Watch your way through the end of the world
Horror and science fiction have always been preoccupied with the things that scare us: the uncanny, the unimaginable, the terrifying nightmares that scratch at our psyches during our bleakest moments.
Zombies, vampires, aliens are all manifestations of our fear of the unknown and the incomprehensible, whether that’s because they’re sick, skeletal bastards intent on killing us, bloodthirsty nightwalkers intent on killing us or angry green men from the outer limits intent on killing us. These genres also love nothing better than to prey on our fear of isolation and loneliness so right now they’ve got us right where they want us.
TWELVE MONKEYS — NETFLIX
Terry Gilliam took Chris Marker’s seminal 1962 short still photograph film La Jetée and used its premise of a time traveller from the future who witnesses his own death as the jumping off point for something more madcap and paranoid. Bruce Willis clenches his jaw in acceptance of a mission from his masters in the future to travel back in time to the 1990s to prevent an animal-rights activist’s biological attack that will set off a plague that wipes out 5- billion people. It’s the ultimate “what if” fantasy gone horribly wrong and its uncertain questions about ecological destruction, inequality and illness are still with us 25 years later.
THE SHINING — NETFLIX
Forty years on and Stanley Kubrick’s high-tension, eerily atmospheric adaptation of Stephen King’s novel remains a masterclass in how to unnerve an audience through a careful balance between what’s shown and what’s implied. It’s also a story about a nice normal family who think that holing up together for a few months in a huge hotel in the dead of winter is a good idea — the ultimate isolation nightmare film.
LAST MAN ON EARTH YOUTUBE
Modern moviegoers will be familiar with the 2007 Will Smith adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 post-apocalyptic novel
I am Legend but it wasn’t the first. That honour goes to this 1964 version starring the indomitable horror legend Vincent Price.
It’s the same story of a scientist who survives an apocalyptic pandemic that’s left a world populated by bloodthirsty vampire zombies but with a much lower budget and a more effective use of the basics to create a pleasurable mix of camp and scares that still holds up.
DAYBREAKERS SHOWMAX
Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe star in this gory, high bodycount vampire horror. In 2009 a plague caused by bats has turned the world’s population into vampires and the bloodsuckers are running out of humans to feed on.
It’s a race against time as Hawke’s vampire haematologist must team up with former vampire Dafoe and his band of escaped human survivors to find a cure.
It’s all very B-movie blood and guts, but there’s enough of an interesting premise and a few surprises along the way to keep you both chilled and entertained.
THE BAD BATCH NETFLIX
Do what they tell you! The world out there is far worse than the one in here! That’s the basic message of Ana Lily Amirpour’s uniquely twisted dystopian horror thriller in which a wayward young woman is kicked out of civilised society and finds herself in a wasteland in which fellow reprobates and misfits must band together to protect themselves against marauding cannibals. It’s a mad, mad world filled with strange but unforgettable characters who can’t be trusted and a reminder that sometimes it’s best to remember the warning in Apocalypse Now to “never get off the boat”.
VIRUS — AMAZON PRIME
Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku doubles up on the apocalypse in this 1980 Cold War thriller in which an American scientist engineers a deadly pathogen that is released on an unsuspecting world, causing a global outbreak of “the Italian Flu” that wipes out the earth’s population. The only survivors are the few hundred scientific researchers in Antarctica. But this is a Fukasaku film, so just because they survived the plague doesn’t mean they’re safe after it’s discovered that an impending earthquake will set off the unmanned US nuclear arsenal and finish off the planet once and for all.