Screening Children in Post-apocalypse Film and Television

This collection examines the representation of children in contemporary apocalyptic films and television, arguing that they inhabit conflicting roles as either harbingers of disaster or symbols of survival and hope.

This collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television. In these narratives, children have occupied conflicting positions—as harbingers of disaster or as symbols of survival and hope. The child in many post-apocalyptic narratives occupies a unique space that oscillates between civilization and tribalism, human and animal, life and death, hope and despair, faith and nothingness. By exploring the ways the child character functions within a dystopian framework, the chapters in this book illustrate how traditional notions of childhood are tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often works to reaffirm the “rightness” of past systems of social order.