The appeal of the apocalypse

The end of the world is all the rage nowadays, as popular with authors and directors as with readers and viewers. Take a random selection of apocalyptic novels, films and television dramas: I Am Legend (two versions), Cell, The Stand, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, The Road(both novel and film) and Survivors (two versions). Why should it be so, I found myself wondering? After all, it’s hardly feel-good material.

Let’s dig a little deeper and see if we can find an answer, shall we?

The first reason I can come up with is this: it is somehow cathartic to see the destruction of everything we know and care about whilst, at the same time, knowing that it isn’t real. In fact, I think it is very similar to the attraction of the news channels for doom-addicts (see my article “How to kill your soul with 'the news’, http://www.abctales.com/story/markihlogie/how-kill-your-soul-news).

The second reason is less obvious than that. We all have thwarted ambitions, areas of our lives where we feel we have failed and times when dreams have died. Reading about, or seeing on a cinema or television screen, the end of the world as we know it and seeing survivors rebuilding their world, allows us to think we can remake our lives the way we want. It strikes one hell of a chord with us, in other words, even though it is other people having their second chance, not us, and at an almost unimaginable cost.

Also, I have to say that when I’m in a strong enough mood, the bleak atmosphere and the starkness of the settings appeals to me.

Another reason is, I think, that seeing the survivors cope with what to us in our industrialised society are everyday problems (or not even problems at all – turn on the tap for water or click a switch for heat) make our own problems seem rather less overwhelming. This encourages us to overcome them. Moreover, we can see parallels for dealing with common situations that involve the ending of something, such as divorce, bereavement, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse.

What is the common thread here? I think that it is that it is the feeling we can control – or even improve – our lives more than we thought. Put another way, things are not as bad as we feared, which brings us back to the question from the beginning of this post, where I asked why tales of the apocalypse are so popular when there is no feel-good factor in them. But that’s precisely the point. Look beneath the surface of most apocalyptic tales and they actually are inspiring. The survivors can start to rebuild the world, so we can improve our lives too.

They give us hope for a better tomorrow – like the most popular teen novels.