Theme: The Last People on Earth

The Last People on Earth refer to a body of films where a handful of people (sometimes as little as one or two) find themselves the only ones left after everyone else on Earth has disappeared or been killed.

Such films usually follows the survivors’ connections with one another (sometimes romance where the arrival of a third often leads to a love triangle), their internal conflicts, their struggles to subsist, their visiting the ruins and being able to wander freely without social restrictions.

The first of these films was the post-nuclear drama Five (1951) concerning naturally enough five survivors. The genre continued through several of the Nuclear War films of the 1950s where people would awake in deserted cities or survive a nuclear apocalypse. The genre was revived with The Quiet Earth (1985), which removed nuclear explanations from the mix. Thereafter explanations for the deserted world have been mysterious or quite often none offered at all.