Tomb

Just how will the world end? Well, here are a few scenarios from film and television:

• Natural disaster: As it turns out, nature wants to kill us. Solar flares, tidal waves, earthquakes and swarms of killer bees are lining up, all waiting for the chance to bump humanity off. Maybe the sun wants to burn us (Solar Crisis, 1990), or freeze us (Sunshine, 2007), and it’s up to a plucky band of astronauts to save the day. On the other hand, maybe every single bird in the world will suddenly decide they’ve had enough of humanity’s bullshit and straighten us out themselves (The Birds, 1963).

• Unnatural disaster: Alternately, a global cataclysm could result from something going hideously wrong. In The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), nuclear bomb testing throws Earth out of orbit, sending us hurtling towards the sun. Whoops.

• It’s all our fault, Part 1 — global warming: Man-made climate change spells our doom in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Waterworld (1995), but that’s not the only way humans can screw things up big time....

• It’s all our fault, Part 2 — pollution: We might also render our dirty, stinking planet completely uninhabitable. Our usual solution seems to be to getting a spaceship and finding a new place to pollute. Maybe we’ll have adventures on an eerie frontier world, like in the television series Earth 2 (1994-95), or maybe we’ll just sit around in a luxury space cruiser, getting fat (Wall-E, 2008).

• It’s all our fault, Part 3 — nuclear war: Ah, the big favourite. Not every nuclear disaster movie is bleak, though — comedies exist as well. Dr. Strangelove (1964) famously lampoons the destruction of mankind, while the oddball flick The Bed-Sitting Room (1969) takes place after a catastrophic “nuclear misunderstanding” in which ambient radiation does strange things to the survivors. One young lady is 17 months pregnant, for instance, while another survivor mutates into a bed-sitting room.

Some post-apocalyptic flicks are unintentionally funny, including Rats: Night of Terror (1985), in which a bunch of dim-witted survivors prove themselves an inferior species to the rats (well, hamsters) that keep getting thrown at them by off-camera stagehands. The New Barbarians, a.k.a. Warriors of the Wasteland (1982), gives us a post-apocalyptic world in which bad guys roam the blasted plains driving souped-up golf carts equipped with buzz saws and flamethrowers.

• Mass sterility: Once we stop poppin’ out babies, it’s just a matter of time until humanity disappears. That’s the setup to the bleakly brilliant Children of Men (2006), but it also appears in the surprisingly thoughtful B-movie Creation of the Humanoids (1962), the just-as-ridiculous-as-it-sounds Hell Comes to Frogtown (1987) and the indescribable post-apocalyptic porno Café Flesh (1982).

• Zombies: In 1968, the film Night of the Living Dead presented moviegoers with the first-ever zombie apocalypse, a scenario that remains popular to this day. When the dead start eating the living, we’re all pooched.

• Aliens: Enemies from the stars might exterminate us at any moment. The attack might be frightening, as in The War of the Worlds (2005); gleeful, as in Mars Attacks! (1996); sneaky, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956); or thoughtless and bureaucratic, as in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005), in which humanity is wiped out in the first few minutes of the story. Robot Monster (1953) infamously presents us with an invasion consisting of one guy in a gorilla suit and a space helmet.

• Monsters: If none of the above beasties get us, there’s always Cthulhu.

• The Earth deflates like a balloon: In Michael Overbeck’s funny three-minute cartoon Atlas Gets a Drink (1999), a couple of fish decide to walk on land just for the heck of it. The other creatures of the world are so astonished by this sight that they, too, reject their usual roles and start doing things they’ve always wanted to do. A cow devours a bunny rabbit. Sharks and killer whales hunt people door-to-door. Humans fly through the air by flapping their arms. Things escalate ridiculously, and before long the entire planet deflates like a balloon, leaving the mythical titan Atlas unencumbered at last, allowing him to enter a saloon and (presumably) get the drink mentioned in the title.

That’s not the only cartoon in which the Earth deflates like a balloon. It also happens in an episode of the British claymation series Rex the Runt (1998), when the protagonists foolishly try to drill to the centre of the Earth. The next episode takes place on the surface of the shrivelled planet as it shoots through the cosmos, while the protagonists deal with their guilt, boredom and substandard interstellar chicken restaurants.

• Unclassifiable: Sometimes, the end of the world is so chaotic, nobody has the slightest clue what’s going on. The animated film End of Evangelion (1997) brought the phenomenally popular series Neon Genesis Evangelion to a close in such a bizarre, obtuse way that not even diehard fans could decipher it upon first viewing. There are giant robotic “angels,” military conspiracies, trippy biblical iconography and the entire population of Earth turning into orange goo. Many viewers now claim to understand it (at least partly), but only after multiple viewings and hours of online research.

Similarly, Southland Tales (2006) bombards viewers with the Book of Revelation, multiple references to events unwitnessed by the audience and baffling stream-of-consciousness nonsense. The film is divided into “Chapters 4, 5 and 6” and viewers are expected to read a 360-page graphic novel in order to get the first part of the story. Stifler from American Pie (1999) plays identical-twin messiahs, Jon Lovitz plays a homicidal cop, and the Antichrist character looks like the mayor of Munchkinland. Every single scene looks like it should have been cut out of the movie. This ridiculous film bombed at the Cannes film festival, and was radically re-edited for its theatrical and DVD release. It didn’t help.