So, the trailer above is for District 9-meets-I Am Legend-meets-Cloverfield movie Monsters. This, apparently, is the actual title for the film, as I imagine we are so deep into 21st century irony that even the plainest of names is now reinvigorated with menace. ‘Monsters’. Positively shiver-inducing, isn’t it?

More to the point though, watching the trailer I was struck by seeing another filmic vision in which civilization is gone or has disintegrated. As always, the trailer is littered with signs of how day-to-day normalcy has ceased – moments that, I suppose, are the symbolic inversion of the plane in 28 Days Later.

There’s certainly something compelling about seeing a world devoid of the structures that currently give it meaning. This, to me anyway, was the thrill of I Am Legend’s powerful opening third. Watching Will Smith and his faithful dog move their way through an utterly empty New York was not simply eerie – it spoke to the kind of imaginative freedom both film in general and new effects technology specifically allow.

There are many forms of catharsis and identification at work in these apocalyptic films. Beyond that oh-so-enjoyable feeling of ‘what would I do presented with the same circumstances’, there is also the release of imagining a world in which nothing that now holds, holds.

Still, something similar can be accomplished by moving the setting to an an entirely different place. What is it about a world torn down – yet discomfortingly recognizable – that is so pleasurable? What does it allow and what does it release?

All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying “hey, I like these kind of movies sometimes, let’s go see it when it comes out”.