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The science fiction film genre is separate from the irrational or unconscious meanderings of the human mind. In line with this, this book regularly pertains to examples of the genre that can found on television, in books, comics, video games and even fine art, as part of the project to locate the films within a wider cultural context. Science fiction has surely adopted material from both the musical and horror film. The genre of science fiction film allows the kind of debate witnessed among critics, writers and aficionados of the written novels. The chapter then looks at what might be called proto-science fiction films. These films came before the science fiction film which boom in the 1950s. It is shown that Metropolis had a huge impact on science fiction. The interwar films evidently address the political and social unrest of their times. Until the 1950s, the science fiction feature film genre actually started in America.

This chapter addresses the genre code of realism, which brings with it a fundamentally different order of realism. Not one concerned so much with the real social-historical world but one which revolves instead around our expectations of a particular genre. Here the starting point lies within the realm of a fiction genre itself rather than in lived experience of the real world as rendered in the language of scripted fiction. The chapter shows that when words like 'real' and 'realism' are cited for, say, a science-fiction film, what is meant is more directly aligned to expectations of the science-fiction genre than to notions of the real world. It then looks at examples of science fiction, all of which belong to its alien invasion subgenre: District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009), Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010), and Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011).

This chapter reviews the terms of the themes, iconographies and mode of address of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner that made it fall within the science-fiction genre. It describes Blade Runner as a dystopian, iconic and visually spectacular film that is argued to be an exemplary case study for what constitutes a science-fiction film. It also explains how Blade Runner offers a despairing view of the future, showing high, low and expansive shots of the Gothic, patchwork city as it belches flames, chokes on its own smog, and produces the discernible sense of an omnipresent decay. The chapter discusses Blade Runner's theme on disintegration, in which earth is so over-populated and polluted that people in the film are encouraged to move to off-world colonies. It investigates the 'aesthetic of decay' of Blade Runner that is compounded by the encroachment of technology and techno-science into all areas of social life.

This chapter explores the legacy of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop in terms of the original critical reception, the film's relationship with its two sequels, and the marketing of the film. Released in the summer season of 1987, RoboCop was an unexpected commercial success, leading to the creation of the RoboCop universe, extending into television, video games, animation, and numerous sequels. The chapter then considers Verhoeven's work in the Hollywood science-fiction genre. The success of RoboCop led to an interest in science-fiction cinema that would lead Verhoeven to direct three more science-fiction films: Total Recall (1990), Starship Troopers (1997), and Hollow Man (2000). None of the films are pure science fiction but hybrids, fusing conventions from a broad range of genres including war movie, horror, and the political thriller.

This chapter examines Hammer and its history with science fiction. Hammer had become, by 1963, an easy studio to pin down: the broader production slate of the 1950s had been narrowed to mainly produce Gothic horror and modern thriller/slasher films, with little interest in cultural 'respectability'. Since Hammer's first feature-length film, however, its slate of releases covered a multitude of subjects and genres such as mysteries, comedies, crime dramas and noirs, and science fiction. A certain amount of commentary on Joseph Losey's The Damned (1963) has identified it as an anomaly in the Hammer catalogue. There is its frequent description as a kind of hybrid, mixing the biker/delinquent movie with the science fiction genre; but Hammer had previous form in this department. The genre mix in The Damned is more ungainly than most because, rather than running concurrently throughout the film, the genres tend to interrupt each other.