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As the fall season comes upon us once more it’s time for that spookiest of traditions: the new season of American Horror Story. This year’s season will be about something that’s on everyone’s mind lately: the apocalypse. The end of days is one of those primal fears that’s been with society pretty much ever since there was a society for us to fear the end of. However, despite being a fairly ubiquitous terror and one that you’d think everyone held a stake in the Apocalypse’s place in the horror pantheon is actually pretty limited.
Even setting up this timeline I’ve had to fudge want counts as “horror” a bit to include some stuff that’s more schlocky or was featured a lot in the old horrorathons that channels used to show around Halloween when I was a kid. With that said, I did find enough apocalyptic horror material to create something of a timeline for the genre and how it reflects the anxieties and apocalyptic scenarios of the time.
We start in 1951 with one of those “not quite a horror” movies that I mentioned earlier: When Worlds Collide. When Worlds Collide is one of those movies that I don’t think many people have seen but the title has become weirdly ubiquitous, sort of like Utopia or Voyage of the Damned. It’s also one of a large handful of ‘50s sci-fi movies that featured enough junky special FX and horror-adjacent material to land it a spot in most horror movie marathons hence why it ended up on this list.
To the horror movie marathons’ credit, When Worlds Collide actually does have something of a horror bent to it. It’s the story of a kind of rogue planet that enters Earth’s solar system and will pass so close to us that we’ll be thrown completely off our axis. The science of it is extremely junky, especially when you get into the human’s plan to build an escape rocket given this is almost a decade before manned space flight would even be attempted, but it’s still an enjoyable watch.
Most of the movie centers on the scientist who discovered Earth’s imminent doom and his desperate attempt to save some of humanity with the help of an old rich guy. The real horror of the situation sets in as the rogue planet becomes more and more visible to the world and everyone begins to panic, culminating in a riot at the escape rocket launch site when the mass team of folks who built the escape craft learn there isn’t room enough for all of them.
For real-world comparison When Worlds Collide came out in 1951, only three years after the Soviet A-Bomb was confirmed and the Cold War arms race began to heat up. It was a serious era of paranoia in American society, with McCarthy and HUAC beginning the Red Scare the year before in 1950. Despite that, When Worlds Collide is ultimately hopeful with the humans actually managing to escape to the passing planet and maybe even forward facing as the lead scientist ultimately chooses to strand himself and his rich old benefactor on Earth, saying the new world will be better without them.
The end of the ’50s saw something of an uptick in apocalyptic horror offerings, in particular from The Twilight Zone, the new face of speculative fiction at the dawn of the ‘60s. Though The Twilight Zone offered a number of apocalyptic scenarios in its various episodes 2, in particular, stand out as exceptional examples of the show- ‘Time Enough At Last’ and ‘It’s A Good Life.’ These are two of the most popular and iconic episode The Twilight Zone ever produced and both touch on the apocalypse in a unique way.
For ‘Time Enough At Last’ it’s the story of an isolated man who somehow survives the apocalypse only to find the one thing that gave him joy was lost to him in the end of man as well. It’s a harsh and ironic episode, with the final shot of the broken Burgess Meredith, blinded by his own flippancy towards the apocalypse, left opining the unfairness of being the one man left alone in a shattered world. For real-world context, the episode premiered in 1959 around the height of the US personal bomb shelter craze, when the best symbol of suburbanite status was a concrete shelter in the backyard for the inevitable nuclear war.
‘It’s A Good Life’ is also about an apocalypse though one of a very different kind. It’s the story of a child in a small Ohio town with near-omnipotent power who, in the show’s opening, simply makes everywhere else in the world that isn’t his small Ohio town “go away.” It’s unclear if the child Anthony has somehow removed the town from reality or simply wiped out everyone that used to be but it is definitely an apocalypse, albeit one overseen by a dictatorial little tyrant in the form of a spoilt monster of a child who’s never been told no.
The Twilight Zone has always been a show made in the shadow of World War 2 and Rod Serling’s Jewish heritage and it’s easy to see how ‘It’s A Good Life’ examines fascism through its uniquely apocalyptic lens. The ‘60s was very much an America concerned with the fascism of the ‘40s, especially as we became more widely aware of Nazi crimes and the fascism of the USSR became more and more visible. It’s not that hard to draw a line from the petty child tyrant of ‘it’s a good life’ to the petty posturing of Kennedy and Kruschev as the Cold War continued to heat up.
The mid-60s were an odd time for horror. The old standards of Universal horror had slipped into the realm of kitsch or beginning their Hammer revival era while the Atomic horrors of the ‘50s had faded off. New bogeymen were coming to dominate the American subconscious and easily the most prominent of them was the zombie and while the zombie was firmly cemented in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead (not technically an apocalyptic film) they definitely got their start in the ‘60s in 1964’s The Last Man on Earth. A black and white Italian adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend, the 1964 film is one of the clearest influences on Night of the Living Dead and one of the truest explorations of the horror of the apocalypse. It follows Vincent Price as the last normal human left in a barren landscape ravaged by a plague that turned its victims into zombie-esc. vampires.
The film is a chilling exploration of Price’s isolation in the apocalypse and the way it’s slowly but steadily eaten away at his own humanity, eventually culminating in the realization that a society of intelligent zombies had been growing under his nose and that he had still been murdering them like vermin. The film is a great combination of the ‘60s fears of global disaster and increased militarization, especially in the flashback scenes of the plague destroying the world, as well as connecting to the lingering Italian legacy of fascism as the new order of intelligent zombies wear the black shirts of fascist Italy.
The end of the ‘60s brought a growing sense of apocalyptic defeatism in American cinema, especially the more sci-fi and speculative material. This was mostly a response to the various political assassinations of the ‘60s, most notably JFK, and the nation’s souring on the Vietnam war as it dragged on and on. By 1968 America was a nation trudging headlong into the malaise and depression of the ‘70s and that was most reflected in Charlton Heston’s dystopian trilogy. Only 2 of Heston’s 3 films are horror adjacent so I’ll save Soylent Green for another discussion, but Planet of the Apes and Omega Man definitely hold a spot in the horror pantheon.
Planet of the Apes is easily the more long-lived and popular of the two films, spawning a franchise that endures to this day but I’d argue only the first film exists as something like unto horror. Obviously, there’s the existential horror of mankind’s end but what I think really sells Planet of the Apes’ horror is the way the humans are treated. The scene of the human hunt and the gorillas posing with their pile of human corpses is one of the most nightmarish things I can imagine and the threat of being dissected alive hovers over Charlton Heston’s entire time among the ape overlords. That’s part of what makes the film such a unique bleak take on a bleak situation, it’s not just that mankind wiped itself out and the apes took our place, there’s a lot of evidence in the series that the apes have ruined their own civilization and what we’re seeing here are the last remnants of a once great ape civilization.
Omega Man, while not as well known, is definitely more horror-oriented as it’s another adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. The film casts its zombies as even more hideous mutants with albino skin and hideous sores though it also cuts out a lot of the more interesting narrative aspects.
Omega Man is more of a straightforward “lone man against the zombie horde” type story, even if the zombies, in this case, are more intelligent radiation mutants than actual zombies. Omega Man is probably most noteworthy in this list as one of the only apocalypse films that ends on a happy ending, certainly, the first time that’s happened here since 1951’s When Worlds Collide.
It’s fair to say that American in 1978 was a very different place from America in 1968. By this point, Vietnam was over and the nation had powered its way through Watergate but was still caught in something of a national malaise. Star Wars had hit theaters a year ago as the third part of a triple knockout alongside Rocky and Jaws so the market for apocalyptic cynical films was about to shift, but not before we got one more out.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a remake of a film of the same name from 1956. The basic premise of both films is the same: creatures that can replace humans with their exact duplicates have invaded the world. The major difference between the 1956 film and the 1978 film is that sense of dystopian pessimism that the ‘70s managed so well.
While the 1956 film is framed as a scientist who discovered the invasion desperately warning the authorities of the attack and ultimately convincing them, the 1978 film is a lot more esoteric and bleak. The story is told from the POV of a handful of angsty city folk who are slowly noticing more and more people they knew becoming unfamiliar strangers till they eventually realize what’s happening only after it’s far too late to stop it.
The film’s final scene, of one of the last human survivors reaching out to her old friend only to find him also replaced by the pod people, is one of the great dark endings of horror and, in a way, nicely predicted the complete takeover of shiny faux-optimism of the coming ‘80s.
While the ‘80s was a decade of unflinching American jingoism and blind optimism in the face of Cold War threats that particular air of plastic happiness didn’t go completely unexamined. There was a counter-culture of the day, however weird and imported, that grew more and more angry and honest about the ’80s mask of conformity as the decade went on. We start in 1982 with Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.
This was an attempt by the producers to transition the Halloween franchise from a slasher series to an anthology series of films with a story about a latex mask kingpin who’s updated the ancient druidic rituals of Halloween for the modern day to sacrifice millions of children for some unclear goal. As the ‘80s would go on businessmen villains would become more and more common but Halloween 3’s Conal Cochran remains one of the worst the decade ever produced: a mass child murder set to kill the world with a special TV commercial.
Then, 1984 gave us Terminator, the film that launched the franchise and people tend to forget was originally more of a slasher with a robot monster than an action movie. While a more personal and focused horror tale, Terminator actually moves up the cynicism and timescale of the apocalypse, opening with a world already ravaged by death and destruction and ending on the implication this future is an inevitable one despite mankind’s best efforts.
From there we move on to 1985’s Day of the Dead, the first of the Romero zombie films to be set firmly in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. Day of the Dead presents a world fully overrun by the undead, with the last of humanity cowering in their holes and slowly going mad from isolation and societal collapse as the few remaining reasonable humans are caught between an unhinged military commander and an equally unhinged mad scientist. It’s an intensification of the world Terminator already showed us, a world with an inevitable apocalypse only here there’s no Kyle Reese to save the day: all the soldiers are violent monsters and the scientists are self-obsessed and useless, all figures of authority are useless and you can only save yourself.
*Finally, 1986 gave us the ultimate takedown of the ‘80s by way of the apocalypse in Little Shop of Horrors. The horror musical based on the stage play of the same name is the story of a nerdy little nobody named Seymour Krelborn who discovers a weird plant during a total eclipse of the sun only to have the plant grow huge off human blood and began talking to him, offering money and the love of his lady friend Audrey in return for killing people and feeding them to the plant.
While the final version of the film has Seymour ultimately rejecting and defeating the plant the original ending of the stage play, which was filmed and screened to audiences and eventually rediscovered, had the plant devouring Seymour and additional plants spread across the US and take over the world. The whole thing ends with the world ending because the jerks of the world were all too willing to feed them blood for the promise of fame and fortune- the whole world flushed down the toilet by a bunch of cowardly nerds eager for money and girls.
The ‘90s brought a real sense of cooling off to the world after the fall of the USSR. It wasn’t completely a time free of global conflict but it was an era of unchallenged American hegemony, so the apocalypses of the ‘90s weren’t going to come from any petty pedestrian source like artificial intelligence or space plants. No, for the ‘90s we looked to Satan to destroy us, mostly as a response to concerns about the impending millennium, hence why one of the prime examples of this was the TV show Millennium.
Produced by Chris Carter as his follow-up project to The X-Files, Millennium wasn’t terribly clear on what it was exactly, just that it was about “the rising darkness around the upcoming millennium.” Mostly that translated to a lot of lurid crime tales but it also had a habit of having demons and angels and various sundry visions factor into episodes concerning prophecy and some oncoming great struggle. The overall vagueness of the ultimate threat served as a nice parallel to the ‘90s inability to predict its own future.
There was also the 1994 TV movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. Though ostensibly about a plague destroying mankind, The Stand is much more of a metaphysical apocalypse concerned with King’s own mythology of good and evil clashing in the emerging post-apocalyptic societies. The main thrust of the story is about the divinely led survivors in the Boulder Free Zone embarking on a spiritual vision quest against the new city of wickedness that emerges in Las Vegas under the thumb of a Satan stand-in named Randall Flag. The story is mostly in tune with stuff like Independence Day or Volcano, ‘90s movies that were mostly concerned with continuing the growing sense of pan-demographic communality under Americanism. It’s an apocalypse to be sure but it’s a hopeful apocalypse.
By the mid-2000s it’s safe to say the optimism and patriotism of the ‘90s had drained away. We didn’t have as much of an apocalyptic center point as we did during the Cold War so our various doomsday offerings served as reflections of multiple issues rather than a single threat like nuclear war. In 2005 we got George Romero’s crowning 4th installment in his zombie series Land of the Dead, a searing indictment of capitalism and how it persists and festers like a weed even amid the rubble of the apocalypse. It’s a really great capstone to the series featuring dynamite performances by Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo as well as an interesting examination of the zombies as an emerging class of intelligent being with a society, shades of Matheson’s I Am Legend.
Speaking of which, I Am Legend got its third and least faithful adaptation in 2007 with the Will Smith film of the same name. A lot like Land of the Dead, both films are very big apocalypses, marked by vast destroyed and overgrown cityscapes that have been claimed by nature and the new world orders. However, I Am Legend is ultimately about isolation more than anything else, probably as a reflection of growing anxieties about the way booming technology was dehumanizing and isolating one another (yes, that was even a concern back in 2007.) This is also part of I Am Legend’s place as an ambassador for fast zombies to the popular consciousness, with the super fast zombie hordes representing a booming overpopulation where we all can’t help but feel more alone.
Finally, there was 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, a movie that basically turned the 6-year quagmire of American military occupation in the middle east into a literal apocalypse. Most of the film is about the complete unpreparedness of the military structure to actually deal with emergency situations, a reflection of the recent failures in Katrina as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan, eventually highlighting the brutal inhumanity of a billion dollar military machine unleashed in an environment where collateral damage doesn’t matter. Even with all that brutal inhumanity turned against the film’s zombie/rage virus, the fact that it’s allowed to escape into the outer world and end humanity because we weren’t quite inhuman enough in our fight against is a chilling thought to be sure.
I think it’s fair to say the late 2000s/early 2010s belonged to the zombie. Seriously, without warning these guys were everywhere- books, video games, movies, TV shows- if it had the living dead we were eating it up with a spoon. For our purposes, though there were essentially 2 defining directions the zombie subgenre elected to take in the 2010s, handily summarized by two opposing zombie apocalypse stories of Zombieland and The Walking Dead. Zombieland, released in 2009, is the ultimate payoff to the fun apocalypse fantasy that first started with elements of Omega Man and was solidified as “zombie” became interchangeable with “apocalypse” while also becoming the default shotgun fodder of video games across the world. It’s the nerd fantasy of self-sufficient glory found in the midst of humanities twilight, even if things like the breakdown of the Internet would render most of us paralyzed.
Meanwhile, The Walking Dead, which premiered one year later, was just as much a fantasy of the end of the world but one geared towards a different kind of man. Walking Dead is more of a doomsday-prepper fantasy of the apocalypse, a world where the macho strengths of men are important once more in forging a new path for humanity. It’s every bit the elaborate fantasy as Zombieland only one made for men who already know they’re macho now instead of ones who assume they’d become macho during a zombie apocalypse.
It definitely seems like a grim commentary on the world of the 2010s that even amid our horror films the apocalypse is presented as a fantasy of a better world, a chance to finally let loose the heroism within us or the skills that can’t find purchase in the world as is. Maybe with how much the real world has become a dystopian wasteland the idea of an apocalypse has just become more appealing because whatever else at least we’re getting a chance to start over.
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