There are of course past examples such as Soylent Green, Phase IV, Silent Running, and Demon Seed, to name a few. However, these movies tend to use the ecological crisis as a means of reinforcing conservative concepts of love, family, and tradition.
M. Night Shyamalan’s 2008 film The Happening is a rare exception.
All created worlds are more or less parasitic on our collective conception of the “real world.” Postapocalyptic narratives treat the real world as a background to be tested against the injection of a singular fictional element—that of the form of the apocalypse.
It is following this emphasis on the chosen few that I am skeptical of the rageful yet comedic approach towards apocalypse in Evan Calder Williams’s Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (London: Zer0 Books, 2011).
See, for example, Dylan Evans, “I Quit My Job to Set Up a Post-Apocalyptic Commune,” The Guardian, January 31, 2015 →.
See, for example, Scott Meslow, “The Post-Apocalyptic Morality of The Walking Dead,” The Atlantic, March 5, 2012 →.
Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, 6.