Theme: Lost Worlds and Cities

Lost Worlds are pockets of prehistoric life or ancient civilisation that are discovered untouched in the modern world. These can be located in the jungle, the desert, remote plateaus and mountainous regions, at the bottom of the ocean, on islands or undiscovered continents, or other dimensions. Almost all the entries in Centre of the Earth and Underground Adventures are lost world stories.

Ever since works like Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), both of which have been multiply filmed, the lost world genre has been filled with undiscovered pockets of the world where dinosaurs and cavemen roam. The first lost world film was the silent adaptation of The Lost World (1925) whose creator went on to make the most famous of all lost world films King Kong (1933).

While these depict adventures featuring prehistoric remnants, depictions of Lost Cities are more modern. These tend to turn up in Adventure Films where they are places that house great treasures, magical artefacts or secrets of lost science. Or else they can be ruled over by tribes and immortal queens who have never encountered modern people before and as a rule tend to sentence interlopers to death.

There have been some examples of Lost Worlds in the real world. The most famous of these is Atlantis, while there have been other examples that have entered into the popular imagination such as Lemuria and Mu.