The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Social Collapse concerns the dissolution of the bonds of civilised order and a society’s fall into anarchy and barbarism. This is frequently depicted in terms of rioting, rampant lawlessness, looting and lack of individual safety. As this becomes more widespread, we see groups maintaining a tenuous coexistence or mutual defence in the absence of widespread law and order. Where any form of society regathers in the aftermath, it usually consists of small self-contained communities or is governed by warlords.
Stories range all the way from the beginning of collapse to the immediate aftermath of the fall of civilisation. Stories set after that point are dealt with under After the Holocaust. Films frequently concern a small group seeking to get to a place of safety as the world is in the process of collapsing into anarchy.
The cause of social collapse is some form of Catastrophe – be it revolution, Alien Invasion, Plague and Pandemic, a zombie apocalypse, an outbreak of Nuclear War, or circumstances that are smaller and more localised in scale.
George Romero’s successor to his cult hit of Night of the Living Dead. Romero creates a very different film, one that takes place in a mall and comes with a level of droll satire. A bigger budget allows him to push things to gore-drenched extremes
Spanish film about a group of orgiasts at a villa who survive a nuclear explosion outside but are then held at siege from an attack by blinded villagers
Fine Spanish-made killer children film inspired by The Birds where children inexplicably turn and kill adults. This has developed a modest cult and works with frequently unsettling effect
The second film from John Carpenter, a powerful and effective work about a handful of police and prisoners trapped in a police station at siege from an all-out assault by gang members outside
Louis Malle’s one and only venture into the French New Wave – a baffling work set around social collapse as a young girl wanders a farmhouse encountering unicorns, talking animals and various surreal happenings
Anarchic French film entirely without dialogue as a group of people in an apartment begin to revert to pre-civilised behaviour
George Romero’s most underrated film, filled with disturbing images as the population of a town are driven crazy by a bio-weapon spill The first and also the best of a number films on the theme of outbreaks of mass insanity
Satiric Roger Corman film in which a gas kills everyone in the world over the age of 25. Corman indulges his droll and surreal sense of humour in what amounts to a parody of his own films
A wildly anarchic fantasy where Malcolm McDowell leads an armed revolution against the petty tyranny of a British boy’s boarding school. The first in a trilogy of social commentary films for director Lindsay Anderson
The film that created the modern zombie genre, that took a creature from voodoo and reinvented at a something stumbling and wanting only to devour flesh. George Romero creates a horror film that shoots out all cozy, established convention
Jean-Luc Godard’s classic of the French New Wave where a couple’s journey into the countryside for the weekend becomes increasingly more surreal and anarchic
Peter Watkins stark, brutal mockumentary about a nuclear strike on England, this was banned from the BBC and still makes for harsh viewing today
A starkly effective film adaptation of William Golding’s classic novel about a group of British schoolboys stranded on a desert island in a plane crash and their descent into barbarism
The first film version of John Wyndham’s novel about a catastrophe that renders most of the population blind and leaves them prey to lethal plants. This is killed by variable effects and the abandonment of much of the book
A film about the outbreak of nuclear war directed by actor Ray Milland. What takes you aback is the naked liberatarian fantasy that Milland engages in, arguing in favour of a brutal ruthlessness in the name of survival
Classic British end of the world movie that presents with enormous conviction a fundamentally implausible scenario in which nuclear tests tilt the Earth off its axis causing a massive heatwave and the attempts to right it
From a script by H.G. Wells, this comes with a visionary sweep that depicts the building of a scientific utopia but equally suffers from dull and heavy-handed polemical dialogue