The whole Mad Max, The Postman, Waterworld etc type thing with society collapsed back to survival. The earliest I can think of is 1975 “A Boy and His Dog” and 1981 “Escape from New York” which had a sectioned off, contained version of that. Anything earlier?
On the Beach, perhaps; although not as anarchic as the others.
Possibly Things to Come (1936).
(Things get better.)
There have been a lot of films that could be considered post-apocalyptic. It’s actually a rather vague term. Wikipedia has an entry called “List of apocalyptic films,” some of which may fit your description.
Probably not the earliest, but there’s Damnation Alley (1977), starring George Peppard and Jan-Michael Vincent, very loosely based on a Roger Zelazney story. **Rollerball **and Death Race 2000 came out a couple of years earlier, but while certainly dystopian, they’re not post-apocalyptic.
Of course, there’s also Zardoz (1974). **Zardoz, **however, defies definition.
There’s the 1960 version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which works in a nuclear war (set in 1966).
What film you choose, depends on the details you select for your “post apocalypse dystopia,” and on how much of the film is about the dystopia itself. It onlly became technologically possible to make a movie that would measure up to being about “a post apocalyptic dystopia,” and not just about a few people having a rough go of it locally, until after 1929. So Things To Come would have to be the one, I’d say.
But again, it depends on the exact details of your decision making.
The first thing that came to mind was “A Boy and His Dog”. But then I remembered “Planet of the Apes” (1968)
Oh! An honorable mention: 1939’s Peace on Earth.
Notable for being 1) Animated, and 2) a Christmas film.
Possibly disqualified for being 1) a short, not a feature-length work, and 2) not, strictly speaking, being a “dystopia.” At least, not for long.
I’m partial toPanic in the Year Zero, a low budget horror flick from 1961. But even IMDB’s "People who liked this also liked… " shows that it wasn’t first by a long shot.
I just ran across this review of a movie I had never heard of before, Deluge–filmed in 1933 and about surviving in a post-flood world: http://pre-code.com/deluge-1933-review/
Whoa… that might be it.
“Gone With The Wind” (1939) showed an anarchic, post-apocalyptic dystopia.
Yeah, but they’ll never be hungry again.
Agreed. Hence why I as well as others have at least indirectly called for more specificity about what the parameters are.
There are all sorts of disaster films, and war films, which had nasty post-whatever portions.
I suggest that the most logical parameter to use for this, would be that the main THEME or REASON FOR MAKING THE FILM, was to show the what-if dystopic world, as opposed to simply being another human adventures in disaster management. War movies and natural disaster films would be out, as would religious themed “dystopia’s,” since the point of those isn’t the dystopia, it’s the religious lesson (i.e. threat).
But I’m not in charge here. How about you, OP? Any specifics interest you?
I reading the responses it’s clear the concept of what comprises a fictional dystopia changes over time. Until the advent of the atom bomb and the concept of weaponizing biological agents AND people being utterly dependent on technology I’m not sure people even had a concept of or notion of everything in modernity being reset to a barbarian, survival level state of existence.
Imagine you’re trying to describe Mad Max to a person in the 1920’s pr 1930’s . Plague or non-nuclear war was the most you could come up with for maximum devastation and even that did not bring social collapse down when it happened. A subsistence level of existence in small groups and living off the land would be close to the way many country people actually lived.
Deluge might win, but the was the first GOOD one. When I heard it was finally coming out on Blu-Ray, I put in an advance order. Ray Massey and Sir Ralph Richardson just kick ASS in this.
“Mister WINGS over your WITS.”
Nah. See Things to Come. Poison gas and biological weapons were around before the atomic age.
Interesting how Britons were terrified of gas warfare carried out on civilian populations post-Hitler and pre-war. Also interesting that Adolf didn’t rain gas bombs down on London during the Blitz. Was he worried about retaliation?
Not really. “Apocalyptic” implies the destruction of civilization and of the social fabric of the entire world, not just a single city or even a country. The post-bellum South wasn’t anarchic for any length of time. And post-Reconstruction one might argue that it was a dystopia for blacks, but it wasn’t one for whites.
I think one of the reasons it took so long for someone to create this genre is in the early days of Sci Fi there was still enough unexplored areas left that you could set your story in an newly discovered land to create adventure. You didn’t need to destroy civilization to create a savage land, you could just create a savage land in South America or something.