what would in an ordinary person be merely a delusion of grandeur. Like Mr. Hyde before him, Hulk is the literal representation of repressed rage. Like madness itself, which can sometimes be contained but often never completely cured, Hulk is always returning from whatever prison the military, the shrinks, or the Avengers cook up for him.

Of course, there is one perfect way to defeat madness — perhaps as perfect as the cold virus was at defeating the tripods in War of the Worlds. Simply destroy the brain that spawns the madness. Hence the amazing brain-drilling scene in Pi, which allows our hero to escape his own mind — and escape the evil corporation that wants to exploit his mind. This idea also feeds into the utterly depressing scene at the end of Brazil where our romantic hero Sam Lowry has been tortured to the point of complete catatonia. I suppose in Brazil his madness may in fact be his salvation. Depends on how you read it.

There are dozens of other books and movies that deal with space madness writ small or large: Jacob's Ladder, Perdido Street Station, Dark City, and Octavia Butler's superlative Patternmaster series. While some of these stories imagine that you can get over "the crazy," as it's called in the TV-signal-makes-you-smash-heads movie The Signal, most of them don't. Either the characters die, or remain alive in a state of horrifying out-of-controlness like Hulk or some of the creatures whose minds have been eaten in China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station. So, like I said, things could be a lot worse than having your brain eaten by zombies. You could have zombies in your brain. Forever.

The answer is obviously complicated. For some people, torture puts any story beyond the pale: a couple of weeks ago, scifi writer Karen Joy Fowler told me in an interview that she refuses to watch Battlestar Galactica because there's too much torture in it. But millions of movie fans have turned near-future flick Hostel, about an imaginary Eastern European country that houses a torture-entertainment center for the rich, into a cult hit and franchise. And the TV series 24, which is also a near-future dystopia, also has millions of drooling fans who don't seem to mind that superspy Jack, our main character, is constantly torturing people with everything from ugly lamps to fists.

Enough has been said about torture porn that I don't need to repeat the arguments too much here. They all boil down to one question: Does watching torture make us more likely to tolerate it in real life?

I had a brilliant professor in college who always answered that question with a roll of her eyes. "Look," she would say, "If it were true that we always did what the media told us, then every single advertisement would work. We'd buy everything we see advertised." Because she's right about that, we know it's not the case that everything we see in the media leads to behaviors in real life. The question of torture then boils down to whether it's necessary for a given story.

Let's look at one of the most famous examples of torture in scifi. Canadian flick Cube, which came out in the late 1990s, was your classic, Saw-style "a bunch of strangers trapped in a weird place have to solve puzzles to escape horrible grody death" kind of flick. For people raised with videogames, a form of entertainment where you solve puzzles to avoid dying, the scenario was familiar. And the puzzle was even pretty cool: the characters have to figure out a sequence of prime numbers in order to escape from a giant cube building full of rooms that move around all the time. As they're figuring out the prime number sequence, they venture into rooms that stab them, poison them, chop them up into little cubes, and generally spew gore everywhere. Do we need the torture along with the cool math game? I'd say yes. The entire movie depends on the audience understanding the characters' urgency, but at the same time the scenario is surreal enough that bringing in the torture enhances our sense of bizarre otherworldliness.

But how about Wes "Scream" Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, a classic cult movie from the 1970s that was just remade into a less-than-amazing franchise? In the original, gritty-freakout movie, a family whose truck breaks down is waylaid by atomic cannibal mutants in the desert. The torture is campy and hideous at the same time. In fact, the entire point of the movie is really the torture, and the escape, of our normal American family. Like Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes is literally about torture and what it can do to you. So the movie couldn't exist without torture, and in fact the torture itself is the point. How will people be dismembered? Where will the blood splatter? Will they really DO that? Without torture, there would be no movie.

Let's return to Battlestar Galactica's torture with these two examples in mind. Unlike The Hills Have Eyes, BSG is not about torture. It's about a horrific dystopia where torture has become part of everyday life. Like Cube, BSG uses torture to explore the urgency of the situation its characters are in. So do we need the torture to feel that urgency?

One might ask the same question about a scene in Iain M. Banks' novel The Algebraist, where we are treated to an intense scene of torture in order to show how evil one particular character, Luseferous, really is:

[Luseferous] had decreed that the final punishment of the assassin should be his own teeth . . . Accordingly, his four canine teeth had been removed, bioengineered to become tusks which would grow without ceasing . . . These great finger-thick fangs had erupted out of the bones of his upper and lower jaw, puncturing the flesh of his lips, and had continued their remorseless growth. The lower set curved up and over his head, and after a few months worth of extension, came to touch his scalp near the top of his head, while the upper set grew in a scimitar-like paired sweep beneath his neck . . . Both sets of teeth then started to enter the assassin's body, one pair slowly forcing themselves through the bony plates of the man's skull, the other entering rather more easily into the soft tissues of the lower neck . . . The fangs burrowing through his skull and into his brain were the ones which would shortly, and agonizingly, kill him . . . This unfortunate, nameless assassin had been unable to do anything to prevent this because he was pinned helpless and immobile against the wall of the chamber . . . his nutrition and bodily functions catered for by various tubes and implants . . . The fellow's ears and mind still worked.

Perhaps it could have been less detailed, but I would not have remembered it so vividly if it had not. Similarly, I would not have felt the horror of the humans' and Cylons' situations without seeing Six tortured by humans, and Baltar tortured by Cylons. I am not sure if making something memorable is justification, but it is certainly emotional realism. And in a genre whose entire narrative substance is the unreal, the science fictional, a dose of emotional realism can be potent indeed.

I still use this little survival mechanism to get through the scary scenes in movies. It's amazing how covering your ears, rather than your eyes, makes it all much more bearable. Plus, I wouldn't want to miss the best parts: the spatter of gore when the infected lady explodes; the crunch of the monster's gigantic mouth through the annoying dude's neck; the boiling pool of bloodslime where the ladies stab each other with rock-climbing equipment while a monster looks on; the giant alien orgy where some poor sucker gets dissolved and eaten.

So I have trained myself to watch horror movies, using little tools like fingers-in-the-ears and watching so many flicks in the genre that I know what will happen before the director does. And I'm willing to admit that I pay a little price in my electricity bills every month. That's right: I can't sleep without leaving the hall light on. I've got too many excellent eviscerations packed into my imagination to ever sleep soundly again.

Why do I do it? Why do we all do it? Here are five reasons — they may not be good reasons, but I guarantee that they are true.

To Survive
As I have already pointed out with my little story about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, part of the fun of every horror flick is getting through it alive. I am a firm believer that the right way to watch horror is not to distance yourself from it, but to plunge in and let yourself be completely credulous and scared. Sure the monster in Neil Marshall's amazing spelunking horror flick The Descent was a little cheesy, but watching those women get deeper and deeper into the dark tunnels, more and more lost, squeezing through the claustrophobic, dirty spaces and into madness — if you let yourself feel the horror of the situation, you'll be thrummingly high on relief when the flick ends.

To Take Your Secret Thoughts to Their Most Extreme — and Laugh
When I first saw Stuart Gordon's mad doctor gorefest Re-Animator, it was like a revelation. There were all these gross brain-operation scenes, and headless zombies, and people drooling blood. And that was good, but I'd been over that terrain before. But then came the moment of pure breakout genius. The headless zombie bad guy, whose body carries his head around in a bowling bag, finally kidnaps the lady he's been wanting to hook up with. His body straps the lady to a medical table, and proceeds to jam his severed head between her wiggling legs. He's giving her head! Also, holy crap what the fuck. Director Gordon WENT THERE. I mean, he wasn't afraid to just show you the most fucked up thing he could possibly imagine. How could even your weirdest private thoughts ever seem disturbing once you've laughed at the most fucked-up thing in the universe? Same goes for the moment in Frank Henenlotter's Brain Damage where the main character's penis-shaped parasite hides in his jeans and pops out to eat the brains of a girl who is just trying to give him a nice blowjob. Damn. I will never feel weird about any of my random fantasies ever again, because they can't top what Henenlotter actually committed to film.

To Let Everyone in on Your Nightmares
All of us have dark thoughts, but probably some of us more than others. I'm one of the ones with the ultra-super-dark thoughts — and my dreams are even worse. But the whole situation becomes a hell of a lot more bearable, and even fun, when some of those dark thoughts are realized in film. After all, most of our dark thoughts aren't really unique or special. That's why I will always treasure David Cronenberg's mad gynecologist movie Dead Ringers. Those gynecological tools for mutant women, pictured below? Oh yeah, I imagined stuff like that about twenty million times before I saw them in his flick. And now I can force all my friends to think about them with me when we watch the movie together. Same goes for the lady impregnated by aliens in Slither, who grows to the size of a barn before exploding with all those sperm-shaped baby aliens going everywhere. Sick, but I've dreamed that one too. Welcome to my mind. Nice to have company in here!

To Speak the Unspeakable
It may be hard to articulate what's wrong with your city, your sexuality, or your relationship with your boss. That's why horror does it for you, in grisly, unsparing detail. While the movie Akira is usually billed as pure scifi, anybody who has watched the grotesque physical mutation-explosion of the gangster-psychic Tetsuo at the end knows that it's also a terrifying look at the unspoken but well-known psychological consequences of poverty in the city. And anyone who has ever quietly suspected her boss might be controlling the fabric of reality was rewarded by that scene in The Matrix when Neo is kidnapped by Agent Smith, told to be a good little worker, and then tortured and implanted with a tiny robot while his mouth is sewn shut. In a few months, when Frank Henenlotter's latest movie Bad Biology hits theaters, we're about to get a good dose of inexpressible sexual panic in a tale of a guy whose giant cock is both detachable and addicted to drugs — so it's always running away to score some dope. I know the feeling. But I wouldn't have been able to tell you about it without the help of Henenlotter's film.

To Shove a Big Spiny Stick Up Rationality's Ass
The great part about science horror, full of mad doctors doping themselves with Hyde serum and physics experiments gone wrong, is that they are a slap in the face to so-called rationality. How many times have you heard someone describe the "rational thing to do" and known that it was also the worst, scariest thing to do? Sure, it was "rational" to try to get samples of those aliens in the first Alien flick; and it was "rational" to put that futuristic Prozac in the air of that planet in Serenity that created the rapin, cannibalizin' Reavers; and it was rational to genetically engineer dinosaurs for a cool new theme park in Jurassic Park. All those things were done with pure science in mind (and a little profit). My point? Scientific rationality is great and all, but scifi horror is here to remind you suckas that sometimes you need to check with your ethics and all that mushy crap before experimenting on people's brains or messing around with outer-space superweapons that you don't understand. Your science won't save you when the Hulk comes around to beat your sorry ass.

Anatomy

The earliest horrifying science was clearly biology, and anatomy more specifically. In the West, a fierce battle raged for centuries between the Christian church and anatomists who wanted to dissect cadavers to learn more about human physiology. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many anatomists were hounded into giving up the knife because it was defilement of a dead body. This wasn't an issue in the East: Muslim anatomists had mapped and explained the circulatory system over 1000 years ago.

Still, you can already see a horror tradition in early Western anatomy drawings — this is a famous plate by Juan Valverde de Amusco from 1559. This was in fact a medical drawing, but it has a sense of grisly fun. It looks as if the guy holding the knife has skinned himself, and is holding his skin like a jacket or cape. The horrifying image of a guy without skin comes up again and again in science horror, most recently in a plot arc from Sarah Connor Chronicles where a Terminator who has lost his flesh goes looking for a doctor who can build him some new tissue. Once he's got the tissue, he has to steal somebody else's skin to wear over it.

Anatomists are also ignite the horrorshow at the heart of science horror's most famous tale: Frankenstein. In fact, the mad doctor in that book has to go out and steal body parts from cemeteries because there are regulations (inspired by the Church) against doing experiments on dead bodies. Since Frankenstein, however, there have been countless science horror movies about anatomy, starting with 1930s Peter Lorre flick Mad Love, where a mad doctor grafts the hand of a murderer onto a pianist who has lost his digits in an accident. Pretty much every movie you've ever seen where people inherit murderous body parts (think The Hand) is inspired by the terror of anatomists.

Neuroscience

The study of the nervous system, and specifically the brain, leads in only two directions: mind-controlled zombies, and close-up pictures of giant, bleeding brains full of electrodes. 1950s and 60s movies like Donovan's Brain and The Brain that Wouldn't Die are both about the scariness of brain transplants (later parodied in Steve Martin's The Man with Two Brains).

But in the contemporary world, brain transplants are less shocking than the idea that your brain could be turned into a fancy computer. That's the basic idea in the Matrix trilogy, and we see how that would work in rather gory detail in a short called "The Second Renaissance" from the movie Animatrix (this is a collection of animated shorts set in the Matrix universe). In this clip, which gives us the backstory on the final war between the machines and the humans, you can see how the machines move from destroying humans to controlling them at the neurological level. They poke and prod the people's brains until they figure out which blips and boops make them laugh, cry, and see visions that later become the nonconsensual hallucination known as the Matrix. This is a really intense scene, and it's worth picking up Animatrix to check out the whole thing.

Other tales about using neuroscience to control people's brains are legion: tales from Re-Animator to Robocop contain glimpses of how horrifying it would be if scientists could hack our neurology as easily as they can knit our bones.

Psychiatry

Psychologists may be creepy sometimes, but even more creepy are psychiatrists — the people who can prescribe drugs that might turn an entire planet into a bunch of listless zombies ala the flick Serenity. In that movie, as in many movies where psychiatry goes evil, futuristic Prozac-pushers have seeded the atmosphere with drugs to make people happy and serene. Of course, it all goes terribly wrong: most of the population becomes so serene that they lose the will to live; and a minority of them go apeshit, turning into the cannibalistic Reavers who kill and rape and eat everything in their paths.

Similar kinds of psychiatric nightmares can be found in movies as cheesy as Equilibrium (where everyone is forced to take a drug cleverly called "Prozium"), and in literature like Brave New World (where unhappy people take the drug Soma to "go on vacation"). And don't forget that the ultimate evil that the bad guy Scarecrow is going to unleash on Gotham in Batman Begins is a psychiatric drug that gives everybody hallucinations. The point is, nobody likes a mad psychiatrist with pharmaceuticals to get too close to the water supply.

Quantum Physics

Though nearly all the shocking sciences on film involve the body, there is one branch of science that never fails to give people the willies. As the recent lawsuit brought by a couple of black-hole-fearing dudes against the Hadron Supercollider makes clear, people are always scared that messing around with the laws of physics could do something really, deeply bad . . . like stop the core of the Earth from rotating as it did in the weirdly compelling yet awful flick The Core.

There are hints that mad physics may be behind the sudden universe-altering events occurring in Quiet Earth, an amazing post-apocalyptic film where the fabric of reality keeps shifting under our heroes' feet. And one of the things that makes Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan such a formidable and scary dude is that he controls reality at a quantum level. (In the film, he'll be a CGI effect.)

With CGI effects getting better and better, you can expect more quantum physics horror coming your way. I can't wait for a movie about a tiny black hole zooming through the Earth. Or a wormhole dumping weirdness all over the solar system.

For my money, two of the scariest science horror flicks out there are David Cronenberg's 1980s version of The Fly, and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. What stands out about them, aside from the fact that they are eat-your-arm scary, is that they are both sustained, visually-arresting movies about men going apeshit because they are men.

The Fly is a simple tale of a guy who has invented a teleportation pod that has a bug in it — literally. One day when our mad scientist Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is zooming between pods a fly gets stuck in there with him and the computer decides the best way to deal with the situation is to merge the two creatures genetically and create BrundleFly.

The film's special effects sometimes look strange and jerky to our CGI-trained senses, but Cronenberg manages to use a puppet-and-prosthetics infrastructure to his advantage by sticking to visuals that look as real as possible. When our mad scientist Jeff Brundle merges genetically with a fly and starts to transform, we are truly grossed out by his mulchy face and sudden need to eat sugary food by barfing on it first and then slurping it up fly-style.

Brundle is a stereotypical male science geek, totally obsessed with his machines and teleportation experiments to the point of caring about little else (though he does take some time out to get with Geena Davis — who wouldn't?) He's your basic guy nerd who doesn't give a crap about his body or meatspace. It's all about the machines. Brundle's rapid physical deterioration into half-fly, half-man is as pathetic as it is terrifying: He makes us gag and we feel sorry for him, so when he goes lethal, we sort of understand why. His gooey revenge is exactly what the Star Wars Kid has in mind for us.

28 Days Later draws its frenetic horror from another stereotypical idea about what dudes are like when given the chance. A virus turns most of the population of England into bloodthirsty, mindless superzombies, and one of the only holdouts against the diseased hordes is a military squadron holed up in a fortified mansion in the country. Our heroes, who have also managed to survive and escape London, join the military dudes for safety.

But then they discover the truly scary shit. These military guys, led by Christopher Eccleston at his most eye-buggingly Naziesque, have been trying to lure women into their little lair so that they can imprison them, rape them, and "restart the human race." Unfortunately, two of our heroes are female and now they're trapped between zombieland and a dark, dudely place.

This is a gory movie, but its horror doesn't come from looking at decaying bodies like it does in The Fly. Instead, it's scary because we're watching a decaying society. In Boyle's vision of the apocalypse, a bunch of guys with guns are more horrifying than any genetic disaster. He seems to suggest that men automatically revert to a state of violence and rape when provoked, and the inevitability of that transformation is what terrifies — the fact that these men seem so blind to the fact that they've become monsters.

And yet one of the heroes of 28 Days, Jim, is a guy who refuses to join Eccleston and his rape gang. He has no interest in possessing his female companions, and his blood-soaked rescue of the women takes up the latter half of the film. I think seeing the evil military guys through the eyes of another man who doesn't want to be like them makes this movie even more of a nail-biter. It would be easy for Jim to join up, to stay safe in the house protected by their guns, and to have a little gang rape for fun on the side. But he fights tooth and nail (literally) to stop that from happening.

In fighting the monstrous men, of course, Jim has to become a little bit like them. Those fight scenes are some of the most chair-grippingly intense I have ever seen. Scary, gory, shocking.

That's true horror, people. And never a vadge in sight.

1. Double mouth, or double-wide mouth. (See: Alien)

As the Alien series taught us, there's nothing scarier than a really long, giant toothy mouth — especially if there's a second long, toothy mouth inside it. But the long, toothy mouth rule shows up in a lot of alien movies. In Slither, for example, a guy is taken over by an alien and one of the first things it does is elongate his mouth so that it practically stretches to his ears on one side. (Lopsided elongated mouths are a bonus — lopsided is always scary.)

Corollary: Drool

A scary alien must drool. Again, we know this from the Alien series where the drool flows like water. But since Ridley Scott first gave us full frontal drool in the first Alien flick, drool has been the sign of scary for all aliens. It says "out of control." Now, of course, we cannot imagine any monster without drool. See, for instance, Beowulf, where the monster's drool is one of the first 3D effects. And there's 3D drool coming up in Journey to the Center of the Earth, too. Dinosaur drool!

2. Collective Consciousness (See: Borg from Star Trek)

One of the scariest and most alien things we can imagine is a species that has collective consciousness, or group think. All their minds are connected together like a bunch of little networked Linux boxes, rapidly churning through all that knowledge to figure out exactly how to kill you. Plus, collectively conscious creatures can more easily coordinate an attack, because they are all in mental communication with each other all the time. And they might absorb you — think how scary it was the first time you saw the Borg chanting: "You will be assimilated."

3. Looks Exactly Like a Human (See: Invasion of the Body Snatchers)

Somehow it's scarier when an alien looks exactly like a human, or is camouflaged as one. Even though Men in Black wasn't exactly scary, there was something uncanny when the alien took off its human skin and revealed its true face. And of course one of the reasons Hollywood has remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers four times in the past 50 years (Invasion was the most recent one) is that it's so freakin creepy that the aliens look perfectly human — except for the fact that they have no emotion. We will not, however, speak of the human-camo farting aliens from Doctor Who.

4. Treats Humans the Way Humans Treat Animals (See: Predator)

The infamous Twilight Zone tale "To Serve Man" packs all its punch into one single idea: the aliens have a cookbook ALL ABOUT EATING HUMANS! They look at us the way we look at chickens! The same idea lurks at the heart of popular franchise Predator, where the whole conceit is that the alien has just come to Earth on a safari to hunt human game. Where's the respect? 5. Polymorphous (See: The Thing)

If there's anything scarier than an alien that looks just like a human, it's an alien that can look like whatever it wants. Although the shiny, pretty aliens in Abyss wind up being our friends, they are super scary at first because they can morph into any shape they want. And of course what makes the thing in John Carpenter's version of The Thing so scary is that it can turn any body part into chunks of alien — human heads sprout legs, blood jumps up and runs around the room, people grow dog heads. Whoa. Same goes for the aliens in my personal favorite alien movie, Society, where a bunch of rich Beverly Hills types turn out to be polymorphous creatures who love to have giant orgies where they merge into a big room full of goo and eat humans.

6. Wants to Mate With Humans to Produce Scary Hybrid Offspring (See: Species)

The fear of an alien being who wants to mate with you probably goes back thousands of years, but in terms of current pop culture we can probably trace it back to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories of the 1920s. Remember, one of the scariest things about Cthulhu's spawn is that they are mating with humans, producing strange, fishy-looking humans who eventually go back to the sea. Combining this rule with rule 3 (looks human) is the Species franchise, where a super-hot alien lady goes around humping unsuspecting men for their seed and then killing them in flagrante delicto.

7. Buglike (See: Independence Day, Starship Troopers)

Buglike aliens are a staple of the genre. Even the aliens of Alien are buglike, with their hard carapaces. Bugs are so scary-looking already, and we suspect they may also participate in rule 2, having collective consciousness. In fact, "buglike" has become shorthand (sometimes lazy shorthand) for "scary alien," which is why you see so many depictions of aliens with feelers or antennae on their heads. Bug aliens show up in some of the most generic scifi flicks like Independence Day and Starship Troopers. But there are buggy aliens in more highbrow places too, like the Ender's Game series, where Earth is battling (and ultimately genociding) a buglike race.

Some of the early standouts in the horror-scifi genre are Donovan's Brain (1955), about a scientist whose mind is taken over by the brain he's keeping alive in a tank, and The Tingler (1959), about a parasite that lives in everyone's spines and controls their ability to feel fear. The beasts are fine as long as they stay inside you, slowly sucking up all your fear chemicals. But if they get out — they will kill! Movies like these set the tone for later mind-control flicks, which all seem to contain a certain amount of surreal goofiness. In 1960, Village of the Damned played gave us those iconic blonde, glowing-eyed children who are all born mysteriously after everybody in town conks out for an hour. A cross between pod people and devils, the kids can use their mental powers to control people's actions and of course MUST BE STOPPED.

During the 60s, however, the horror of mind control took a decided turn for the political. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), full of trippy drug sequences, combines the idea of government conspiracy with brainwashing, suggesting that the Cold War is really a battle to control people's wills rather than geographical territory. Those who remember the original flick — way better than the 2004 remake — know that it's the harrowing tale of a soldier brainwashed by commies to become an assassin. (Plus Frank Sinatra joins the fun as another brainwashee.) Or was he brainwashed by somebody else? In 1987, era of corporate mania, poor Robocop gets mind-controlled by a giant corporation, rather than the government. Company geeks program him with a secret behavioral modification called the "fourth law" which prevents him from doing any violence to employees of the corporation that made him — even when they are breaking the law or threatening somebody's life.

The upcoming Russian flick Inhabited Island, based on a 1970s novel, is another political mind control tale. It's set on a planet that's clearly meant to be the USSR, and everyone is completely obedient because they're being controlled by signals sent from giant towers all over town. (No, they're not cell towers, but you can bet that if the novel had been written in 2008 they would be.) This political brainwashing is of course presaged in one of the ultimate scifi mind control tales, 1984, published just as World War II was coming to an end. Countless movie versions of the novel seem to bend to reflect the political tenor of the times. A 1954 film version makes it obvious that Big Brother is an evil commie (something that the book suggests too). An Apple commercial (pictured above) makes Big Brother out to be IBM. And a 1984 film version, while clearly about fears of fascist commies, is also obsessed with the way television manipulates and mind-controls the masses. Big Brother is a baddie here, but so is television itself. And television has continued to be a mind-controlling nasty, inspiring one of the best and weirdest of the mind-control movies: Videodrome (1982). This classic, directed by freaky brainfarm David Cronenberg, is about a television signal that turns people into the puppets of a shady media conglomerate. It also makes them have kinky sex with Debbie Harry, but I suspect that's just the side-effect of being in a Cronenberg movie. Creepy-funny flick The Signal, hitting theaters next week, is a direct inheritor of Videodrome's mantle. Residents of a city which is clearly intended to be Atlanta are turned into ultra-violent psycho killers by a strange signal broadcast on all televisions, radios, and cell phones.

The mind-controlled mob of psychos, of course, is an old chestnut in movieland. You'll find it in everything from Re-Animator (1987) — where a mad doctor wants to create an army of mind-controlled zombies — to Batman Begins (2005) — where the Scarecrow releases drugs into the water supply that turn Gotham City into a town of dangerous maniacs.

But for sheer mind-control weirdness, I'll bet you can't beat 1977's Empire of the Ants. It's the only example I know of where an insect controls the minds of humans. A town overrun by giant ants becomes enslaved the the ant queen, who is controlling their minds to make them help the hive. The ant-controlled townspeople keep bringing more humans in so the ants will have more slaves — and possibly human food!

No list of pollution mutants could begin without first paying homage to Hedorah, AKA The Smog Monster (1971). He lands on top of Tokyo's smokestacks and sucks the smoke out to grow bigger, and meaner, and more red-eyed. He literally shits all over the city, big slimy rivers of diarrhea. But he also does nice things, like use his grody powers to prevent us from having to hear one more folk song from a bunch of psychedelically-dressed hippies playing guitar in the middle of a field. Eventually Gojira kills him by grabbing a couple of weird glowing white balls from inside his stinky body. There are also a lot of messages "from the children" in this movie, which was allegedly inspired by letters from Japanese children saying the scariest thing they could imagine was pollution.

One of the greatest filmmakers at work in the U.S. today, John Sayles (director of Lone Star), got his start writing cheesily great pollution monster flick Alligator (1980). The fact that this movie is both funny and politically-minded is entirely due to the accident of Sayles needing some money to fund his indie movies. A pet alligator flushed and released into the sewers of Chicago starts slurping up growth hormones that people are pissing and pooping out into his home. Then he grows into a ginormous, mutant alligator who eats pets . . . and people!

A terrific and fairly obscure entry in the pollution mutant genre is Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973), directed and written by outlaw filmmaker Fredric Hobbs. "Gaseous vapors from an ancient mine" have turned a gentle sheep into a guy dressed in a fucked-up sheep suit, but that hardly matters in this strange sendup of life in a small Western town. As the town's racist mayor tries to prevent a nice black guy from buying real estate in his town of apple-cheeked whiteys, the mutant sheep rampages and tries to make it with a hippie chick. Eventually, there is some serious racist violence that takes the film from happy mutant romp into more sinister territory. Like Alligator, this is good political satire masquerading as a cheesy monster movie, and it will please you by succeeding at being both smart and gooftastic.

The best kind of pollution mutant is a rampaging, pissed-off animal, and that's why Prophecy (1979) is such a terrific flick. Bears who have been eating mercury-saturated fish in the rivers near an industrial factory have turned into massive, yucky bears who basically look like they have been turned inside-out. Rampaging and eating of humans follows, and some of the special effects are actually pretty cool. Directed by John Frankenheimer, who helmed the original (and great) Manchurian Candidate (1962), as well as a whole bunch of pretty good horror/actioners, this flick never spawned the billion cheesy sequels. Instead a supernatural movie with Christopher Walken called THE Prophecy got a bunch of awful sequels instead. That's what you get if you keep dumping mercury in the water, kids: bad sequels from a movie with the same name. It's Mother Earth's way of punishing you.

And no list of this sort would be complete without our generation's return to the pollution beastie: The Host (2007), a terrific scifi-horror-comedy about a giant thing (carp? whale? eel? combo platter?) that comes out of the waters near Seoul after a lameass military dude from the U.S. orders his underling to dump a zillion tons of old formaldehyde in the water. Bad move. Now a very angry combo platter is eating people and looking very much like the coolest special effect ever. When the mutant kidnaps the youngest girl in a family of quirky outcasts, they go on the offensive, tracking down the beastie in its lair to get their little girl back. This is the best mutant monster movie to come out in years, and like many entries in the genre it's well-written and has a social message that anybody who hates pollution can get down with.

I already mentioned Alien, but the prison planet on Alien 3 was actually even creepier than the smashed alien ship. That bleak, abandoned planet with its industrial freakshow prison was so depressing and hopeless that audiences stayed away from this film in droves — even though it was directed by David "Se7en" Fincher, a guy who certainly knows how to give good setting. William Gibson worked on an early version of the script. If you haven't seen this one in a while, give it a second viewing. You might be surprised.

One of the all-time most horrifying scifi settings is the hallucinatory, hellish veterans hospital in Jacob's Ladder. This film about a guy given weird "super soldier" drugs during Vietnam has strange religious overtones, but mostly is about someone driven crazy by government-conspiracy pharmaceuticals and high-tech warfare. Played with wide-eyed hysteria by a very young Tim Robbins, the guy begins seeing himself in a hospital hell, which is full of these twitchy-headed, masked demons who make the scariest dry-shuffling noises I've ever heard. Watch if you dare.

A cult movie from the mists of time (ie, 1975) called A Boy and His Dog wins for best scary, underground city long before City of Ember locked us into its spell. Featuring Don Johnson and a talking, mutant dog who is smarter than he is (yes, I know that's believable), the post-apocalyptic flick chronicles Don's foray into an underground city called "Topeka" where everybody wears weird clown makeup and lives a horrifying nightmare of suburban life, complete with enforced church-going and scary, ultra-trimmed lawns. Unfortunately for poor Don, radiation has made all the men sterile and they want to keep him prisoner and milk him for sperm (but not in a fun way). Jason Robards does an amazing job as the underground city's demented mayor. Actually, this trailer may scare you for reasons other than the underground city.

Laboratories — especially where They are experimenting on humans — are always frightening. That's what made so many scenes from The X-Files compelling.

And it's also what makes us love to fear the lab featured in Resident Evil: Extinction, where Milla Jovovich's clones kept getting tested and killed over and over again. But for sheer horror in set design, nothing can beat THX 1138, George Lucas' film about a completely sanitized, emotion-free society where everyone wears white (except the cops), every room is white, and everything is lit with insanely bright floodlamps. Filmed partly in one of San Francisco's ultra-white subway stations (the Powell St. BART station, to be exact), the whole film is saturated with a freaky fascist feeling created by Lucas' minimalist but frightening setting.

I want to call all these movies scifi because they're about technology doing strange things, which is pretty much the ultimate B-movie scifi plot. But of course then the whole ghost element gets in the way because homicidal spirits of drowned girls or neglected girls or raped girls or you-fill-in-the-scary-girl-thing are not the same as the smooth evil voice of HAL telling Dave about how he'll never open the pod bay door. And yet HAL and the drowned chick from The Ring have a lot in common.

I'd go so far as to say that the horror represented by the scary girls of haunted-tech flicks equals the fear of HAL and every other psychotic AI like say the one in Virtuosity (remember when the interwebs were haunted by Russell Crowe? how did they fit his hunkitude in those pipes?). What's the difference between a so-advanced-it-might-as-well-be-magic AI like HAL and a special-mental-powers-beyond-the-grave mutant girl whose spirit lives on a VHS tape? Pretty much nothing, except one pretends to be science and the other leaves it up to the viewer to decide.

After all, if you wanted to look at The Ring as scifi you really could. Before the psychic kid becomes a ghost, she has awesome mental powers that are right out of X-Men or Heroes (both of which are firmly scifi). Plus, scary girl's mom takes her to doctors who do tons of scientific tests on her, so there's your science, bitches. She has a power that can be measured by science, but not explained by it. Just like HAL, whose madness could never have been predicted by Grace Hopper or other famous computer science nerds.

Haunted technology even has a long and fertile tradition in real life. Sarah Winchester, who built the crazy Winchester Mystery House in Silicon Valley during the late nineteenth century, believed that she was haunted by ghosts in the Winchester Repeating Rifles that killed a zillion natives in the West and made her husband a fortune. Guns are a perfect technology to haunt, if you think about it.

Videodrome, David Cronenberg's mid-1980s scifi flick about haunted televisions, also includes a haunted gun. Or perhaps these televisions and that gun are just controlled by some kind of demonic "broadcast signal" with a pseudo-scientific origin. One could say similar things about the abysmal flick Event Horizon, about a haunted spaceship. Or is it just a ship inhabited by an evil alternate dimension whose properties can be explained in fake sci-babble? What difference does it make? It's all magic; it's all about how technology is mutating us and turning our future selves into something so techno-strange that it's as if the next generation will be monsters.

So I'm going to see One Missed Call, and I'm going to pretend that it's science fiction because whether it's ghosts or Cybermen taking over our bluetooth headsets it's all the same basic stuff. Whether or not it's good stuff . . . well, I'll tell you that in my review tomorrow.

The Aliens are just what the name advertises: truly, creepily alien. We never know what they want, other than to use our bodies as hosts to breed, though it's pretty obvious that they have some form of intelligence. We see them doing things like using battle strategy, and protecting their young. And they don't need tools like those wussy Predators because their entire bodies are weapons. Who is to say that they aren't a race of super-ultra-mega-warriors who genetically engineered themselves to become weapons? That makes them even more advanced than Predators.

Aliens aren't just out to get us - they are out to become us. One of the hallmarks of a hardcore freakshow monster is that it wants to make babies with you, or create versions of itself using your body. That's the Alien all over. It wants to get you pregnant and use your genetic material to create offspring. And the Aliens are so sexy that other species want to do the same thing to it: that's how we got the human/alien hybrid in Alien: Resurrection. Even the Predator-boosting Colin Strause has to admit the superiority of the Predalien hyrid (pictured here) in his new flick. Hybrid vigor!

Nobody will ever mistake the Aliens for a racial stereotype. One of the sort of cool/sort of lame parts of Predators are their dreadlocks, suggesting they're a species of Rasta warriors. Aliens, to their credit, never veer into JarJarism.

And finally, the Aliens are always a pleasure to gawk at. All too often, monsters in horror movies are all bite and no show. Predators are of that variety, which is why the first Predator movie worked the best - the Predator was invisible, so we didn't have any time to feel disappointed that he looked so half-Klingon, half-Rasta boring. The Alien, however, got more intriguing the more we saw. That long, shiny head with its double-mouth dripping acid? The skeleton body like something from an Iron Maiden album cover? Dude. Plus, when the Alien starts to wear thin, just create a cool hybrid! Sure, Alien: Resurrection was total crap, but my inner FX gore geek was totally satisfied by the final scene with the creepy naked Humalien getting sucked out of the teeny hole in the spaceship wall.

In short, Alien kicks Predator's ass on all fronts: it's creepier, better-looking, and wants to make babies with us. What else do you want?

The true horror in I Am Legend, and other stories like it, is having to watch what happens to people when they're robbed of society. It's no accident that Mary Shelley, author of horror-scifi classic Frankenstein, later wrote a post-apocalyptic book called The Last Man. Like many storytellers in the genre, she knew that no monster is scarier than a human being without companions.

Often the aloneness monster rears its head in post-apocalyptic scifi: New Zealand indie Quiet Earth tortures us with fear when our protagonist discovers he's the last guy on the planet; and the masterful 28 Days Later amps up the fear right away when the hero awakens to find himself alone in the middle of an abandoned London. Possibly the most desolate portrait of this aloneness comes in Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime, where a handful characters who can travel forward in time find that they've "jumped" to a future where humans are mysteriously gone. The time-travelers head to the future in longer and longer jumps, trying to reach a world where apes or spiders have evolved into intelligent life that can keep them company. But it doesn't happen. The sun just grows older and dimmer, and the lost humans never cure their species-loneliness.

Of course, there's being completely alone and then there's being "the only one." Being completely alone can sometimes be peaceful, as Ripley demonstrates in Alien when she crawls into her pod after ejecting the alien into space. But being the only human left in a world of mutants, super-evolved apes, or alien invaders - that's more typical in scifi horror. It forms the basis of often-retold stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and countless Alien ripoffs (often little more than slasher movies in space).

Still, no matter what horrifying creature menaces that army of one, the true terror lurking beneath the surface is the loss of protective community. This isn't a fear that humans reserve for themselves, by they way. The scary parts of E.T. (and yes, there are some) have to do with E.T. being a castaway who is vulnerable on a world dominated by homo sapiens. And those who read Frankenstein know that what makes the reanimated man into a monster is his realization that he's alone among creatures who want him destroyed.
Image from Marooned in Realtime book cover by Stephen Martiniere.