Have Post-Apocalyptic Books and Movies Become a National Obsession? - by Shaun Clarke

Post-Apocalyptic books and movies have been getting quite a lot of attention in recent years; Movies like I Am Legend and Cormack McCarthy's book The Road for example have had huge success and critical acclaim. This has a lot of people wondering why there has been such a sudden increase in fiction of this genre.

Looking back in recent history you could easily identify the rise in apocalyptic fiction against the political era. For example the early 60s with the Cuban missile crisis, saw an increase in peoples appetite for nuclear war themed movies. But it wasn't just the fear of nuclear annihilation that fanned the flames of Hollywood's burning obsession with Armageddon. The publics knowledge that both the American and Russian military were conducting secret experiments in biological weaponry, was also added fuel to the fire. And so we now had a plethora of Armageddon flavours to choose from; anything from flesh eating zombies and plagues to rogue meteors, as well as the good old fashioned nuclear holocaust.

So why the sudden increase in the "end of the world" movies? Are we still getting 9/11 out of our system, or is this something else? Maybe the simple truth is that we have always been in an era of fear. When Oppenheimer detonated the first nuclear bomb the dynamic of the human experience was changed forever. It's now painfully apparent that whether by design or folly, the biggest threat to human existence is man himself. After all our future may only be as secure as an air seal in a military laboratory somewhere. The truth is that the possibility of human induced Armageddon, is now forever etched into the human psyche and that's reason enough for our obsession with apocalyptic fiction.

To get the latest news and reviews of apocalypse themed movies and books or to view our Index of movies from this genre please visit: http://www.apocalypticmovies.com

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