ABSTRACT
Millennial structures and themes have been used extensively throughout the history of film as means of narrative resolution. The ways in which it is manifested depend on the nature of the obstacles that are represented as endangering humanity or impeding its social evolution. Because of this, millennialism is most prominently in evidence in those genres that deal with conjectural dangers, particularly horror and science fiction films. Most commonly, these threats are represented as deriving from external sourcesgalactic disasters, hostile extraterrestrial life or demonic entities-and the solutions to these problems are located in the manifest world. This construction is postmillennial: the possibility of a sudden alteration in the direction of human history is evoked only to endorse the continuation or reduplication of the contemporary or manifest world. However, films that deal with fears of disaster or annihilation deriving from within humanity itself-generally, nuclear devastation, or alternately dangerous social movements or ecological catastrophe-occasionally adopt premillennial modes of discourse. Here, human history is represented as either helplessly declining or heading towards cataclysm, and only some form of radical intervention by an external agency is sufficient to save humanity from its own destructive tendencies.
