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A friend left a lengthy comment on my post about The Griffin Incident over on Twitter. Since over there I am restricted to 280 characters, I will respond here.

First off, I want to say it was not my intention, nor do I think I stated, that science fiction and horror are incompatible genres.  While most people, and I fell into that easy trap myself, call horror a ‘genre,’ it is more like a mood and an intention. Like a romance (lower case R), horror is about what the recipient of the art is intended to feel and experience over the mechanics or rules of the genre. Science fiction can be horror, with A Dance to Strange Music, the short story by renowned hard SF author Gregory Benford, as a perfect example. It is horror and in the author’s note afterwards, Benford explains all of the very detailed science behind the strange events of the tale.

@gunsandrockets wrote, I think what defines science fiction is not rationality, not an explicable story, but instead the presumption that the universe is a material universe, absent of the spiritual, absent of magic. I agree, but I would also point out that a material universe absent spirits and magics is a universe that is explicable and one that can be understood by reason.

So, is Alien science fiction or horror? It is clearly both, though with the somewhat dodgy science we have allowed cinema to get away with. Aliens is not horror; it is action/adventure. With the ‘rules’ of the creature understood by the audience, it is hard to return back to horror; the films following Aliensdid, but mainly by reducing the once terrifying beast into an outer space slasher.

Horror, as a style of cinema, has terribly fuzzy borders that encompass and exclude based almost entirely upon the viewer’s own internal definition. Is Jaws horror? Is The Silence of the Lambs? How about Seven or Manhunter or Mulholland Drive? What is or is not ‘horror’ is a very difficult thing to nail down and even the filmmaker’s intention doesn’t cleanly answer that question. Both the writer and the director of The Exorcist do not consider either the novel or the film to be ‘horror,’ but rather supernatural detective fiction.

I was also asked what about the works of H.P. Lovecraft, science fiction? horror? or both? Clearly both, but I do think many people confuse the nature of the horror at the center of his work, mistaking tentacles and monstrosities for the horror and not that humanity is not only insignificant in the vast universe but that the nature of that universe is beyond our ability to sanely comprehend. Consider the opening paragraph of his novella The Call of Cthulhu.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Lovecraft is stating, rather plainly, that the nature of existence is, to the human mind, inexplicable. To try and understand it is to invite either madness or willful ignorance. It is why the recent film Backrooms strikes me as very Lovecraftian. In the end, the nature, the reason, of the backrooms lies beyond our ability to decipher. It simply is and that alone is enough to unship a person’s sanity.  To be fair, this is also a point raised by @gunsandrockets.

That the true nature of the universe is unknowable to lowly mankind. An ignorance which is a mercy, since even getting close to the truth either drives a person insane or turns them into a monster.

To my interpretation, this is saying that the universe is inexplicable. The universe is not rational in any manner that is comprehensible by humanity.

The Griffin Incident promises no explanation at all for the ship and its terrifying manifestations. That puts the story beyond the realm of science fiction. It is not a story that exists in a place without spirits or magic of some kind.