Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

Abrams frames apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives less as predictions than as cultural diagnostics. When stories depict society collapsing, the spectacle functions as a controlled experiment: strip away institutions and comforts to reveal what a culture worries about—violence, scarcity, contagion, authoritarianism, moral breakdown, or the fragility of community. By placing filmmakers alongside novelists, playwrights, and painters, he situates screen apocalypse within a long artistic tradition of using catastrophe allegorically. The remark also implies that such stories persist because the underlying anxieties persist, and because the end-of-society scenario offers a dramatic way to test values, ethics, and social bonds under extreme pressure.