For me it's depends on if it's a movie or a book. In books I like the social/political allegory stories as others have covered. In movies I rather survival stories, which mostly take the form of survival horror.

Take a group of people and place them in a location where there's no chance of outside help. Then introduce an imminent threat outside of normal human understanding, while still being based in science, and explore how they function. Alien, Predator, The Thing, Event Horizon, Sunshine, Pandorum, Underwater, etc.