Survivalism in Fiction - Films

Films

• The 1962 movie Panic in Year Zero! starring Ray Milland, Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon and Mary Mitchel portrays the Baldwin family's attempt to flee the Los Angeles area for a cave in a rural location after a nuclear war between the US and the USSR.
• The 1970 movie No Blade of Grass starring Nigel Davenport, based on the book by John Christopher, features an apocalyptic scenario in England.
• Deliverance, both the 1970 novel and the 1972 film adaptation, feature elements of survivalism, and one of the main characters, Lewis Medlock (played in the film by Burt Reynolds), is a self-proclaimed survivalist, who at one point briefly explains his apocalyptic worldview: "Machines are going to fail, and the system is going to fail. And then...survival. Who has the ability to survive. That's the game, survival."
• The 1977 film Damnation Alley portrays a handful of survivors of a post apocalyptic world driving across the country in a Landmaster.
• In the 1983 made for television comedy movie Packin' it In, the main character Gary Webber (Richard Benjamin) moves his family from suburban L.A. to the wilderness of Oregon. The family moves into a small rural community where most of the residents are survivalists.
• In the comedy The Survivors (1983 film), Robin Williams plays a man who becomes obsessed with the survivalist culture after being robbed. Walter Matthau costars as Williams' more level-headed companion.
• The 1984 movie Red Dawn portrays Colorado high school students who take to the hills after a fictional invasion of the US by the Soviet Union. The students survive with supplies gathered at the beginning of the invasion, by hunting, and by ambushing Soviet patrols and supply convoys.
• In the Tremors film and television franchise the character Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) is a self-proclaimed survivalist. In the first film he and his wife are preparing for social upheaval. Later in the series Burt shifts his focus towards the "graboids" that infest the soil of his home valley.
• The Postman, a movie based upon the novel of the same name, depicts a post-apocalyptic future in America in which a quasi-survivalist militia preys on weaker communities.
• In Mad Max 2, a global oil shortage causes a total socioeconomic collapse and depopulation. The few scattered survivors in the Australian Outback are depicted fighting for survival, with precious "guzzoline" as their main object.
• In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) John Connor's mother, Sarah Connor stores weapons in an underground cache in the desert, as instructed by Kyle Reese, John's father, in preparation for an apocalypse precipitated by computerized machines.
• In 1999 the film Blast from the Past was released. It is a romantic comedy film about a nuclear physicist, his wife, and son that enter a well-equipped spacious fallout shelter during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. They do not emerge until 35 years later, in 1997. The film shows their reaction to contemporary society.
• The 2007 film I Am Legend features Will Smith as Dr. Robert Neville, a military doctor immune from a virus that killed off the majority of mankind. Living in an abandoned New York City researching a cure for the virus, he fights off mutated human zombies and struggles to survive on his own. Set three years after the onset of the virus, Neville is equipped with an ample amount of supplies, including weapons, food, and fuel for electric generation.
• The 2010 film Tomorrow, When the War Began, based on the novel of the same name, features 8 teenagers waging a guerrilla war against an invading foreign power in their fictional Australian hometown.