I feel that the original George Romero zombie films really leaned hard into the fault lines in a small group of frightened humans, and the imagined dynamics of those, and honestly that’s a horror setup that I really love. I also really enjoy The Mist, despite the very Stephen King touch of an over the top Christian cult that develops right in the middle of the survival horror situation.
I think there’s something a little different with extended series set in an apocalypse, because those are more social critiques than illustrations of “human nature” or small group dynamics. Like I think the inspiration for the guy who created The Walking Dead was “what if Dawn of the Dead just went on and on and never ended, what then?” And I think in attempting to answer those questions, the only answers people seem to come up with are dark fantasies of power, domination and exploitation. I do like stories about power and how it’s used! I just think at this point the post-apocalyptic genre is extremely one note.
I think Stephen King’s The Stand is a good example of something that goes from the post-apocalypse to the post-post-apocalypse, even though it’s very manichean and ultimately it’s not my favorite. And at some point he decides to stop telling the story of these two opposing societies growing and throws them into a direct religious confrontation…