Every sci-fi horror movie streaming on Criterion Channel in the US right now — 18 films ranked by rating, checked against Criterion Channel’s live catalog.
Updated July 2026 · Availability refreshed from Criterion Channel US
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSolaris dissolves genre boundaries—existential dread replaces monsters, consciousness itself becomes the horror.
A psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet called Solaris to investigate the death of a doctor and the mental problems of cosmonauts on the station. He soon discovers that the water on the planet is a type of brain which brings out repressed memories and obsessions.
Directed by George A. Romero
✦ MovieMuse AI takeGrainy, unflinching social realism transforms zombie siege into indictment of human barbarism—the real horror isn't undead but us.
A ragtag group barricade themselves in an old Pennsylvania farmhouse to remain safe from a horde of flesh-eating ghouls ravaging the Northeast.
Directed by Bi Gan
✦ MovieMuse AI takeDreams weaponized as survival instinct—sci-fi horror's ultimate existential terror made visceral and hallucinatory.
In a future where humanity has surrendered its ability to dream in exchange for immortality, an outcast finds illusion, nightmarish visions, and beauty in an intoxicating world of his own making.
Directed by Lars von Trier
✦ MovieMuse AI takeVon Trier's cosmic dread thesis: planetary collision becomes psychological breakdown, collapsing science and psyche.
Two sisters find their already strained relationship challenged as a mysterious new planet threatens to collide with Earth.
Directed by René Clair
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSilent proto-sci-fi freeze-frame devastation predates modern apocalypse cinema with pure temporal nightmare logic.
A night watchman on the Eiffel Tower wakes up to find the entire population of the city frozen in place.
Directed by Christian Nyby
✦ MovieMuse AI takeThe Thing's shapeshifting paranoia blueprint—unknowable alien disguised as human—establishes sci-fi horror's foundational existential dread.
Scientists and US Air Force officials fend off a blood-thirsty alien organism while investigating at a remote arctic outpost.
Directed by Wim Wenders
✦ MovieMuse AI takeWenders' prescient 1999-set tech-noir; surveillance and memory become instruments of inescapable dystopian entrapment.
In 1999, a woman's life is forever changed after she survives a car crash with two bank robbers, who enlist her help to take the money to a drop in Paris. On the way, she runs into another fugitive from the law — an American doctor on the run from the CIA. They want to confiscate his father's invention – a device which allows anyone to record their dreams and visions.
Directed by David Cronenberg
✦ MovieMuse AI takePsychic warfare visualized: telepathic power explodes skulls, making consciousness weaponized horror.
After a man with extraordinary, and frighteningly destructive, telepathic abilities is nabbed by agents from a mysterious rogue corporation, he discovers he is far from the only possessor of such strange powers. Some of the other “scanners” have their minds set on world domination, while others are trying to stop them.
Directed by Bertrand Bonello
✦ MovieMuse AI takeGene-purification as psychological horror—past-life descent weaponizes identity against the self in algorithmic terror.
In the near future where emotions have become a threat, Gabrielle finally decides to purify her DNA in a machine that will immerse her in her past lives and rid her of any strong feelings. She then meets Louis and feels a powerful connection, as if she had known him forever.
Directed by Ishirō Honda
✦ MovieMuse AI takeFungal mutation transforms organism into monstrous ecosystem; body horror through slow, spore-based transformation.
Five vacationers and two crewmen become stranded on a tropical island near the equator. The island has little edible food for them to use as they try to live in a fungus covered hulk while repairing Kessei's yacht. Eventually they struggle over the food rations which were left behind by the former crew. Soon they discover something unfriendly there...
Directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.
✦ MovieMuse AI takeGelatinous void consumes matter indiscriminately; nature weaponized as incomprehensible blob-horror.
A drive-in favorite, this sci-fi classic follows teenagers Steve and his best girl, Jane, as they try to protect their hometown from a gelatinous alien life form that engulfs everything it touches. The first to discover the substance and live to tell about it, Steve and Jane witness the blob destroying an elderly man, then it growing to a terrifying size. But no one else has seen the goo, and policeman Dave refuses to believe the kids without proof.
Directed by Arthur Crabtree
An American airbase in Canada provokes resentment from the nearby residents after fallout from nuclear experiments at the base are blamed for a recent spate of disappearances. A captain from the airbase is assigned to investigate, and begins to suspect that an elderly British scientist who lives near the base and conducts research in the field of mind over matter knows more than he is letting on..
Directed by Hajime Sato
✦ MovieMuse AI takeExtraterrestrial parasitism weaponizes biology; alien infection converts victims into alien-human hybrid predators.
The survivors of a plane crash in a remote area are attacked by blob-like alien creatures that turn their victims into blood-thirsty vampires.
Directed by Robert Day
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCosmic radiation mutates astronaut into bloodthirsty entity—space transforms human into alien predator.
The first pilot to leave Earth's atmosphere lands, then vanishes; but something with a craving for blood prowls the countryside...
Directed by Ishirō Honda
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSingle organism orchestrates kaiju metamorphosis across ecosystem; alien intelligence as evolutionary cascade weapon.
When a space probe crash-lands on a far-flung Pacific atoll, the craft's alien stowaways decide to take over their new world one creature at a time. Soon, the parasitic life forms latch onto three indigenous critters -- a squid, a crab and a snapping turtle -- and transform them into colossal mutant monsters.
Directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu
✦ MovieMuse AI takeAtomic-age UFO unleashes kaiju terror; space exploration births planetary destruction.
The spaceship AAB-Gamma is dispatched from FAFC headquarters in Japan to make a landing on the planet Mars and investigate reports of UFOs in the area. As they near the red planet, they encounter a mysterious UFO that coats the ship's hull with unusual spores. Taking one of the specimens back to earth, it soon develops and grows into a giant chicken-lizard-alien monster that tramples Japan.
Directed by David Cronenberg
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCosmetics as bioweapon eliminating gender—body autonomy consumed by synthetic plague, proto-body-modification horror.
Crimes of the Future is set in a future where sexually mature women appear to have been obliterated by a plague produced by the use of cosmetics. The film details the wanderings of Adrian Tripod, director of the dermatological clinic the House of Skin. Tripod seems at a loss following the disappearance of his mentor Antoine Rouge.
Directed by Eitan Reuven
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBiological warfare's uncontrollable spread; weaponized pathogens transform survival into grotesque post-human nightmare landscape.
The movie is a post-apocalyptic horror/science fiction film. the setting is in a near post apocalyptic future where a biological warfare program goes wrong, and turns most of humanity to mindless, murderous creatures.
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