Nightmare Fuel / Soylent Green

• The Reveal that "Soylent Green is people!"
• The opening sequence starts off nostalgic and happy but it quickly becomes clear about the growing human population and over-usage of the planet Earth has gotten completely out of control by the decades.
• The film opens with photographs showing how modern Americans evolved from frock-coated settlers to fishermen, farmers and early town-dwellers. The slide show then blurs into a rush of cities with heaving sidewalks, smog-cloaked traffic jams and even Tokyo-style “professional pushers” cramming commuters onto subway trains. A title card tells us the population of New York City is 40 million; an exasperated Thorn at one point remarks, “There are 20 million guys out of work in Manhattan alone — just waiting for my job!”
• The scoops are pretty unpleasant. Imagine Trash Trucks converted with Bulldozers designed to scoop up the rioting populace. On the outside, it seems like an important safety feature. However, after the twist ending was revealed, it seemed that Thorn's prediction of the people being used as cattle came true.
• The setting itself. The oceans are dead. The literal source of life on Earth is gone! This isn't a dystopia story anymore; this is a mass extinction event!
• People are eating Soylent Green, right? Then they die, and their bodies are processed into Soylent Green, eaten by people who die and are processed.
• Simonson's assassination. Not just the act, but Simonson's own casual acceptance of his impending murder. He's so broken by the horrors of the world that he would rather die than go on.
• Everyone who eats Soylent Green are unknowingly committing cannibalism to survive.
• The true horror isn't that Soylent Green is people, but that people are the only food left.
  • It's worse than that. There's food left, but not much. Which naturally means the rich hoard all of it, keeping the starving masses trapped in the cities, forcing them to eat eachother even if they don't know it. Their greed have literally reduced the world to cannibalism, and they're STILL clinging to their power.

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