The Best End-Of-The-World Movies for When You're Feeling a Wild Ride

End-of-the-world movies have their own brand of power. They combine the adrenaline rush of disaster movies with the creeping dread of horror movies, so you'll definitely feel a pulse-quickening suspense. Sometimes, the movies take place as the world is about to end, so you have to sit there and mentally create your own end-of-the-world to-do list along with the characters. Sometimes, there’s already an extinction event, and you wonder if you’d be able to hack it with the other survivors. And sometimes, the movie takes place sort-of in-between, so you can panic as you watch society unravel in real time.

World-ending movies also are a mirror that reflects society’s biggest paranoias back at us. For the movies of the '50s, there was unease about the dawn of the Atomic Age. In the '80s, the disaster was almost always caused by an impending nuclear war between the United States and Russia. And there are always lingering doubts about what exists in outer space, and whether unconquered forces of nature can end us at any moment — be it via comets set to collide with Earth, a sun ready to expand its borders in our solar system (or stop working entirely), or, you know, aliens. These impending disaster movies span decades, so you can take in the various neuroses we’ve had over time.