I think its the same thing that attracts people to Wild West settings or alien planets - you have a lawless wasteland, where danger can come at you quickly and you don't have the protections of normal society to take off the rough edges.

You are exposed.

Walking Dead does it brilliantly.

I also think it appeals to some basic element of negativity about ourselves in the human psyche.

@ToddF: Agreed.

Also I think there's something special visually and conceptually about taking something everyday and making it new again. Seeing a regular supermarket - but graffitied and scavenged and inhabited with ruthless raiders. Seeing a national monument - but ravaged by some unknowable disaster. Seeing the motorway overpasses that you drive over every day - but made impassible by huge yawning gaps. It shows that our artifacts are a part of history, just as much as the pyramids or the colloseum. It imparts a sense of historical scale.

Note also that some of the best stories provide that link between the everyday and the unbelievable. How often have we seen the story "regular Joe Schmo stumbles across something crazy"? For example, Terminator (1 and 2 particularly), ET, District 9, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Labyrinth, Groundhog Day, Neverending Story. The characters who live lives like ours allow us to experience that wonder rather than take all the weird wackiness as a given. Seeing the remnants of the world we live in provides that link, with the world as a character rather than a person.

@Jefferytitan, yes, what you say about the visual aspect is spot on.

Earliest example I remember is in the original Time Machine (1960) wherein our hero travels backwards and forwards in time but on the exact same spot (not a limitation Doctor Who has to contend with). So you had that immediate impact of, 'What the Hell happened to the world?!?!?'

Then you had later filmic examples like the iconic shot of Charlton Heston coming across the half-buried Statue of Liberty in, 'Planet of the Apes', or the 'submerged New York' section of, 'Waterworld.'

I suppose on a basic level, scary is more scary in the warped-familiar than in the abstract.

But like anything, it gets a bit much. I'm as tired of dystopian universes as I am of anti-heroes and "gritty realistic" versions of stories I heard as a kid. Some of these things are pretty cool. And then there's the egregious cash-ins that dilute things a bit.


By the by, I loved the movie Road Warrior when I was a kid. I couldn't sit through the first minute as an adult, though, because that's when I realized that in all this gritty, post-apocalyptic nonsense, the roads we see are freshly painted and in remarkably good shape.

@Heath, its funny that you refer to it as Road Warrior - I think it was only in the States that it was called that. To us Brits, it was always, 'Mad Max'!

BTW, did you know they're making a new one?

http://screenrant.com/mad-max-4-start-date-rob-104458/

It bothers me a little that this reveals where I hail from, but yeah, the second movie in the series is "Road Warrior" here. I didn't know that about a fourth movie, but Tom Hardy is a good actor.

Hardy is absolutely superb, just seen him as Bane in 'Dark Knight Rises.'

If you want an off-the-wall Brit performance from him, check out, 'Bronson' - the biopic of a notorious British criminal called Charlie Bronson......

I have been eyeing that on Netflix, and I heard Hardy assumed that Nolan chose him because of that role as Bronson. Nolan claimed he hadn't seen the film.

Bronson is well worth a look!