Crapsack World / Live-Action Films

"What kind of shithole planet is this?!"

— Tom Servo (on seeing Metaluna in This Island Earth), Mystery Science Theater 3000

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• 12 Monkeys: In the future, a plague has killed 99% of humanity and the rest live in an underground Dystopia where prisoners are treated like animals.
• 2019: After the Fall of New York: After a nuclear war, the vast majority of humanity is left infertile. Most of the species are now roving, anarchistic wanderers who perform death games and trade sex slaves with impunity or a fascistic government committing genocide and horrific human experiments in a desperate attempt to save humanity. The only hope is if the last remnants of decent government can get off the planet with the only fertile woman, but Earth is beyond saving.
• 2020 Texas Gladiators: Society has collapsed, with vigilantism being the only way to stop the roving psychopaths terrorizing the land. The only semblance of government is fascist conquerors or small settlements too weak to stop their own conquest.
• The ABCs of Death:
  • "V is for Vagitus (The Cry of a Newborn Baby)" is set in a dystopian future where, due to overpopulation, reproduction is only allowed by permit. Any unapproved babies are taken and killed. Meanwhile, the government has instituted a campaign of genocide and human experimentation against psychics, to the point of declaring them legally not alive.
  • The likely post-apocalyptic Japan in "Z is for Zetsumetsu (Extinction)" isn't much better, implied to have suffered some kind of nuclear attack and has a Neo-Nazi hermaphrodite with a bladed penis running around killing people. Then again, it's hard to tell what exactly is happening in Zetsumetsu, so who knows?
• The nameless European city where The Adventures of Baron Munchausen begins is exactly this, being constantly bombarded by the Turkish army. The titular hero blames science and the age of reason for the world's ills. This is confirmed later in the movie when it is revealed that the city leaders have been negotiating all along with the Turkish Sultan to keep the war going indefinitely with the winner of each battle decided beforehand, which is intended as a critique of modern thinking.
• And God Said to Cain...: The American West is depicted as a desert hellscape where the rich are corrupt and the poor have their lives regularly destroyed by tornadoes.
• Android Cop: The Zone is a section of future Los Angeles that's contaminated by radiation. In response, it was quarantined under pain of death for anybody who tries to enter or leave without a special bypass. The population are mostly mutants and criminals. The rest of LA isn't much better, since poverty is rampant and the government is incredibly corrupt. Also, euthanasia and organ harvesting are legal.
• Anino: The slums of Manila, with naked children wandering about, people starving (the photographer hasn't eaten in a day), shanty towns, garbage everywhere, and human feces floating by in the street.
• Antichrist opens up with the unintentional suicide of an infant and just gets worse from there. Everyone in the film is horribly miserable and the film is shot in an ugly gray palette. Hell, even the acorns are miserable — and possibly vicious. Then again, this is a Lars von Trier movie, so this is to be expected.
• The Act of Killing portrays Indonesia as this.
• The Alien and Predator franchises are set in a galaxy controlled by a greedy MegaCorp that has repeatedly placed human lives in mortal danger in order to benefit themselves, especially in their unceasing efforts to weaponize the titular alien monsters, whose very nature and presence does not help things in the slightest.
• Alita: Battle Angel is set in the post-Fall city of Iron City. It sits at the base of a damaged space elevator that supports Zalem, the only sky city to survive the Fall, an interplanetary war 300 years ago. As Hugo says, "the strong prey on the weak down here." Iron City is a corrupt though not entirely wreched hive which is governed by a crime boss working as a sock puppet for an evil scientist overlord. Law enforcement consists of robot spider tank enforcers and cyborg bounty hunters. Gangs prey on the cyborgized citizens, literally ripping off their cyborg implants.
• American Justice: The Texas town our hero passes through on vacation is filled with nothing but the dirt poor, drug dealers and a police force so corrupt and racist that the film treats the slaughter of the entire police department as a good thing.
• Avatar: We can tell that Earth has become this (or Gaia's Lament, to be more specific), even though we never actually see it. However, an extended version of the first scene is available on the DVD, showing how crappy life on Earth is. Also, it can be inferred from conversations that the US has been involved in at least two more conflicts in different parts of the world, which are implied to have been invasions to secure oil.
• Avengers: Endgame shows that five years after half the life on Earth was wiped out by Thanos, while the environment and resources bounced back, the combination of grief, loss of life, unsupported infrastructure and the resulting power vaccuum is eroding humanity steadily. Through Carol Danvers, it's clear that other worlds are under the same loss of stability.
• Back to the Future Part II has a memorable version of this with the alternate version of 1985 Hill Valley. Biff became immensely rich and powerful with the Gray's Sports Almanac, and then turned Hill Valley into a heavily polluted city infested with trigger-happy gangs, armed militias and bikers.
• Beau Is Afraid:
  • The city and state of Corrina seem to be a cartoonish exaggeration of what some big American cities are like, with deranged homeless people stabbing strangers in the streets to crowds urging suicidal people to jump off buildings, and Beau is at the center of it all.
  • What little we learn about the broader world isn't much prettier. Among other things, there was apparently a major military conflict between the US and Venezuela.
• Batman:
  • Batman (1989) and Batman Begins set Gotham up quite solidly as this; it gets worse in The Dark Knight.
  • Though in Nolan's films, it's a bit better, as part of the goal of Batman is to cleanse the world using righteous methods. It's pushed to the brink in The Dark Knight where a homicidal Monster Clown can turn the city's "White Knight" into a madman, but then the civillians and prisoners onboard the ferries prove him wrong about human morality, refusing to kill each other. It's pushed yet again in The Dark Knight Rises: Bane's unveiling the truth about Harvey Dent starts to undo all of the good work Dent, Gordon and Batman did and creates chaos. In the end, however, Batman is able to pull off a (seeming) Heroic Sacrifice, saving the city and finally earning the eternal gratitude of the populace, being immortalised as a hero whose values they can look up to.
  • Even The Dark Knight pales to Batman Returns, which is set in the crappiest of Crapsack Worlds where Batman admits that he's as twisted and neurotic as the villains he goes after, a despicable Corrupt Corporate Executive gets away with multiple acts of murder and pollution and still remains well respected as the "Light of Gotham", and the citizenry in general are gullible, decadent, and unlikeable. Seriously, if Heath Ledger's Joker turned up in the world of Batman Returns and set up the Prisoner's Dilemma with the two ferries, they'd blow each other up before he finished talking.
  • While much campier and cartoonish, Joel Schumacher's Gotham is still a steamy, gaudy sensory overload of neon lights and luminous paint, where the street gang problem has gotten out of control, the local nuthouse is terribly easy to break out of, and the cops are twice as ineffective as they were in Returns against increasingly larger-scale supervillain threats.
  • In the DC Extended Universe, we haven't seen much of Gotham yet, but its reputation precedes it.
    Perry White: 'Crime wave in Gotham!' Other breaking news: 'Water, wet!'
  • If Suicide Squad (2016) is any indication, Gotham is pretty nasty in the DCEU. While the Joker was more of a rogue supervillain in the other adaptations, here he's apparently high up on the criminal food chain, if not in charge of all of it. Think about how messed up it must be with that guy running things.
  • Gotham's incarnation in Joker (2019) is possibly the worst movie depiction of the city yet, thanks in no small part of dose of World of Jerkass. People are generally unpleasant one to another, the economic crisis is palpable, high criminality and the richer class doesn't seem to care about the lower class. Even Thomas Wayne is shown here in more negative light. Joker himself actually Lampshades it.
• The Battleship Potemkin: Odessa, and by extension all of Tsarist Russia, is depicted as a repressive state where the military are fed rotting meat, the regular people are starving, and anybody who complains is brutally murdered.
• The unnamed country The Big Doll House takes place in is a dictatorship on the brink of a civil war. Anybody can be thrown in prison for knowing too much, killing one of the upper class in self-defense or even knowing a rebel. The prisons themselves are hellholes full of hard labour and torture, where the guards can basically do whatever they want to the inmates and corruption is practiced openly.
• Billy Liar is set in Britain during the early 1960s, still drained and shattered by war. All the urban scenes have a backdrop of buildings being demolished.
• Black Death: If the plague doesn't get you, the bandits or the witch-burners will.
• The Blade: The far west/south west of old China as portrayed in Tsui Hark's film is as crapsack as old China gets. Marauding bandits? Check. Abundant opium? Check. Insane bounty hunters? Check. Enslaved prostitutes? Check. Villains killing monks and trapping dogs in bear clamps for sport? Check....
• Blade Runner:
  • Los Angeles. Homicidal Artificial Humans? Implied post-World War III Cyberpunk setting? Always raining, with the water mixed with radioactive particles and/or acids? Blade Runner is the flagship example of a filmic Crapsack World.
  • In the sequel Blade Runner 2049, life on Earth has gotten even worse in the 30 years since the first film. The oceans have risen and become completely toxic to the point that a giant sea wall had to be built to prevent the toxic waters from flooding Los Angeles while the climate has continued deteriorating to the point that it is snowing in southern California in July. In addition, vast sections of the city are left completely unlit, either due to the blackout or sheer degradation. Las Vegas was abandoned following a dirty bomb detonation during the chaos caused by the Black Out while San Diego has been reduced to a giant trash dump. There is no fresh food available with the populace surviving off artificial food produced by the Wallace Corporation, while the elite of society have abandoned Earth for the off-world colonies. And racial tensions between humans and Replicants are boiling to critical mass.
• Blondie Johnson is set and was made during the Depression era, so everything goes wrong for poor Blondie. She then resorts to petty crime to survive, and eventually becomes a ruthless gangster.
• Blood Diamond: Sierra Leone is presented as a place where at any moment an army can descend on your village, rape your women, cut off your arms, force you into slavery, and turn your children into child soldiers. Unfortunately, this is very much truth in television.
• The Book of Eli: In this post-apocalyptic world, the US is a wasteland of refugees, cannibals and gangs. Alcatraz is where the good people live, who are collecting the masterworks of our culture.
• A Boy and His Dog considers a post-apocalyptic violent "above ground" as the better alternative to the Dystopian repressive underground world.
• Imagine if Monty Python directed 1984, and you should get the general idea of how dark and twisted Brazil is. Only the wealthy are happy, but they're all decadent and utterly moronic. And while the government in 1984 is so terrifying because of its efficiency in surveillance and skill in the use of state terror and propaganda, in Brazil the horror comes from its mix of willingness to use torture combined with incompetence and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that can drive even the most ordinary people to insanity and terrorism, if the latter even exists.
• The Brides of Sodom: After the nuclear war, the sun hasn't shone in ten years. Vampires rule the eternal night, and treat humans as cattle. The humans who aren't held as livestock spend their lives desperately scavenging for resources and being hunted down by the undead.
• Brotherhood of Blades: Ming China is portrayed as a corrupt land where bribery is mandatory to get ahead and a government-sanctioned Sex Slave operation goes unquestioned. The most herouc characters in the film are a trio of Professional Killers who gladly work for the Secret Police, their only problems with it being that there are infiltrators trying to topple their emperor.
• Nearly every character in Bullet in the Head is a criminal. Hong Kong is full of pro-Communist riots. Vietnam is in the middle of a civil war with both sides committing war crimes with impunity.
• Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter: Medieval England is stuck right in The Dung Ages. A plague just happened, there's a civil war so horrific that soldiers regularly desert regardless of if they won or lost, and the religious fervor is so great that you can be put on the stocks for dancing on a Sunday. Meanwhile, vampires stalk the countryside, and there are enough species with different weaknesses that you'll most likely not figure out how to kill it until it's far too late.
• Chicago portrays the titular city as a corrupt place where murderers become celebrities, the one innocent prison inmate is the only one to be hanged, and the most powerful lawyer in town can easily get criminals acquitted.
• Children of Men: Massive environmental pollution, heavy-handed authoritarian police/military presence, a largely apathetic and indifferent population that knows it's the last generation of humanity. Only Britain maintains the semblance of a functioning society, and barely at that.
• The Chronicles of Riddick, as first introduced in Pitch Black and expanded on in later films and games, is... well, let's just put it this way: The eponymous Riddick is a sociopathic, amoral mass murderer, and he's the setting's premier good guy. Alien monsters, ravaging hordes, renegade mercenaries turned slavers with a heavy helping of Body Horror, prisons that almost make real-world ones look pleasant by comparison...it's not a nice place.
• Citizen X: The Soviet Union is a bureaucratic nightmare where the vast majority of people are poor regardless of what they do and the government will deliberately cover up a Serial Killer to maintain the party line.
• The city Coffy is set in has a drug problem so bad there's a rehab center for children, with the entire government being in on it — even the supposed young crusader pretending to fight the system.
• Confessions (2010): The classroom is an allegory for this.
• Let's just say Cool World is similar to Toontown from Who Framed Roger Rabbit if it had been created by a deranged comic book writer to pass the time while he was in jail for murdering his wife's boyfriend.
• Cosmos: War of the Planets: The alien world was once a technologically advanced utopia, until the computer gained sapience and destroyed civilization in an atomic blast. Now the world is a barren wasteland, the people are forced to live savage and brutish lives, and the computer stalks the planet, killing any living thing it sees.
• Crazed: Harbor City is a crime-filled Wretched Hive where the most honest cop moonlights as a vigilante and human traffickers run the streets.
• Cry Freedom holds nothing back from showing just how awful life in Apartheid-era South Africa was for black citizens, with most living in crippling poverty, working as the servants for rich white people, dealing with regular harassment from police that could easily end in being brutally assaulted, wrongfully arrested or outright killed and knowing you have no hope of ever escaping the slums. Just surviving all that is the best case scenario.
• C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America depicts a world where the South won the American Civil War. Slavery is still legal and has grown to include Asians. The Confederacy conquered the Union shortly after the Civil War, and then conquered most of Latin America. Having even one drop of non-Caucasian blood means you are automatically put into slavery - unless you're Latino, in which case you live under an apartheid system. Women have not been liberated and sexism still rules. They enter World War II as allies of the Axis and launch a war against Japan, rather than the other way around. One line suggests they've conquered parts of the Middle East as well. All religions not based in Christianity are banned, with the exception of Judaism, and even they have been ghettoized onto Long Island. Many of the people responsible for America's cultural advancement, such as Mark Twain and Elvis Presley, flee to Canada, resulting in that country becoming the entertainment powerhouse. Plus, the two countries are in a Cold War with one another because the country accepts runaway slaves. Being gay also results in blacklisting or some other penalty, it isn't made clear which. In short, not the place you'd want to live.
• The city Dark Angel: The Ascent takes place in is corrupt from the top down. Families are kicked onto the streets while the police brutalize minorities and let white people get away with rape and murder.
• Dark City (1998): It's always night, everyone remembers a sunny beach but no one knows how to get there, and telekinetic aliens are experimenting with everyone's minds.
• Daybreakers pictures a bleak future for mankind where Vampires have taken over and hunt humans. Interestingly, the vampires' future is just as bleak because their food supply is running out due to humans having been hunted to near-extinction, and blood-starved vampires regularly turn into raging monsters that threaten even their own kind.
• Deadly Harvest: Catastrophic worldwide climate change has led to a kind of Endless Winter, resulting in crop failures and famine throughout North America, with less than a month's worth of food supplies remaining by the time of the film's setting. In turn, gangs of marauders roam the countryside slaughtering precious livestock and selling it on the black market, food riots are regularly breaking out in urban areas, and governments have decided that the only solution to the problem is letting their citizens starve.
• Death Becomes Her: This is set in a bleak world where appearances are everything and becoming undead is preferable to aging and these are just the social standards. A world where people can be trapped in their own bodies no matter how badly they break down, get mangled or just rot, without any hope of ever finding the sweet release of death, is not a world whose supernatural principles can bring to people any safety or comfort. On the other hand, it is implied that Ernest achieved recognition and popularity in his new life because of his charitable nature, leading him to metaphorically "live forever" in a good way.
• Death Wish: These are New York City and Los Angeles as depicted in these movies.
• The Real Life city of Detroit gets this treatment a lot in film, usually as a crime and gang-ridden hellhole.
  • RoboCop's Detroit of the future. The general crappiness isn't limited to Detroit, either. In the first film, an orbiting defense satellite misfires and causes thousands of acres of forest to burn in California, killing several when it also sweeps through some homes, as well as two former US Presidents. In the second film, ED-209s are deployed in five major cities despite its continuing malfunctions; a nuclear power plant in the Amazon goes critical, irradiating the entire rainforest; additionally, there's an ongoing war in the Amazon to boot; it seems that skin cancer due to the lack of ozone layer is a pretty common problem and the most powerful sunscreen is also highly carcinogenic; and it's also perfectly legal to purchase the MagnaVolt - when a car thief breaks into your car, the moment he sits down, shackles spring up around his arms and legs, turning the seat into an electric chair. The third movie sees OCP bought out by the Kanemitsu Corporation who uses an android ninja for its dirty work, and the aforementioned Amazon War is still going strong with the Rehabs being composed of vets of it, too.
  • The Crow (1994)'s Detroit.
  • Airplane!'s Detroit.
    "It was filled with every lowlife from Bombay to Calcutta... it was worse than Detroit."
  • David Bowie's Detroit.
    "A trickle of strangers were all that were left alive ... Panic in Detroit!"
  • Eminem's Detroit.
  • Gran Torino's Detroit is a hell-hole of a big ghetto at the mercy of gangs who don't have any.
  • Up in the Air's Detroit:
    Ryan Bingham:^note A Career Transition Counselor whose job takes him to Detroit with "clients" whose careers he "transitions" into unemployment Now listen, these Detroit guys can be tough. They've been getting hammered. So you don't get distracted. Stick with the simple stuff. Get these packets in their hands and get them out the door, okay?
  • Scary Movie 4 set after the Martian invasion, shows Detroit with gunfire, screaming sirens and fires. Then it shows the city after the invasion, being exactly the same hellhole but with Martian tripods.
• Dredd: Mega-City One is, for lack of a better term, a shithole, located on the edge of the radioactive wasteland that covers most of North America. According to Dredd there are tens of thousands of crimes in Mega-City One every single day, and the Judges only have the manpower to respond to around 6% of all that. Violent crimes are so common that rookie Judges have a 20% mortality rate, comparable to military forces directly involved in extended combat. That's not over the course of their first year, that's over the course of their first day.
• The Elite Squad seems to suggest that, caught between out of control criminals and a vapid, selfish middle class the only options open to the police are corruption or fascism.
• In Elysium, Earth is devastated and overpopulated, and the people who still live on it are destitute. The very wealthy live on the titular Elysium, a space station similar in appearance to a Stanford torus, and will stop at nothing to maintain the distinct separation between the two classes of people and prevent immigration. To show how bad things are on Earth, the slum city Max lives in is Los Angeles.
• Escape 2000: The Bronx is an anarchic hellhole in a constant state of gang war where a Mega Corp. can commit genocide while covering it up with relative ease.
• Escape from New York takes place in a Dystopian America where New York's Manhattan Island has been turned into a maximum-security penitentiary in response to all the crime going down, and quintessential Anti-Hero Snake Plissken is given the job of breaking into the place in order to rescue the President. Its sequel, Escape from L.A., turns America itself into a fascist Crapsack World following the Big One, with anyone not following the new President's new "Moral America" laws being given a "choice" between being shipped off to Los Angeles Island, which is every bit as hellish as New York, or being executed via the electric chair. Snake gets shipped there for obvious reasons, but the President is willing to drop all charges for Snake's crimes in exchange for retrieving a superweapon that could knock out all power to the world which Snake ultimately uses in the end as a final "fuck you" to the President and the system. There's also a unified Latin American communist army preparing to invade the United States and nobody's preparing for it. The novelization also provides some additional insight on how crappy this world is. World War III, which began in the Middle East, was a chemical war instead of a nuclear one. Huge amounts of nerve gas were used in cities like New York and Leningrad, also polluting the atmosphere. The gas now seeps down in rain and slowly drives people crazy before killing them. The western U.S. is a no-man's land where the war is still being fought.
• Exam is set in an alternate-history United Kingdom where a disease known only as "The Virus" forces much of the population to take pills every few hours or die.
• The Exterminators of the Year 3000: Nuclear war has destroyed most of the water on Earth, and society has collapsed with it. Most of humanity are rogues who at their most moral will steal water and leave others to die of thirst for their own survival, because doing so is necessary. The worst are marauding barbarians who will brutally murder children For the Evulz.
• Falling Down provides a Deconstruction. What happens if an ordinary white-collar man living in a Crapsack World just... snaps? It's also a Deconstruction of escapist fantasies where ordinary people go out and get their own back on all the world's assholes.
• France is depicted as this in Frontier(s). In urban areas, an extreme rightist Prime Minister winning an election is sparking citywide riots, while the country has cannibalistic Nazis roaming the woods.
• In the world of Final Destination, Death is a sentient, malevolent, sadistic, and unstoppable entity. For anyone who manages to escape from its intended design, a Cruel and Unusual Death is waiting for them, often as a result of mostly ordinary accidents or mundane circumstances. No matter what you do or how far you go to escape it, Death will now be hunting you down, and won't stop until it finally claims you.
• Post-WWII Berlin in A Foreign Affair. It's played straight at times, since some of the residents were happy when the Americans turned on the gas... so they could kill themselves, but it also shows the resilient Germans who are trying to repair their destroy homes, lives, and beliefs.
• Freeway: Southern California is a land of incredible classism, where the poor are doomed to be eternal white trash while the rich commit whatever atrocities they want. When they try to fight back, the system destroys them regardless of who's guilty.
• Future Force: America has a crime problem so bad it's viewed as a countrywide war zone, and the government's response is to hand law enforcement over to private enterprises. These companies are incredibly corrupt, and believe in "guilty until proven innocent," so due process is dead and they can imprison anybody they want.
• Gabriel (2007): Lucifer's forces have taken control of Purgatory. As a result, it takes the form of a filthy, corrupt and impoverished city that is locked in perpetual night. Even archangels despair after spending too much time there.
• God's Gun: The Old West is a desolate desert where one can go days without food or water just trying to pass through town, gangs of outlaws roam the streets, and the law is enforced by morons.
• Godzilla: When you look past all the camp, Toho's universe almost reads like a Cosmic Horror Story. Not only do Kaiju attacks happen on a regular basis, but most people seem to either be complete jerkasses or Too Dumb to Live, the government keeps dumping countless billions into military projects that are ultimately doomed to fail, the universe is filled with aliens hellbent on conquering Earth, there's a race of supposedly Perfect Pacifist People living Beneath the Earth who worship one Kaiju as a god and send him to destroy humanity in the wake of nuclear tests, well-intentioned extremists from the 23rd century attempt to change history and make things worse, and no matter how many times the Kaiju are destroyed, they always come back.
• Gory Gory Hallelujah: Jackville is a fundamentalist Christian cult town where the cops explicitly don't believe in human rights and the local preacher wants to destroy the world. Also, books are illegal.
• More like Crapsack Wilderness, but The Grey is about as dark of a movie as you can find. A harrowing survival film that ends with a heartbreaking Shoot the Shaggy Dog.
• Guyana: Crime of the Century: Johnsontown devolves into this over time. At the start of the movie, Johnson talks about the area of Guyana they're heading to as a paradise free from the corruption which, according to him, has crept onto the modern society. However, Johnsontown itself turns out to be a ruinous regime where anyone who disagrees with Johnson is seen as a traitor and is punished, even the smallest infractions are punished severely (and children don't get any sort of leeway when they're the culprits), and the used-to-be preaches of optimism and assurance are replaced with sermons fueled with paranoia and a culture of fear.
• Hardware (1990) is set in a post-apocalyptic world full of weirdos, perverts and psychopaths with seemingly nothing on TV but news footage of war atrocities and GWAR videos. Overpopulation problems in the remaining radiation-filled cities are leading to the government introducing large-scale sterilisation, and there's a self-repairing android killing machine on the loose. Oh, and Lemmy is in it. Lampshaded by Iggy Pop as the never seen radio DJ at the end of a very downbeat new report:
  "And now for the good news: there's no fucking good news!"
• Hardwired: The world is in a global recession/depression, and various private companies have bankrolled the last two wars the USA has been in. The corporations see, and presumably control or guide, everything.
• Hell of the Living Dead: New Guinea is a third world country in the first place, and the organization providing foreign aid is actually wanting to unleash a zombie gas to stop overpopulation. Then the gas leaks, and the country goes full Zombie Apocalypse. The ending shows that the zombie plague is spreading to the rest of the world.
• Heroes for Sale is about a Shell-Shocked Veteran during The Great Depression who can't catch a break in life even if he was a war hero.
• Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers: Los Angeles is a Wretched Hive where crime, including incestuous rape, is epidemic and a chainsaw cult is running around killing people for their dark gods.
• The Human Condition: set in Manchuria nearing the close of WWII — a situation which was a Real Life living hell for soldiers and civilians.
• Hobo with a Shotgun: "Hope Town" makes most Wretched Hive cities look like Mayberry in comparison. Not only are the local crime lord and his two sons the epitome of evil, and not only are the cops on the take from these guys and viciously corrupt to boot, the Gorn levels and general depravity by the rest of the population is through the roof. And there's only ONE good person in the film who isn't a vigilante or a victim of some kind (a police officer), and he's only on screen for a couple of seconds.
• The setting of Hundra is a grim wasteland with marauding barbarians and decadent cities where women are brutally raped, killed and sold into sexual slavery.
• I Am Legend is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a cynical Robert Neville is one of the last survivors of a deadly viral outbreak. Only 1% were immune to this virus, 90% were killed immediately and the other 9% were turned into ravenous vampires trying to infect the remaining survivors. For the first half of the movie, Neville is the only survivor you see, and his dog. Neville searches for other survivors every day to no avail. In flashbacks it's shown that Neville's wife and daughter were killed in an attempt to evacuate the city. Halfway through the movie, Neville's dog gets infected, and he is forced to kill her, leaving him all alone. He grows even more cynical and even suicidal. For the record, this was in fact the third adaptation of the original novel, I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson. The first adaptation was The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price, the second was The Ωmega Man starring Charleton Heston.
• Idiocracy: In the future, stupid people manage to outbreed intelligent people and so society caters to the lowest common denominator. By 2505, America is a horrifically dirty and overcrowded wasteland filled with people who are very crude, very dumb, and very hostile. In addition, starvation is rampant and dustbowls are common because crops are being irrigated by a sports energy drink, which is just salting the earth, and the economy and government are in a terrible state - the Secretary of Energy is a 13-year-old boy who drinks heavily and says he got the job by winning an unspecified contest. He's at least as competent as any other Cabinet member.
• I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore: The central premise is that Ruth starts perceiving the world this way: everyone around her seems to be a rude, inconsiderate jerk. This causes her to start fighting back.
• The three Infernal Affairs films as a whole demonstrate that Hong Kong is a horrible place for both cops (since arresting individual gangsters doesn't do a thing to solve the city's massive corruption, the job eats your life, and you'll probably get murdered) and gangsters (since you'll end up a friendless, hollow wreck of a human being tormented by guilt, and probably get murdered). Also, the title and the epigraphs that open the films suggest that all the characters are literally in a terrestrial Hell being punished for the bad karma of their past lives.
• Interstellar: Sometime in the future, Earth is stricken with a super-blight that has destroyed many of the world's crops, leading to massive worldwide famine. At the start of the film, the only sustainable crop left for agriculture is corn, and it too will soon succumb to the blight, which is also taking in nitrogen and making the atmosphere virtually unbreathable thanks to massive dust storms. Meanwhile, the need for farmers to help sustain what is left of humanity has caused civilization to regress to an agrarian, anti-intellectual society where MRI's and other machines taken for granted are no longer being made, and Cooper says in a discussion with Murphy's teacher that an MRI would have saved his wife by finding the tumour in her brain before it killed her, and school curriculum tells students that the Apollo landings were faked. The expedition that the protagonists are undertaking is literally humanity's last resort to ensure that even a fraction of it can survive on a new homeworld.
• Iron Sky: The Nazis are planning to invade Earth from their base on the Moon to "save" it from the hordes of untermensch that have infested it since the end of the war. The Moon Fuhrer and his top brass want to forgo that entirely and just nuke it all into oblivion. The only people who can save the day are the Americans, but they are greedy warmongers who only care about stopping the Nazis to protect their fuel supplies and for the President to be re-elected, and the only reason they stand a chance is because they break every weapons prohibition treaty they sign. The rest of the world are also greedy, stupid warmongers who also break weapons treaties because they want to one-up America. The resulting international dick-measuring contest reduces the free peoples of Earth to such selfish, slobbering Jerkasses that the Nazis end up coming across as relatively civilised by comparison. The combined forces of Earth win and destroy the Nazi moon base with nuclear weapons, but haven't won for a minute before they disband their alliance and nuke each other into oblivion anyway over who gets the Nazis' fuel depots. Crapsack is too kind a word.
• It! The Terror from Beyond Space: Mars is portrayed as a desolate hellscape where what little life exists is in a constant, barbaric struggle for survival and must kill to live. It's so bad that our heroes speculate that it's post-apocalyptic.
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): True to It's a Wonderful Plot fashion, Winnie wished herself into a world where she wasn't there to stop Waters, who is still killing several people in Angel Falls, while controlling things as the mayor. He’s been able to buy most of the property in the town and the rest has fallen into disrepair. The townspeople have given in to the prospect of death with a lot of kids turning to hard drugs to cope. Winnie’s brother is dead, and her family has fallen apart with her mother being an alcoholic and her father falling under Water’s mysterious mind control which he’s also used on multiple townspeople.
• It's a Wonderful Life: The tropes of Strawman Has a Point and Inferred Holocaust overlap.
  • Pottersville has more excitement and a superior economic infrastructure. Bedford Falls only has a moderate manufacturing economy and no obvious places to find excitement. Once the factory closes down Bedford Falls will suffer depression and unemployment. Pottersville has backup industries, such as the nightclubs, that can encourage outside investment.
  • Pottersville's only viable option for housing if you're not as rich as Mr. Potter are broken down shacks or really cheaply built houses that will probably collapse on you and yours in a matter of years, and it's all run by a man who has no sympathy for his fellow man, and will readily screw anyone over if it means he can make a quick buck. Even if you like the jazz clubs and everything, you'd be a fool to want to live there.
  • George makes it clear that he wants to leave Bedford Falls, go to college, and travel the world. All of his dreams are destroyed and he must commit suicide to regain hope. Potter is correct that George’s life has not resulted in personal happiness. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]
    • Except George has many friends and Potter has no one. And the point of the movie was friends have more value than any amount of money.
• In Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978), England has become a hellhole where girl gangs roam free and the everything from the BBC to the Church of England is owned by a blind lunatic.
• Judge Dredd: Mega City One, at least the lower levels of it (we do see some luxurious homes at the top of the huge skyscrapers), is quite a dump. Overpopulated, dirty and constant riots. But the post-apocalyptic Cursed Earth outside of the city is even worse.
• Jug Face is set in a small town dominated by a Human Sacrifice cult worshipping an Eldritch Abomination, where the ghosts of any sacrifices the being rejects wander the woods as tormented beings for all eternity. The residents are so brainwashed into this cult that they'll kill their children for it.
• Juice: The film's setting being in Harlem, NY.
• Jungleground: Jungleground is a section of the city so full of criminals that the police refuse to go there for fear of their lives. It's in such a constant and extreme Mob War that there is no neutral ground.
• The Last Days of American Crime: America is shown to be plagued by violence, to the point the police have given up in favor of legitimate Mind Control to end crime.
• The Last Man on Earth: There is exactly one human left, with everybody else being a ravenous, bloodsucking monster. Except there are a few stragglers, who live in fear of the supposed last man who has been mistakenly killing them.
• La Terra Trema is set in Sicily, portrayed as a land of desperate grinding poverty where the working folk are oppressed by greedy businessmen.
• In Lawn Dogs, the whole town of Camelot Gardens is full of upper-middle-class cretins who are distrustful of outsiders and obsessed with moving up the social ladder. Trent, one of the movie's two heroes, is suspected of crimes he didn't commit, and even physically attacked, twice, for things he didn't do. Devon, a kid, has parents who try to use her only to promote their own image within the town and help their own social status. One can hardly blame Trent and Devon for becoming Rebellious Spirits. They are practically the only sympathetic people in the whole film!
• The Ledge: Joe argues that the world is a Crapsack world. However, his argument is quite egocentric. It's all about him having made bad choices in his life and lived a shitty life until he found Christ.
• The Little Shop of Horrors: Skid Row. The musical version has a number entitled "Downtown" that explains the story of Skid Row, such as its condition and Seymour's backstory.
• The world in the Living Dead Series is a gradual display of this. Of course, this is the series that defined the Zombie Apocalypse, so it's expected. They take place in a world where even in the face of the human race crumbling into an ever-growing horde of cannibalistic zombies, the survival of the many comes second to the power and ego of the few. All of society's worst values are clung to while good will and cooperativeness rot along with the undead army, and the lawlessness of the apocalypse is something to be exploited for greed and sadism instead of remedied.
  • In Night of the Living Dead (1968), the emergency is just starting so it's not too bad, and there's a chance of recovery. Unfortunately, the end of the movie gives the audience a feeling of "We're fucked."
  • In Dawn of the Dead (1978), it's worse and the emergency services meant to solve the crisis are quickly overwhelmed by the growing zombie population. This one ends with a feeling that societal collapse is inevitable.
  • In Day of the Dead (1985), the collapse has happened and a group of military scientists are basically spinning their wheels because the people they were supposed to report are likely dead and all their solutions are no longer workable.
  • In Land of the Dead, life really sucks in the Fiddler's Green human refuge because the only good people are being squashed by folks that make it look like humanity deserved to get crushed.
• Los Olvidados: Luis Buñuel's depressing look at Mexico in The '50s. Kids Are Cruel: The Movie.
• The Lost Boys: Santa Carla, a California town so packed with undead that it's the murder capital of the world.
• Mad Max: This is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia where vicious biker gangs run wild, engaging in robbery, rape and murder whenever they can. The world of the sequels, The Road Warrior, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and Mad Max: Fury Road, isn't much better.
• The Magdalene Sisters: In 1960s Ireland, women who are deemed "corrupt" by the Church are sent to Magdalene Laundries, where they are put to work and abused by the cruel nuns while their families disown them and society looks down on them as sinners. They are punished cruelly for many things. Bear in mind that the women the Church called corrupt in this film were a) raped by a cousin that appears to get off scot-free, b) had a baby out of wedlock (and was forced to put the baby up for adoption) and c) simply was too flirty with the local boys (said girl was still a virgin too). What makes this worse? That was how Ireland actually was back then. The last of the laundries closed in 1998. One Magdalene inmate spoke up saying that the reality was much worse than the film depicted.
• Manborg: The Legions of Hell have taken over the Earth, and enslaved humanity. Most of the human race live in abject poverty, and human experimentation and death games are a common occurrence. Also, there's no Heaven.
• The Matrix: During a Robot War, humanity arranged for a self-replicating cloud of nanomachines to be released into the atmosphere in order to deprive the Machines of solar energy. However, the humans were using that too so when the Machines found a new power source, the humans were quickly defeated. With their defeat and the total destruction of any and all infrastructure, the technology to dissipate the Darkstorm shroud was lost forever. That was over six hundred years ago which means a clean class 5 as the constant nighttime killed off the biosphere. Aside from the humans enslaved by the Machines and the humans in Zion who live off of protein supplements and geothermal energy, the Earth is dead. There are no known survivors of the war aside from these two groups (actually one because the Machines created Zion and are running a masquerade aimed at periodically debugging the Matrix by expelling rebel elements who will eventually harbor the next One who in turn will be bluffed into restarting the Matrix then taking a bunch of people out to repopulate a destroyed Zion and telling them they're the first ones out of the Matrix).
• Meatball Machine: Tokyo is an industrial hellhole full of perverts. There's also a race of monstrous parasites that attack random people and trap them in an And I Must Scream situation as Living Weapons in their tournament of death, with the only respite being their own destruction in the battle.
• Menace II Society's version of Watts, Los Angeles is a hellish world of drugs and gang violence shaped by a history of institutional racism, with the boys who are born there growing up to be gangsters who perpetuate the vicious cycle—often with no way to escape their fate. It functions as a response and companion to the portrayal of Crenshaw, Los Angeles in Boyz n the Hood, where drugs and gang violence are also commonplace but the young protagonist has a fair chance of making it out, unlike in Menace.
• Network: The only character who doesn't end up utterly corrupted is the lunatic, and he pays for it with his life.
• Onibaba: The war-ravaged Fourteenth Century Japan in which the peasants must try to survive, where armies destroy or eat all their crops, rape their daughters, conscript their sons, and leave them almost nothing on which to live.
• Pacific Rim: In addition to the giant monster attacks that are happening with alarming regularity, there are clues that society has slowly broken down. Simple things like bread are seen as a luxury, people are working dangerous jobs for food rations, and there is an implied social divide between the wealthy and the rest of society with the rich getting special treatment in wake of the monster attacks.
• Payback: There are literally zero characters who aren't involved in some sort of unsavory business, and the director tried to make the atmosphere as dreary and depressing as possible. The closest this film has to heroes are Porter, a guy who in any other film would be an Anti-Villain at best, and his ex-hooker love interest. The film's tagline was 'Get ready to root for the bad guy' which pretty much sums it up.
• Perrier's Bounty plays this for laughs: every 'friend' the heroes turn to tries to turn them in to the pursuing gangsters. At one point merely sheltering from the rain in a barn causes the owner to call the cops after first accusing them of rape.
• The whole Pirates of the Caribbean film series presents a very dangerous and inhospitable take on the Age of Sail, even worse that real history, where human life has little to no value in all human societies (unless a certain social standing is involved) and value only as prey for the various supernatural entities of nautical folklore that are very real and roam the seas in search of wayward travellers.
  • While Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl doesn't bring the franchise to its full potential in dark story-telling it still features both marauding pirates who take advantage of the lawlessness of the New World seas to terrorise seafarers who dare to venture unprotected in the West Indies and arcane curses enforced by Aztec Gods that can bring any being into a state of undeath and suffering, and combines them making them unstoppable to all mortals.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest plays more a like a Horror Comedy for the better part of its duration. The writers themselves have stated that they wished to show that a character like Jack could not find safety anywhere, be it sea or land, always running for his life. The things that he runs away from, for most of his screentime, include the draconic Ottoman Empire who tortures and kills all law-breakers, the sadistic psychopomp Davy Jones who wants his soul and sics the horrific Kraken after him and a tribe of cannibals who make a meal out of ay travellers unlucky enough to encounter them. The other characters especially Will and Elisabeth don't fare any better as they get dragged to dealing with all that because of the East Indian Trading Company, whose leader Lord Beckett has taken over as the true power of the British Empire and imposes death penalties at will on civilians and assassinates them to further his plans.
  • In fact, Davy Jones himself believes in the cruelty of life and proceeds to ensure that his philosophy will be proven true in his dealings with Jack (which he got into in the first place by getting branded as a pirate by Beckett for releasing slaves) by asking for one-hundred souls in return for his freedom. Thus rescuing souls will be a man's doom and damning souls will be a salvation. By the end of the film, even an idealist like Elizabeth has been forced to compromise her morals and take a ruthless, undesirable action as a last shot at survival and it is only the start, since as of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End everyone has made questionable choices either because of plain selfishness or because the stakes have become so high that survival isn't a luxury that can be afforded without a toll.
• Planet of the Apes: "IT'S A MADHOUSE, A MADHOUSE!"
• In the world of Priest (2011), humans and vampires have been at war for as long as they can both remember. Despite humanity's superior technology, the vampires continued to hold the advantage except for the fact that sunlight kills them. In the end, the humans won the war but the planet is still devastated and most of humanity is still confined to one single city where the pollution is so thick that the city has a perpetual night. The humans either lived in the city which is ruled by a Corrupt Church whose rule is reminiscent of Oceania or in the middle of the desert where they're at the mercy of being attacked by vampires. The Church won't do anything and instead covers it up because... actually, no one really knows why the church indirectly helps its worst enemy.
• Not only is The Red Spectacles the usual Mamoru Oshii tripfest, but Japan has banned stand-and-eat soba, and it only gets worse from there.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera has an epidemic of organ failures, a country ruled by a corporation that had murder sanctioned by law, and legions of people addicted to painkillers and/or surgery. It's small wonder Nathan locked his daughter in her bedroom.
• The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a cataclysm has killed off almost ALL plant and animal life, all civilization is long gone, everything is ashen and filthy and cold, and the few survivors left are cannibals, thieves, starving scavengers, or some combination thereof. The hero's only goal is the keep himself and his son alive long enough to reach the coast, and even he doesn't know if it'll be any warmer or easier to find food there. It isn't.
• Road to Perdition, being a Film Noir setting, has this kind of world.
• Robot Monster: There are only two life-bearing planets in the universe. One is Earth, the other is a mechanical dystopia. The dystopic planet attacked Earth, and has won. There are only eight people left at the start of the film, relentlessly pursued by a robotic fiend.
• In R.O.T.O.R., everyone takes it for granted that the future (30 to 40 years out) will be a hellish dystopia where killer robots will be the last hope of humanity.
• Samson and Delilah (1949) depicts the Land of Dan as this, as the Philistines oppress the Jewish people with a military dictatorship that abolishes most of their culture and makes them serve their conquerors hand and foot.
• Se7en's depiction of the world is pretty half empty, but the last lines of the film say it best:
  Somerset: Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part.
• The Sergio Leone western films seem to show that they are set in a Crapsack World. In For a Few Dollars More, the title card sets the stage by declaring, "Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared."
• The Seventh Seal is pretty Crapsack. It involves the Plague, Witch Burnings, a horrific scene of self-flagellation, and lots of death. The protagonist's squire saves a young woman from a rapist (who is also a priest) and then says he would rape her himself, but he doesn't feel like it. There is mention of strange events, such as when "two horses ate each other," which leads to almost every character fearing it is the End Times. The protagonist also playing Chess with Death throughout, and when he tells a Priest in confessional that he is on the verge of winning (by playing "a combination of Bishop and Knight") the priest is revealed to be Death in disguise. Knowing his strategy, Death is able to win, and the film ends with all but three 'good' characters dying.
• Silent Night (2012): It turns out that the small town is one, even lampshaded by Sheriff Cooper when he expresses since when the town has gotten so sleazy.
• Sorority Row is a Slasher Movie and therefore not a pleasant scenario anyway, but even aside from this nearly every 'normal' character is a supremely horrible Jerkass from the therapist who buys sex from his clients in exchange for drugs to the corrupt senator who threatens his potential daughter-in-law to the sadistic backstabbing sorority sisters themselves. When one of the more sympathetic characters in the film is a date rapist you know you are in Crapsack World.
• South Bronx Heroes: The South Bronx is portrayed as a broken city where crime runs rampant, half the buildings are decaying and populated by the homeless, the foster care system is full of paedophiles, and the Police Are Useless.
• Soylent Green: Though it apparently varies person to person.
• Star Trek:
  • First Contact: By all accounts, Earth of 2063 is a pretty miserable Scavenger World in which everyone is suffering from radiation poisoning to one degree or another, and things like murder are commonplace. Not surprising, considering it's the aftermath of World War III.
  • Star Trek Into Darkness: The uninhabited Ketha province of Qo'noS in which the Enterprise crew track down Harrison appears hellish for humans, and even Klingons don't regularly stop by.
• Star Wars:
  • Tatooine, on top of being one big desert, is populated by monsters, mob bosses, wanted criminals, violent tribesmen, and con artists. Anyone with any money or power can freely exploit their employees, slavery isn't even seen as a problem, Jawas live by stealing and cheating, and anyone who ventures outside city limits may get kidnapped and/or murdered by Tuskens. Neither the Republic, the Jedi, or the Empire ever bothered to bring any kind of order, so the closest thing to governments are crime syndicates running protection rackets. It seems that the only people who ever lifted a finger to try to improve conditions on Tatooine are Cobb Vanth and Boba Fett, earning them both the Undying Loyalty of the people.
  • Dathomir, a planet where every form of life is deadly. The men live enslaved and are forced to constantly murder each other just to prove they are worthy of being someone's personal property. The women spend their entire lives fighting just to prove they are worthy of survival.
  • Nar Shaddaa, too, seen how it's basically the criminal capital of the whole galaxy (pre-release material for Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast actually singles out one Rodian as "the only legitimate businessman" on the entire planet, and even his business is a front for criminal activity). The scenery is somewhat like a ruined, decaying Coruscant, crime is the order of the day and the value of life approaches zero. It's also the moon of Nal Hutta, which is home to the Hutts, some of the most inherently evil creatures in the SW universe. The Hutts had an infamous stronghold in Tatooine above.
  • Solo reveals that Corellia is essentially a run-down factory planet filled with street gangs and the main source of employment is building ships for the Empire. Little wonder that Han Solo wanted to get as far away from there as possible.
• Strike Commando: Vietnam is depicted as a third world nation caught in a civil war by the bickering of the world's superpowers.
• Super Fly: Harlem's socioeconomic state is so bad that drug dealing is considered the only realistic way to make money. Also, the cops are controlling the drug trade.
• Tank Girl: A comet impact destroys civilization and somehow destroys most of the Earth's water. Most of the survivors are either evil employees of Water & Power or hopelessly decadent. However, there are many wacky elements as well.
• Taxi Driver shows New York City through the eyes of a young, disturbed man absolutely sickened by the prostitutes, junkies and pimps. Therefore, it comes out looking like a Hell.
• Terminal City Ricochet is set in a future world where only six cities on all of Earth remain habitable, a corporate despot is in charge, birds are nearly extinct, and "meteor showers" made of flaming space junk are a regular occurrence. Needless to say, Terminal City is not a fun place to be.
• The Terminator: The post-apocalyptic Bad Future that Kyle Reese came from. The rogue military AI Skynet started the Robot War by killing three billion humans in a single day, and the survivors were either killed by Skynet's Mecha-Mooks or were rounded up in concentration camps. During the day, huge automated HK-Tanks and HK-Aerials stalk the land and roam the skies, patrolling around to kill La Résistance, but one has to be careful where they are going, as the robots use infrared to detect any nighttime movement. Human skulls and destroyed buildings are the dominant landscape. Humans live in squalid hovels hiding from the machines, which periodically get infiltrated by disguised Terminators. A Deleted Scene shows Kyle suffering a Heroic Breakdown and lamenting how beautiful the world used to be compared to the hellish future he came from, especially when he and Sarah Connor hide in a wooded area.
• The Thinning is set in a post-apocalyptic future where, in order to conserve dwindling nature resources, the United Nations has mandated that every member country must reduce their population sizes by 5% every year. America has chosen to do this by issuing an annual aptitude test for grades 1-12. Those who do poorly on the test are eliminated. Or rather, they're shipped off to a factory to be used as forced labor, likely for the rest of their lives.
• The Third Man: What's really depressing is that it was shot on location in a bombed-out, post WWII-era Vienna. That's our Crapsack World.
• Tigers Are Not Afraid: Mexico is depicted as a crime-ridden hellhole where gun violence happens near schools on the regular, and people get murdered constantly. Gangs of orphans roam the streets, and the cartels control the government.
• Trancers: The future is a post-apocalyptic hellscape where climate change has led to such cities as Los Angeles being completely underwater, Society is slowly rebuilding with the help of a council of three, but a megalomaniac with the ability to brainwash people into his zombie slaves is trying to destroy that. And he's figured out time travel...
• Traxx: Hadleyville, Texas is an over-the-top parody of the urban hellhole that was so common in 1980s action movies. The streets are literally always full of crime, the cops brazenly refuse to do anything, the ones that do condone vigilante action and the apartments just randomly explode.
• Turbo Kid: After the nuclear Robot War, the world is made barren to the point where the water is acidic. The last remnants of human- and robotkind spend their days scavenging for resources, and the only semblance of civilization is a fascistic Evil Overlord.
• As part of de-romanticizing the Wild West, Unforgiven depicts the setting as one where misogyny, bigotry (against "injuns", "Chinamen" and Englishmen) and cruelty are rampant, where kindness, honour and the rule of law are all meaningless concepts, and the only reliable protection you can garner is having a reputation so horrible that nobody in their right mind would want to cross you.
• The Usual Suspects is set in the dark underworld of New York and Los Angeles. The police are either horribly corrupt or completely ignorant about civil rights. The main characters are a bunch of violent hijackers and corrupt business men and "it" never stops. The most sympathetic character in the movie is the crippled con-man Verbal, who is also the Big Bad, Keyser Soze.
• V for Vendetta depicts a future where a nuclear war wiped out the Middle East, America has collapsed into pestilence, poverty and civil war, and Britain is controlled by a fascist regime. Britain's only hope is an insane superhuman terrorist who wants to destroy the government and replace it with... Erm, nothing.
• If all the tapes from the VHS series take place within the same world, everybody is screwed. It's a twisted Fantasy Kitchen Sink home to ghosts, monsters/demons that look like digital glitches, succubi, an insane cult that either brought a rampaging demon into the world or failed to exorcise it; what seems to be a Zombie Apocalypse in the making, an evil corporation (or at least a neglectful one), and psycho lesbians — and it turns out that the evil is not limited to Earth, either.
  • SiREN (2016) takes this further — there's a Sinister Minister running a hedonistic business using demons that killed those who summoned them but failed to control them. There are enough demons running loose due to screwed-up summoning that someone can make a living off it.
  • V/H/S: Viral goes on to include an Eldritch Abomination disguised as an article of clothing, a zombie cult and the man-eating demon who leads them, a parallel world that's even more of a crapsack than this one, and the videos of all these things might just have finally succeeded in bringing about The End of the World as We Know It.
  • V/H/S/94 continues the trend, where we learn this has been going on for quite some time, with multiple cults, vampires, zombies, and a crazed doctor turning people into cyborgs. There's also a human-rat creature living in the sewers Ohio, whom the director has implied is not evil, but just horrified by our world.
• Van Helsing: Europe is full of monsters that kill with impunity and without detection. There is a holy order to protect them, but due to the fact that most monsters turn human upon death, almost all of them are wanted criminals.
• The Wages of Fear: All heroes are poor, unemployed and stuck in a hellhole town with no chance of escaping.
• The unnamed African country War Witch is set in is besieged by civil war, with the rebels employing Child Soldiers and killing civilians. Said civilians live in shacks and live off of subsistence farming, with money being practically nonexistent.
• Warriors of the Wasteland: 2019 Earth has been destroyed by the nuclear war. All scavenge for food in small settlements, stuck in a state of malnourishment to not starve to death. The most powerful faction is a bunch of omnicidal maniacs.
• The world depicted in Watchmen is very depraved, and viewers get to see the downfall of modern society. Excerpt from Rorschach's Journal: "The streets are extended gutters, and the gutters are full of blood. And when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up around their waists... Now the whole world stands on the brink... staring down into bloody hell." Even though he could be exaggerating a bit what we do get to see supports his claims, apparently the fear of an impending nuclear holocaust has turned New York at the very least (and most likely the rest of the country) into a crime-infested chaotic hell-hole where there is very little authority and the system is in fact so corrupt that authorities are more concerned over some retired superheroes breaking the law and coming out of retirement to save children from a burning building than over violent murders that daily take place.
• Waterworld: Four hundred years after the Earth is completely flooded, the last remnants of humanity are small ramshackle communities on the verge of genetic extinction, traders, slavers, pirates, and marauders. Things like dirt and paper are seen as valuable commodities. There's also a deep-seated hatred against mutants, people who have developed gills. Any of them who are found are sentenced to death... for some reason.
• Welcome to the Dollhouse: The films of Todd Solondz, particularly this film, seem to revel in this.
• Witchfinder General: England is portrayed as a country gripped in civil war, where the general chaos has led to the people becoming superstitious. Many con men have cropped up in this time of trouble, torturing and killing with impunity under the guise of finding witches.
• Winter's Bone: Rural Missouri is filled with meth labs, poverty, violence, secrets, inbreeding and the subordination of women. Even the terrain is cold, rugged and inhospitable. Bonus points for being shot entirely on location, with many of the smaller roles filled with people who actually lived there (much like The Third Man).
• The World of Kanako is about ex-cop Akikazu who looks for his disappeared daughter but soon learns about a Dark Secret. The film leaves no survivors. Everyone in this world is either violent, brutal, corrupt, egoistic, manipulative or has a dark past and the few people who are good are ruthlessly bullied, manipulated, corrupted or forced into isolation. Whoever tries to find a way out of this is completely screwed.
• Wristcutters: A Love Story makes the afterlife (at least for those who commit suicide) into this. For instance, it is physically impossible to smile.
• Wyrmwood: Something in the air is making everybody with any blood type but A- turn into flesh-crazed zombies. It's also rendered all flammable liquids inert, so gasoline cars are useless in escaping. The only semblance of civilization left is a military operation bent on experimenting on the survivors.
• The future in X-Men: Days of Future Past. A war-torn hellhole where major cities have been reduced to ruins, and anybody with mutant DNA is either killed or imprisoned in concentration camps.
• Zombie Strippers!; The United States has become a dystopia where George W. Bush is entering an unconstitutional fourth term and has just dissolved Congress to become a dictator. In this society, public nudity is outlawed, the US is in seven wars, including one against Alaska, and corporations can do human experimentation at will.
• Zombie Wars: After a radiation storm hits Earth, most of humanity has been consumed by the Zombie Apocalypse. The only survivors are nomadic camps of warriors and corrupt dictatorships that train zombies to manage slave camps of the former.

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