Who knows how people around you would react to news that the world was ending? If it should happen on your watch, you'll need to be well prepared if you’re going to survive on post-apocalyptic Earth.

Thankfully film-makers have been obsessed with the topic for decades, and scriptwriters have imagined all manner of awful fates to befall mankind: nuclear wars, deadly contagious viruses and environmental catastrophes. If you're lucky enough to be among the survivors, then you would do well to remember the lessons in this collection of post-apocalyptic films.

Axar.az reports citing BBC news.

Zombieland
Two months have gone by since a burger contaminated with a mutated strain of mad cow disease turned people into ravenous flesh-eating zombies. We join loner college student Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) who has managed to avoid becoming a human Happy Meal by sticking to a neurotic list of rules – a running gag in the film – such as “check the back seat” and “beware of bathrooms”.
Making his way back home, Columbus hitches a ride with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), and on the extended road trip meets two con-artists (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) searching for a sanctuary. The four strangers (who go by place names, so not to become attached) pass the time dispensing with the undead in increasingly creative ways: using car doors, a sledgehammer, garden shears – whatever is to hand. This surprise slacker hit also gives us the greatest cameo appearance of all time, but you’ll need to watch to find out who.

Dawn of the Dead
After an unknown phenomenon causes the deceased to reanimate and prey on the living, four survivors find refuge by barricading themselves inside a shopping mall. Soon, however, they’re surrounded by hundreds of the slow-moving friends, who shuffle around the car park and amble up escalators. The survivors also have to contend with the threat of gangs trying to take over the building.
This second installment of George A Romero’s Living Dead series upped the bloody splatter levels considerably (in fluorescent comic-book red), but it’s Romero’s attack on society’s failings in this excellent satire on consumerist culture, that really deals the most savage blow.

28 Days Later
Attempting to free some laboratory chimpanzees, animal rights activists unwittingly release a highly contagious rage-inducing virus into the British population. Cut to four weeks later and we meet Jim (Cillian Murphy) who awakens from a coma to discover he’s escaped the devastating effects of an outbreak while he’s been in the hospital.
Danny Boyle’s ambitious 2002 independent feature – one of the first mainstream films to be shot in digital video – brought the genre back from the dead and gave us a new breed of zombie. The super-fast infected in 28 Days Later dispensed with the idea that the walking dead couldn’t run, giving an altogether more in-your-face terror.

Mad Max: Fury Road
Following a nuclear holocaust, civilization has collapsed and the world has become a wasteland where water and gasoline are scarce. In the chaos, a survivor named Max Rockatansky has been captured by an army of the tyrannical ruler Immortan Joe, and dragged into a road chase, after a driver of an armored tractor-trailer – Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) – who has betrayed Joe and is on a mission to find safety in the Green Place.
Tom Hardy takes on the title role in George Miller’s long-gestating sequel to his trilogy of Mad Max films, originally featuring Mel Gibson. Fury Road’s minimal dialogue, maximum action and accelerated editing means it’s a rare blockbuster that lives up to its name. If you like your post-apocalyptic movies literally darker than most, give the Black and Chrome edition a watch – the director’s preferred version.

12 Monkeys
In 1996, a group known as the Army of the 12 Monkeys is believed to be behind the release of a deadly virus that kills five billion and forces the rest to live underground because of poisonous air. “This already happened,” pleads James Cole (Bruce Willis) to a doctor in 1990 – but his sane warnings sound like mad ravings and Cole is quickly imprisoned in a psychiatric ward.
Cole’s been sent from the future and needs to find the source of the plague, but a mistake means he arrives six years too early and is chasing down Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), a former patient with fanatical views and the son of an eminent virologist. Inspired by 1962 short film La Jetée, Terry Gilliam’s stunning sci-fi visuals balance with enough cerebral plot-twists to warrant several viewings.

Stalker
In a bleak future, three men journey into the Zone; a forbidden place where danger lurks and reality is distorted. A guide known as the stalker leads a writer and a scientist towards the abandoned wasteland, in the hope of finding a mysterious place where people’s most deep desires are said to come true, called the Room.
Loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, this eerie 1971 Russian sci-fi by Andrei Tarkovsky has a chillingly prophetic feel to it, given the depopulation of the surrounding area (officially known as the Zone of alienation) of Chernobyl following its nuclear plant disaster.

Dr Strangelove
Released at the height of the Cold War, Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, pokes fun at the idea of “mutually assured annihilation” and is definitely one of the funniest films about nuclear holocaust. Concerned that water-fluoridation is a dangerous Communist plot, unhinged US General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without consulting the president.
We follow the US president (Peter Sellers), advisers and politicians as they frantically try to recall the bombers to prevent a nuclear apocalypse – “Gentlemen, you can't fight in here,: says the president, “this is the War Room”. The comedy is as relevant today as the egos of missile-minded politicians.

Children of Men
Based on crime author PD James’s novel about the world facing global infertility, Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian version of the future is now disturbingly familiar. Set in 2027, a fertility pandemic has meant no child has been born in 18 years, and civilization is on the brink of collapse.
With the UK deluged by an influx of asylum seekers escaping war, the country goes into lockdown, with the army rounding up and detaining immigrants. A former political activist, Theo (Clive Owen) meets Kee, a refugee who is miraculously pregnant, and he has to protect her from groups who want to exploit her condition. Frighteningly plausible.

The Road
After a catastrophe of unknown origins, a once civilized father with a shopping cart of scavenged food (Viggo Mortensen) struggles to keep his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) alive while walking towards the coast, through a burned America. The father’s only defense against marauding cannibals is a gun, with two bullets. Based on Cormac McCarthy's disturbing novel, this respectful adaptation gives an incredibly bleak, but highly emotional vision of the end of the world. Not a date movie.

Akira
Would we have films like The Matrix, Looper, Inception or TV shows such as Stranger Things without Katsuhiro Otomo’s breakthrough 1988 cyber punk thriller? Not likely. The anime’s influence on TV and film can be seen everywhere, and opened the door for animation which tackled mature themes and complex plots.
Set after the World War Three (initiated by a mysterious event), the story follows a neo-Tokyo biker gang who accidentally uncovers a secret military project, planning to use gifted children with telekinetic powers as weapons. Undiluted and extremely violent, Akira was the film that finally brought Japanese culture en-masse to the West. Three decades later, it flatly refuses to look dated.