Science fiction may be one of those genres that's forever linked to the future and, depending on which side of 2000 you are at, either in a dystopian of utopian fashion.

 

An #Eiffel Tower watchman wakes up to find the world around him asleep. The few ones still awake – the bright, pretty, carefree things – explore, live and loot.

An American tourist visiting Dorset is tricked by a prostitute, then falls victim to a youth gang controlled by volatile con King – a still very green Oliver Reed at his meanest. The trickster is King's sister, who confides in the American hoping to escape her brother's incestuous advances.

“I'm strange, all right! I'll show you just how strange I am!”

– King

The couple elopes to a nearby island, closely followed by King and his gang, where they find a group of #children, all contently living in an underground lab, with #AutomaticDoors only they can control.

 

They are the damned.

Despite its sensationalist pulpy title and #ColdWar premise, Jack Arnold's adaptation of the Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man (1956) is an existentialist treatise.

“A strange calm possessed me. I thought more clearly than I had ever thought before – as if my mind were bathed in a brilliant light.”

– Scott Carey

The Incredible Shrinking Man plays with the understanding of what it means to be acknowledged as a human, and one's place in the world. The story is told through the eyes of the titular Shrinking Man – Scott Carey – who after being exposed to strange fog, finds himself increasingly lost in this world.

Legendary African-American #vaudeville performer Johnny Hudgins – in historically correct Blackface – plays an African explorer who descends onto 2028 Paris to learn about the primitive ways of the white natives. Soon, he discovers the Charleston.

“I have finally discovered my ancestors' traditional dance.”

– Johnny Hudgins

A fantastic Afrofuturist short, made a decade before Sun Ra's trip to Saturn.