Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming.

Acknowledgments
Prologue: Climate Trauma and Hurricane Sandy
Introduction: Pretrauma Imaginaries: Theoretical Frames
1. Trauma Studies Moving Forward: Genre and Pretrauma Cinema
2. Pretrauma Climate Scenarios: Take Shelter, The Happening, and The Road
3. Pretrauma Political Thrillers: Children of Men (with reference to Soylent Green and The Handmaid’s Tale)
4. Memory and Future Selves in Pretrauma Fantasies: The Road and The Book of Eli
5. Microcosm: Politics and the Body in Distress in Blindness and The Book of Eli
6. “Getting Real”: Traumatic Climate Documentaries: Into Eternity and Manufactured Landscapes
Afterword: Humans and Eco- (or is it Sui-?) Cide
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

E. ANN KAPLAN is a distinguished professor of English and Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University, where she also founded and directed the Humanities Institute. The past president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, she is also the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Trauma and Cinema and Trauma Culture (Rutgers University Press).