post-apocalyptic movies: where did they come from?

Factual Questions
21

Talk of The World, The Flesh, and The Devil reminds me that there is a kind of sub-genre of the post-apocolyptic film in which the known world is reduced to just two men and one woman.

Besides TWTFTD there is The Last Woman on Earth, an ultracheap production filmed, I believe, in Puerto Rico. One of the actors was Robert Towne, who later won great acclaim as the scriptwriter of Chinatown and other respected films.

Possibly the best such film is an eerie movie from New Zealand in the 80s called The Silent Earth. Like TWTFTD it also brought in racial overtones, as the remaining people are a white man, a white woman and a Maori man. In this story people who were at the point of death at a particular moment one morning are the only people remaining in the world; either everybody else vanished, or a parallel world was created where everything inanimate was duplicated and the people who were dying were transported.

Another sub-genre would be all of the zombie-type films such as Night of the Living Dead. While this picture is the one which “made” the class of film here in America, it in turn owed something to The Last Man on Earth, a cheap Italian picture with Vincent Price. Like the later film The Omega Man, it was based on a Richard Matheson novel, I Am Legend.

Finally, there are those movies which play the end of the world for laughs. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore appeared in a dark British comedy in the late 1960s called The Bed-Sitting Room about life in England after a nuclear war. I don’t remember much of it except that there was a part about how the government has to find out who is next in line to the throne and decides on an obscure working class housewife somewhere.

There is also The Night of the Comet, in which most of mankind is reduced to dust one night and the task of preserving civilization pretty much falls on a couple of Valley Girls with assual rifles. It is actually pretty entertaining.

22

Nitpick: The Quiet Earth. Pretty darn good movie until it goes off the rails in the last ten minutes.

23

Picky, picky, picky. Pardon me for using shorthand, but did I not identify a dystopia as the opposite of a utopia? If you want to get “pickier”, we can debate the definition of “apocalyptic,” which, according to American Heritage, includes “*nvolving or portending widespread devastation or ultimate doom.” I submit that the societies portrayed in 1984 and Brave New World both epitomize devastation and doom.

24

Best. RPGs. Ever.

25

Don’t forget “Boy and His Dog.”

You could make a thesis that it is an evolution from the Western as well as Science Fiction. Post Apocolyptic stuff tends to have a huge lawless component. The small town survival stuff.

As to where it comes from - you try watching the “crouch under your desk” movies in elementary school and see what you come up with for film projects as a young filmmaker.

26

I did a major academic project on just this subject. I was dealing with dystopias set in the near future, rather than post-apocalyptic movies, but there is obviously a huge overlap. Some of the main points that I covered:

Stories of the “future” are a way of dealing with current fears and anxieties.

In film and in writing, dystopian future stories tend to project what might happen if current trends are allowed to continue. For example:
Fears of nuclear war in the 1950s and '60s yielded films like On the Beach and Planet of the Apes. (The film genre was young at this point, so there weren’t too many dystopian future movies in the 1950s or 1960s.)
Fears of overpopulation yielded films like Soylent Green* in the early 1970s.
Fears of corporate interests taking over have been popular for 3 decades now, yielding films like Rollerball, Robocop, Tank Girl, etc.
Environmental disasters have been popular for a long time, too, with films like Waterworld and Tank Girl.
Fears of the Religious Right were explored in The Handmaid’s Tale in 1990.
And the “technology run rampant” theme has also been a perpetual best-seller. The Terminator is the most beloved example.
Brave New World and 1984 are unusual in that they’re popular as books, not films, but both of them explore the themes of the government taking huge amounts of control over the lives of ordinary citizens.

So, if you’re looking for the historical origins of post-apocalyptic films, you have to look for when people began to really fear apocalypse. As others have pointed out, apocalypse has always been a theme in religious and secular writings, but it was only when people had a concrete reason to fear apocalypse that the genre really took off. In other words, it was the fears of nuclear war during the cold war that prompted the development of the genre. Before that, future stories tended to be more positive (with the exception of Metropolis). In the 1950s, however, the futures got much much darker.

Artistically, I think Dangerosa is on point when she ties these future movies to Westerns. Lone heroes and all that. In fact, one of the most common future movie types (variety of people stuck in a situation together while being threatened by outside forces) comes right from Stagecoach. In Stagecoach, it was a stagecoach being attacked by Indians. In Leviathan, it is an undersea mining unit being marauded from within by a mutant fish monster of Soviet origin. Same story, different players.

*the fact that many films are based on stories written earlier sort of muddies the waters—do we date Soylent Green when the film came out, or when the short story on which it was based came out. I’ll argue that the date of the film is the pertinent one, because that’s when Hollywood decided that it would be of interest to a large segment of the population, thus making a profit.

27

I know there wasn’t much of what we would today call “literature” in the Middle Ages outside of church publications, but what impact did the Black Death have? That was pretty much the closest thing to an Apocalypse that Europeans had been exposed to up to that period, and maybe ever; they had no way of knowing if the dying would stop only when they were all gone.

28

The effects of the plague are easier to see in the art, than in the limited literature of the times
I found couple interesting Piers Plowman (~1380) sites whilst digging, but they’re a bit late for the direct effects of the plague. Still, the difference is about the same as between 2002, and the invention of the atom bomb: E Archives Modern translation