The Best Apocalypses in the World EVER!

I think everyone agrees that we now live in the future and it’s crap. My generation were told in our Usborne books that we’d be jetting around in space by now, hanging out with robots, living in a domed city on the moon or in a twisted post-nuclear war wasteland with loads of cool mutants and adventure. Instead, we’ve got really tiny computers and the slow-burn apocalypse of climate change. I mean, what kind of Armageddon is that? Where are the all mutants and road-warriors?!

Having had the benefit of a few years on this Earth, I also notice that the apocalypse is always changing. Anyway, all this leads me to the point of this entry – my list of the 5 best apocalypses EVER!

1. The biblical apocalypse

This is the daddy of apocalypses, straight from the fevered brain of Saint John. It’s got some great destruction going on after those seven seals are opened by the Lamb of God. Notable for introducing the Anti-Christ and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Plague, Famine, War and Noel Edmunds.

2. Nuclear war – the classic!

As a child, we watched Threads and The Day After which scared the living shit out of us as we lived in the world of Mutually Assured Destruction. However, comics painted a picture of survivalists battling disfigured mutants that made the post-nuclear hell sound rather exciting and fun.

3. Zombies

Somehow a virus reanimates corpses and they bite living humans, so they become zombies too. Quite why, after a few months, all the undead don’t simply rot to pieces so they can’t actually pose a threat any more isn’t explored. Maybe it’s all the preservatives in food these days?

4. Charlton Heston is the last man on Earth…

…or at least the last noble, macho, normal man on earth. Charlton Heston was the face of the apocalypse in the 1970s, railing against man’s inhumanity to man while kicking mutant/ape butt. Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes and Omega Man gave him plenty of opportunity to grimly witness the fall of man and display his righteous Romanesque profile.

5. Everyone goes blind and gets killed by intelligent plants from the stars

Speaks for itself – John Wyndham wrote Day of the Triffids in the ‘50s, but I remember the BBC series featuring John Duttine, which featured extremely badly put-together Triffids that appeared to be made by a man with Parkinsons out of fibreglass. Bad special effects didn’t stop the series terrifying the pants off me at the time, of course.