Apocalyptic movies
Apocalyptic horror is about the arithmetic after the event. Something has ended the world or is in the process of it, and the film is less interested in the cause than in what the survivors decide is still worth doing.
The Last Man on Earth filmed Richard Matheson's 1954 novel and gave the screen its most durable version of the lonely opening act, one man and a routine, though films had reached that shape before it. Night of the Living Dead took the same collapse and compressed it into a cemetery, a farmhouse and the following morning.
Later films mostly pick a scale. 28 Days Later starts with one man waking alone in a hospital and widens steadily until the threat is other survivors in uniform. A Quiet Place reduces the problem to a rule about noise and Bird Box to one about sight. The smaller the rule, the better these tend to work.
Notable apocalyptic movies
If you only ever watch a handful of these, make it these.
New apocalyptic movies
The end of the world remains reliably popular, and recent entries favour a single household over a global view.
You can find these and every other apocalyptic movie in our database. And if you want to keep track of the ones you have seen and the ones you are saving for later, start a profile and log them as you go.