Charlie Brooker’s dystopian and blackly funny Black Mirror is back on Netflix with a new bundle of scarily plausible sci-fi tales of the unexpected.
There’s six of them in season 7, including Brooker’s first ever Black Mirror sequel – the Star Trek riff of ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’ – full of timely jabs at everything from the horrors of privatised healthcare (‘Common People’) to sociopathic tech bros (‘Into Infinity’).
But what kind of sci-fis inspire and/or freak out the man himself? ‘I'm a sucker for worried ’70s dystopias,’ Brooker tells Time Out. ‘I'm not a Comic-Con guy and the sci-fi I tend to gravitate towards is less of the space opera stuff. I like things that have a “Black Mirror” element to them.’
By his own admission, there’s an obsessive quality to the Brit’s love of the genre – ‘I watched RoboCop probably 2000 times when I was teenager,’ he points out – and unsurprisingly, a love of dark, Black Mirror-esque concepts. Human beings being turned into snacks? Sign him up. Here’s ten sci-fi movies he swears by.
1. RoboCop (1987)
‘I first saw RoboCop when I was 15 and it reminded me of Judge Dredd, which I loved. It’s a big blockbuster but a high-concept head-fuck too – and it’s really weird. You can see the influence of RoboCop in Black Mirror; it does dystopian world-building in a sort of comic, almost Zucker Brothers way. I’d love to re-reboot RoboCop.’
2. Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
‘(Screenwriter) Nigel Kneale wrote a lot of TV science fiction, full of ideas I’d have loved to have thought of. Workmen digging under a Tube line discover a mysterious metal capsule that's been there for thousands of years and does fucking weird things. It gets more and more bonkers as it goes on, and has this nightmarishly apocalyptic ending. I tried to channel it in White Bear (in season 2).’
3. The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)
‘Nuclear tests bump the Earth off its axis which sends it too close to the sun in this terrifying ’60s British sci-fi. Everything's getting hotter and hotter and hotter. It’s quite frightening and feels scarily timely.’
4. Looker (1981)
‘This Michael Crichton sci-fi has a bonkers premise: there’s a light gun that makes you blank out for a couple of seconds. In one scene, Albert Finney is driving and the bad guys keep firing at him, so he sort of blacks out at the wheel for a few seconds. It's a clever, really weird way of doing a car chase.’
5. THX 1138 (1971)
‘This was George’s student film and it’s super-bleak and dystopian: everyone’s got shaved heads and they have holographic sex partners. I like the clinical, strange air to it. We did an episode (in season 1) called Fifteen Million Merits, where I'm slightly channeling both THX 1138 and a Nigel Kneale BBC teleplay called The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968).
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
‘I tried to watch it on TV when I was a kid and I was just like, “What the fuck is this?” Then I got a Kubrick box set in the late ’90s, and by then I'd adjusted my filter and I really enjoyed it. It’s an epic-scale arthouse movie. I wouldn’t profess to say I completely understood it. HAL is an incredibly prescient take on A.I. He’s sort of mentally ill, isn’t he?’
7. Kamikaze (1986)
‘This French film is a weird, deep-cut sci-fi. It's about a scientific genius who loses his job and gets so enraged by the inanity of daytime television that he invents a gun that makes the stomach of whoever is on TV explode. It's very Black Mirror.’
8. Britannia Hospital (1982)
‘This is a very, very, very odd film from the early ’80s has Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell in it. It's not sci fi exactly, but it ends with a weird intelligence talking to everyone.’
9. Soylent Green (1973)
‘The premise is that people are turned into food and fed to other people – I don't know what the tariffs would be on that. There's a scene that really gives me the shivers: Edward G Robinson's character goes to be euthanised and for no reason that I can work out, he’s shown a film full of the beauty of nature. It makes him cry, then he's killed and turned into food.’
10. Galaxy Quest (1999)
‘Which writer doesn't wish they’d written Galaxy Quest? It’s so good, it makes me angry. I can see there's a bit of “Galaxy Quest on Mars” going on in USS Callister – hopefully we’re coming out from a very different angle. Callister is a workplace comedy meets Star Trek. Hopefully there’s something for everyone there.
When is Black Mirror season 7 being released?
All six episodes, including the feature-length ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, land on Netflix worldwide on Thursday, April 10.
‘Black Mirror’ season 7 filming locations: where was Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi series filmed?