Global nightmare: horror & apocalypse.

Forsyth, Scott

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Contemporary film and television is filled with the images and narratives of apocalypse; the IMDB has a list of 185 'end of the world' thrillers. This issue began with Fredric Jameson's memorable observation, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism." We are entertained and terrified with the aesthetics of destruction and nightmare. Destruction comes with terrorists, zombies, witches, aliens, robots, meteors, the Internet, ecological breakdown, psychological despair, plagues beyond Biblical, or perhaps from God. The future may bring total destruction of the globe, blowing up the White House or California, or just an ongoing dystopian hell. Heroism sometimes saves us, probably fails, or sometimes it is all just for laughs.

This nightmare is usually global and it crosses genres--comedy, family melodrama, art cinema, action thrillers, science fiction and horror. Maybe especially horror. I am particularly recalling the collection, edited and written in 1979 by future CineAction editors Richard Lippe and Robin Wood, along with contributions from Andrew Britton and Tony Williams, The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. That volume had a powerful influence on subsequent political, social and psychological interpretations, from scholarly to popular criticism, of horror films, as particular texts and as a genre. Now the horror has spread from America to the globe and the end of the world! These films, and their popularity, tell us about the politics of gender, race, class, sexuality and the body, ecology and, of course, globalizing capitalism. We received many interesting submissions and the articles assembled range across art cinema and, low-budget exploitation to big budget blockbusters with a diversity of interests and perspectives.

In this issue, Tanner Mirrlees dissects the politics and ideology of Hollywood's dystopias. Robert Alpert compares George Romero's foundational Night of the Living Dead and his recent Diary of the Dead. Jimmy Weaver explores one of the most disturbing of Michael Haneke's films. Dan McFadden and Elena Woolley offer differing interpretations of the meanings and pleasures of the cinema of the end of the world. Isaac Berk reads The Walking Dead as a critique of the politics of American democracy. David Christopher considers the boundaries between apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic and dystopian films, with a focus on ideological process.