Utopia and Science Fiction vs. Horror

Utopia can be described in many ways, just because it is whatever you want it to be. "I agree that it is useful to think about utopia as a space in which to explore alternatives" (Baccolini and Moylan 2003, 18). Everyone has their own idea of what it looks like and consists of. The biggest part of a utopia is the government and what shape it is in. In today's world the government is in very bad shape and it does not look like things are getting any better. The economy has been at its lowest point in a long time since the Great Depression. In my opinion we are getting closer and closer to dystopia which is the opposite of utopia. Everything is very bad and people are poor, it is a world that no one would ever want to be in. The dystopian world might be run by a dictator which does not usually turn out well, just look at Adolf Hitler. Germany could be thought of as a dystopia, especially if you were Jewish. For Adolf Hitler this could be thought of as a utopia because he had all of the power and everything was being carried out the way that he wanted. The idea of this is that since everyone has a different utopia, one’s utopia could be another’s dystopia.

Science Fiction is a very broad term and many people have different ways of interpreting it. From what I have learned there is no specific definition. One of the first science fiction movies to come out was Destination Moon (1950). About a year later another movie was produced called The Thing (1951). No one was used to seeing these kinds of films and people ended up finding them very entertaining. Horror is another genre of movies that people started to create. I use to think these two were very similar, but in fact they are not. One difference that never came to me was that in science fiction movies, the creature threatens a group of people for the majority of the movies. The creature is also very unrealistic in most of these films, for example The Blob (1958) was about this big ball of mush that slid around and ate people. In horror films the monster is always after one person or group of people and this does not change until the end when most likely everyone is dead or there is one survivor. The monsters are usually more realistic in horror movies because sometimes it is a person who does the killing. For example, the original horror film Friday the 13^th (1980). In each movie there is a select group of teenagers who get murdered by Jason the serial killer. The closest the teenagers come to outside contact in the movie is a cop who ends up getting killed all the time due to ignorance and stupidity. Horror films give people the feeling of being vulnerable just because of how the characters are excluded from society. This is why horror is more frightening than science fiction. In my opinion horror is better than science fiction just because it is a little bit more realistic. On the other hand there is the possibility of some science fiction movies reperesenitng our future which would obviously make them more reasonable.