Many new works of science fiction seem to represent a strain of pre-apocalyptic cinema, characterized by a willingness to dramatize disasters that are less hypothetical than poised to happen. Both Ex Machina and Her, for instance, unfold against backdrops whose production design suggests that viewers are witnessing only a lightly futurized version of 21st-century life. However technically fictional the gadgets on display, the advances the films imagine—an artificially intelligent OS, a Turing-test approved robot—strike audiences as not just possible, but highly probable. As Ex Machina’s partly mad scientist declares, “[t]he arrival of strong AI has been inevitable for decades. The variable was when, not if.” Spike Jonze’s Her similarly takes its paradigm shift—humans falling in love with machines—for granted. Unlike The Terminator and Matrix franchises, these films don’t predict an apocalyptic “rise” of machines so much as a gradual digital takeover, the next phase of a revolution already in progress.

As such, the worlds of newer sci-fi films can look and feel eerily familiar. The opening shots of Interstellar, which feature hardscrabble towns and actual Depression-era footage, initially lead viewers to suspect they’re witnessing, if anything, the recent past. As the critic A.O. Scott noted in The New York Times, “[the director Christopher] Nolan ... drops us quietly into what looks like a fairly ordinary reality.” Or as NPR’s Amanda Fiegl put it, “it’s science fiction with an uncomfortable ring of truth.” It’s possible that such realistic settings—also seen in Ex Machina and Her—are meant to serve moralizing ends, reminding audiences that dystopia is nigh.

Yet these films are hardly cautionary tales; if anything, they’re dispassionate about humanity’s demise, which they treat as a mostly foregone conclusion. That said, it’s hard to deny that the proximity of doom doesn’t heighten its impact. In her study of science-fiction film, the scholar Vivian Sobchack suggests that what distinguishes horror from sci-fi is that the latter “produces not the strong terror evoked by something already present and known in each of us, but the more diluted and less immediate fear of what we may yet become.” It’s possible the genre’s contours have shifted—by making the danger a little more “present,” sci-fi can inspire more potent fear.

A case in point may be the British anthology series Black Mirror. Like its spiritual predecessor The Twilight Zone, the show is unsettling precisely because its bizarrerie takes place in what mostly looks like the here-and-now. The premise of its third episode, for instance—that most people possess wearable tech called a “grain” that records their every movement—seems merely like a next-generation amalgam of a FitBit and Google Glass. Similarly, the scenario explored in the second-season premiere—that software could reverse-engineer avatars of the deceased, by trawling their emails and online activity—seems feasible enough to raise any viewer’s paranoia levels.