Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
I think the "cycles" you've seen have more to do with media looking for something they haven't promoted lately, and dredging up old themes to rehash for the public's dime. Apocalyptic fiction and monsters have a nostalgia value that makes them popular with audiences, a known product and an easy sell.
It's also more popular now because special effects are so much more realistic (and cheaper) that it makes it easier to present wrecked cities, zombies and aliens, supernatural creatures and ruined ecosystems. Even television documentaries can present future creatures and "Life After Mankind" programs that look very dramatic and realistic, while spicing things up with "Us vs Them" conflicts.
There's nothing relatively new about society feeling unsure of its future; some of us have felt that way since the 1960s, and feel like the rest of you are just beginning to notice how bad things are. We can also recite the apocalyptic movies since then, from Soylent Green and ZPG, through Silent Running, A Boy And His Dog, Logan's Run, Twilight's Last Gleaming, Damnation Alley, to the multiple iterations of I Am Legend, Jerico, The Book of Eli, The Matrix, Terminator, The Island, etc, etc, etc... and we say: "What rise? When did it fall?"
The closest I've dealt with fiction after the fall would be... oh, wait, I can't actually tell you, or link you to it. Oh, well... use your imagination. At any rate, I have no personal interest in writing apocalyptic fiction. I'd much prefer to write about the next rise than the imminent fall.
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Some of my favorites that I didn't see mentioned were Max Max, Thunderdome, and one other (maybe a Return to) with Mel Gibson.
I have somewhere on an external drive the original "last man on earth" with Vincent Price. Of course Charlton Heston was in the same movie but it was called "Omega Man" and then came Will Smith's. Maybe another too.
I have never been that hot for Zombies because they always were so dumb that they could have been wiped out easy. However there was a French flick that had the zombies going through a second stage where they got smarter. I never saw the sequel to that one. Does anyone know what it was.