The post apocalyptic is a sub-genre of science Fiction. It's roots can be traced all the way back to even a story like Noah and the Ark which describes the destruction of the current society and the rebirth of a brand new one; an obvious reference to an apocalyptic situation.
Moving back to modern times, the earliest noted piece is Mary Shelly's - The Last Man. In comparison to the Noah story it's on the other side of the post apocalyptic spectrum, but applies just as much nevertheless. The story tells of a plague that wipes out civilisation. Often when people talk about the 'post apocalyptic genre' they think of nuclear wars, and global warming, yet back then the plague was a big issue. This shows how much plots differ now then from back then.
Not a lot of post-apocalyptic novels were wrote until the cold war, when the genre saw a large increase in interest; this was due to obvious reasons as the threat of a nuclear war was looming, and to some seemed like a certainty, so they would want to in some respects 'take comfort' from knowing 'how the world was going to end' and try to prepare themselves for it.
Although during this period, many other situations started to break through, sometimes to an extreme extent, for example; Alien Invasions; Mutants; or future weapons.
As said in the first paragraph, Mary Shelly's - The Last Man was based around a pandemic. This made many other books decide to follow the same path. We have an array of publications that follow this suit in 1980-1990's such as the novels Emergance [1984] and Blindness [1995]. We still see the pandemic issue cropping up today with popular TV series' like Survivors [2008] based around 99.9% of the worlds population being wiped out by a pandemic. This clearly shows that people still have near enough the same view now as they did 20 or 30 years ago, and the genre of post apocalyptic certainly isn't going to go away.
An extremely interesting sub-genre of post-apocalyptic would be that entitled 'cosy catastrophe' that came about mainly in Britain after world war 2. The genre usually entails a group of survivors who set about trying to rebuild civilization. Although in our film the characters aren't shown rebuilding civilization, as an audience we could perhaps infer that any survivors elsewhere in the world set about to do this. Most significantly would be the movie Down to a Sunless Sea [1979] were after a nuclear war a group of survivors try to last as long as they can, and try to escape to Antarctica due to the radioactivity but ultimately in the end are overcome by it and all the survivors die, with life becoming extinct.
Of course, when it comes to movies it's all about making the highest amount of money possible, so time for some facts and figures...
28 Days Later directed by Danny Boyle managed to reach a phenomenal $82,719,885 gross revenue with a budget of only £5 million. Yet even more impressive is I Am Legend directed by Francis Lawrence which on a budget of $150,000,000 earned a gross revenue of $585,349,010. And last but not least 2012 directed by Roland Emmerich managed to gross an impressive $750,0000 from a $200,0000 budget. These statistics clearly show that there's room for the post-apocalyptic genre and a successful movie can be created on any sort of budget, depending on what you're hoping to do and achieve from the movie.
Moving back to modern times, the earliest noted piece is Mary Shelly's - The Last Man. In comparison to the Noah story it's on the other side of the post apocalyptic spectrum, but applies just as much nevertheless. The story tells of a plague that wipes out civilisation. Often when people talk about the 'post apocalyptic genre' they think of nuclear wars, and global warming, yet back then the plague was a big issue. This shows how much plots differ now then from back then.
Not a lot of post-apocalyptic novels were wrote until the cold war, when the genre saw a large increase in interest; this was due to obvious reasons as the threat of a nuclear war was looming, and to some seemed like a certainty, so they would want to in some respects 'take comfort' from knowing 'how the world was going to end' and try to prepare themselves for it.
Although during this period, many other situations started to break through, sometimes to an extreme extent, for example; Alien Invasions; Mutants; or future weapons.
As said in the first paragraph, Mary Shelly's - The Last Man was based around a pandemic. This made many other books decide to follow the same path. We have an array of publications that follow this suit in 1980-1990's such as the novels Emergance [1984] and Blindness [1995]. We still see the pandemic issue cropping up today with popular TV series' like Survivors [2008] based around 99.9% of the worlds population being wiped out by a pandemic. This clearly shows that people still have near enough the same view now as they did 20 or 30 years ago, and the genre of post apocalyptic certainly isn't going to go away.
An extremely interesting sub-genre of post-apocalyptic would be that entitled 'cosy catastrophe' that came about mainly in Britain after world war 2. The genre usually entails a group of survivors who set about trying to rebuild civilization. Although in our film the characters aren't shown rebuilding civilization, as an audience we could perhaps infer that any survivors elsewhere in the world set about to do this. Most significantly would be the movie Down to a Sunless Sea [1979] were after a nuclear war a group of survivors try to last as long as they can, and try to escape to Antarctica due to the radioactivity but ultimately in the end are overcome by it and all the survivors die, with life becoming extinct.
Of course, when it comes to movies it's all about making the highest amount of money possible, so time for some facts and figures...
28 Days Later directed by Danny Boyle managed to reach a phenomenal $82,719,885 gross revenue with a budget of only £5 million. Yet even more impressive is I Am Legend directed by Francis Lawrence which on a budget of $150,000,000 earned a gross revenue of $585,349,010. And last but not least 2012 directed by Roland Emmerich managed to gross an impressive $750,0000 from a $200,0000 budget. These statistics clearly show that there's room for the post-apocalyptic genre and a successful movie can be created on any sort of budget, depending on what you're hoping to do and achieve from the movie.
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