Climate change, War in the Middle East, terrorist attacks, Syrian refugee crisis in Europe, police killings of unarmed black men in the US, rising racist/nationalist in political discourses, on-going economic crisis, to name only a few of the pressing social and economic problems facing the world today. The zombie film as a genre, finds its power in our fear of the apocalypse and its aftermath. This course will explore apocalyptic films as cultural productions that point to a devastating end of the world to uncover the ways social relations interact with our sense of humanity. Beginning with the horror films of George A. Romero we will systematically explore the constructions of the apocalypse and address how historical assumptions of gender, race, class, and sexuality, have profoundly shaped how we come to understand human demise and therefore human existence. Drawing on popular, academic, and human rights literature, we will examine the facts and fictions that go into the constructions of the apocalypse and the analytical tools we can use to discern them. For our work we will juxtapose the zombie film genre and documentary films that depict apocalyptic moments with scholarship about very real world atrocities and moments of mass human destruction in order to glean possible connection and/or intersections. Our class will explore social phenomena like lynching, genocide and torture to get at how these extreme forms of violence are made sense of in any given social, cultural, economic, political context. We hope to explore violence and the use of violence on the human body. What do depictions of extreme forms of violence against human bodies let us know about our sense of what being human means? How do we know we are human in the face of mass atrocities? How is real violence reconstructed in popular culture and what is the impact on our psyche?