Abstract

An atmosfere of fear seems to surround western culture in the last two or three decades. From it stems a new kind of fear, imaginarially expressed in the fear of collapse event. In this paper, we chart some manifestations of the new fear of collapse in the sphere of cinema and of intelectual academic writings. In the first case, with the emergence of collapse and zombie movies in cultural industry productions; in the second one, in the emergence of civilizational collapse as a theme for historians, systems and complexity cientists, ecologists, peak-oil theorists, economists, social scientists etc. Some possible explanatory hipothesis for the emergency of this fenomenon are conjectured.