Apocalyptic Story Ideas

Explore the ends of the earth with these apocalyptic story ideas! Zombies, alien invasion, biological warfare, and more.

Agricultural or Environmental Disasters – Reaping What You Sew

• We were trying to save the world, but our creation may destroy it. We genetically engineered a new variety of tree, heartier and faster growing than bamboo. We planted tens of thousands, and they reproduced and grew more. And then it happened. They started producing more oxygen. Lots more. The air became toxic. The trees were killing us.
• Scientists develop a satellite equipped with a freeze ray and place it in geosynchronous orbit above Death Valley. The satellite successfully lowers the average temperature of Death Valley to seventy-five degrees. However, it doesn’t stop there. It begins lowering the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere, sending a freezing wind across the planet. The scientists send up a spacecraft to retrieve the satellite, but the satellite freezes it, killing everyone on board.
• As the Earth becomes more polluted, the wealthy escape to domed cities. Those less privileged are left to find their own way to survive. Outside the domes, the world descends into chaos. The daughter of a wealthy family searches for ways to sneak less privileged people into the safety of the dome.
• A group of environmental activists develops seeds that can grow into hundred-foot trees overnight. The trees can take root anywhere, even penetrating through solid concrete. The activists sneak the seeds inside of banks and factories. A police detective vows to hunt down the activists before they turn the entire city into woodlands.
• Genetic experiments on crops designed to end world hunger instead ended the world. Genetically enhanced wheat grows everywhere, growing hundreds of feet high, destroying roads, buildings, power plants, and reservoirs.
• After years of being genetically altered by scientists, corn, beans, apples, and other crops evolve sentience – humans wonder “what are we supposed to eat now?”
• The world is in dire straits after the latest batch of genetically engineered potatoes is discovered to be highly explosive.
• A botanist’s experiments with Venus flytraps leads to disaster when the plants begin spreading like weeds, and growing large enough to eat a human being.
• After dozens of volcanoes erupt in a single day, the sky is blotted out by volcanic ash. With no sunlight, the earth begins to freeze.
• Scientists declare that they have solved the problem of hunger when they invent a highly nutritious, weed-like plant that can grow anywhere with no assistance from humans. The plant mutates, and grows faster and faster, covering the surface of the earth. Soon it reaches heights of fifty feet in a single night. Everyone has ample food, but getting around becomes impossible. Technology begins to deteriorate.
• A land developer buys millions of acres of useless land: Antarctica. To make the land valuable, he constructs a gigantic, parabolic mirror to focus the sun’s rays to melt the ice. As Antarctica is freed from its frozen wastes, the rest of the world experiences floods of epic proportions. The rising seas threaten to turn Florida into the next Atlantis.

Population Disasters – Where Did Everybody Go?

• A gifted writer creates a best-selling novel called The Saddest Story. Anyone unlucky enough to read it commits suicide.
• Earth’s communications satellites begin picking up an alien television station. The new programming is so spellbinding that people never leave their living rooms. Starvation becomes epidemic.
• After the invention of robots called Perfect Mates, people begin to prefer the beautiful machines to flawed humans, and stop reproducing.
• Billions of people have been abducted by aliens and forced to compete on a bizarre alien game show (or sports event) where the losers are disintegrated.  After seven billion losers, the last twenty humans are abducted. Surviving the game show now means the survival of the human race.
• A frustrated man working at a chemical weapons laboratory falls in love with a famous actress. Realizing that she would never consider him a worthy companion, he decides to take out his competition: every other male on earth.
• The world’s governments switch to cashless economies, conducting business completely with digital “cash” transfers. All physical money, including bartering, is banned. Unfortunately, just a few years down the line, a computer glitch crashes the system, and ten billion people suddenly find themselves penniless. The resulting panic leads to widespread rioting, looting, arson, murder, and war.

Disease – When More Than Your Laugh is Infectious

• A mutation in bacteria leads to a new sexually transmitted disease. As the disease progresses, the victim becomes more attractive, charming and amorous, until they finally die a horrendously painful death.
• Astronauts returning to earth bring back a strange alien disease. The only symptom is ever-increasing euphoria, eventually leaving the victim so happy and content that they no longer feel any need to go to work, bathe, eat…
• Scientists engineer a virus that dramatically increases human intelligence. Unfortunately, there is a side effect: obsessive paranoia. As people lose trust in each other, society begins to crumble.
• A man named Gary comes down with a bad cold. In his job at a nuclear power plant, he is exposed to a strong dose of radiation which mutates the virus. Instead of injecting its own DNA into human cells, the cold virus injects copies of Gary’s DNA. Anyone who catches Gary’s cold is slowly transformed into his clone. The planet soon has an epidemic of Garyitis.

Zombies – Zombie Candlelight Dinners Are Very Necromantic

• Working in a sewer comes with certain dangers: infection, exposure to poisonous gas, and worse. A new sewer worker discovers that the biggest danger is the undead. Over a dozen sewer workers have died on the job, but their bodies were never found. Reanimated by toxic chemicals, they are still down there, still roaming the sewers, looking to feed on the living.
• A man returns to his home town to visit his parents. After the visit, he heads downtown to explore. He discovers that the jazz club he spent his evenings at back in college is still open. Amazingly, the same trio is still playing there, several decades later. He goes inside and is immediately struck by the smell of rotting meat. The jazz trio sounds as amazing as ever, but the musicians are clearly quite dead.
• Years after the giant died, his skeleton is still roaming the countryside. Some say it’s hungry, looking for food it can no longer eat. Some say it wants meat to rebuild its body, flesh to cover its bones once more. But they’re wrong. That giant skeleton wouldn’t hurt a living thing. I should know. He’s my best friend.
• The policemen barricaded the gas station’s doors and had the customers hide behind the counter. The place was surrounded. Dozens of rotting, undead Vikings were marching through town, killing everyone they saw. Somewhere in town was the thief who had stolen the sword of Ivar Lothbrok, the ancient Viking king. The creatures must have come to get it back. But how many people would die before they found it?
• A doctor’s wife is decapitated in a motorcycle crash. While he is unable to save her severed head, the doctor is able to bring the headless body back to life. Amazingly, the body is able to move and even walk. Late one night, the body disappears. A few hours later, it reappears on the front porch, covered in blood. The next day, the news says the other driver in the motorcycle crash was brutally beaten to death.
• During a zombie outbreak, scientists genetically engineer a huge, carnivorous plant to help rid the world of zombies. The plant grows fruit that resemble human heads to draw zombies to it, then snares them in its leaves. One of the scientists is disturbed when the plants begin growing heads that resemble her dead relatives. Things get even more disturbing when the heads begin to speak.
• A jet pack pilot is scouting the area. A hundred feet below him is a vast horde of zombies several miles wide. An alarm goes off. He is running low on fuel.
• During a zombie outbreak, the military gathers to protect the portal dome. Thousands of portals lead to planets across the galaxy. If the zombies break through the line, the outbreak could spread to other worlds.
• A team of explorers crashes on a distant planet with an Earth-like atmosphere. While some make repairs to the ship, others go out to explore the new world. They encounter a strange mushroom and accidentally inhale its spores. The spores infect them, turning them into fungal zombies.
• The mold first appeared at the funeral home. It grew over the bodies, turning them a sickening green. The mold used the bodies like vehicles, piloting them, and went on the hunt. It wanted to grow, and flesh was the fastest way to spread.
• Three years after my death and I’m still here. I had always been fascinated with ancient Egypt, so I had my mausoleum engraved with hieroglyphics. I didn’t know what they said. I just liked the art. But apparently it was some kind of mummy curse. So now, here I am, waiting in my tomb for someone to come along and, hopefully, erase the writing so I can rest. The only problem is, I can’t tell them how to end the curse. My jaw has fallen off.
• A pyramid is protected from grave robbers by the mummy’s curse. Archeologists are startled to discover that the curse is real, and that the mummy is the pharaoh’s mummified cat.
• After a zombie outbreak is stopped, one company is given the monumental task of burying the dead. They cut corners and take shortcuts, burying the bodies in cardboard boxes. The bodies rot, polluting the groundwater. The zombie virus mutates, infecting the entire town.
• An underwater research facility is experiencing a zombie outbreak. The captain seals off the hallway to the submarines to keep the zombies from getting to the surface world, and then is immediately killed. The remaining staff are trapped a quarter mile below the surface with intelligent undead.
• During the early days of a zombie outbreak, a young woman gets a video call from a group of zombies. They growl and moan and hang up. The next day, it happens again. The background of the video looks familiar. They’re nearby. The zombies are looking for her. Somehow, they know who she is and where she’s been. There are thousands of people left in the city. Why are they after her specifically?
• The survivors of a zombie outbreak detonate a nuclear weapon, hoping to cleanse the world of the undead. Instead, they create a breed of radioactive zombies. Their very presence poisons the air and the ground around them. The survivors must find a way to stop this new threat before it’s too late.
• Why do zombies devour the living? It’s not as if they need food. They’re dead. No, what they are seeking is not nourishment. They are after life itself. Zombies are more attracted to people with more life essence – the athletic, the healthy, the strong. When the zombies discovered the castle of the immortal royal family, they wanted nothing more than to find a way inside and rip them to shreds, getting a piece of that immortality for themselves.
• A team of Arctic explorers unearths a group of cavemen perfectly preserved in the ice. When they thaw out the frozen cavemen, they begin to move, but they’re not still alive. They are the remnants of a prehistoric zombie outbreak.  The explorers soon find themselves on the run from undead cavemen.
• The zombie virus has spread everywhere, even to boats travelling across the ocean. A team of divers discovers a sunken cruise ship at the bottom of a bay. According to rumors, one of the passengers was using the cruse as cover to smuggle diamonds. The captain sank the ship when there was a zombie outbreak on board, hoping to save people on the mainland. The zombies are still there, under the water. The divers decide to risk swimming with the undead to retrieve the diamonds.
• The zombies appeared first, followed soon after by the spiders. No one knew why the zombies and spiders hated each other. We didn’t think they were intelligent enough for hate, but clearly they were. The zombies and the spiders were at war, and humanity was caught in the middle.
• The government decides the quickest way to end a zombie outbreak is to sponsor a prize of a thousand dollars per head. Unfortunately, this leads to zombie hunters producing more zombies for them to kill, unleashing zombies in crowded areas to quickly create loads of new undead.
• A film director hunts down antique spell books to use as props in a horror movie. During the shoot, one of the actors reads a spell aloud. At a nearby cemetery, the dead begin rising from their graves. The director threatens his crew with a gun and demands “Whatever happens, keep filming!”
• A doggy daycare turns deadly during a zombie outbreak. The undead pooches escape and roam the street, attacking every person and dog they come across. Only the dogs come back as zombies. As the canine army grows, the local animal control department heads out, determined to save the day… somehow.
• A survivor of a zombie outbreak finds a jet pack. He flies over swarms of zombies, taking them out from the safety of the air. After several months of this, the zombies begin evolving to deal with the threat, sprouting huge, leathery wings.
• If you attack a zombie, make sure to destroy them. If you just blow off an arm or a leg, the zombie will rebuild itself. They take parts from each other. Sometimes they don’t stop at replacing a limb. They give themselves extra legs until they’re running around like an undead spider. They make their arms longer until they can grab you from ten feet away. I’ve even seen zombies with three heads. Just try shooting a zombie in the head three times before it grabs you. It can’t be done.
• The Blade of Whispers has the power to create undead. Any of its victims returns as a zombie slave, obedient to whoever wields the sword. But there’s a problem. The blade is still stuck in the last guy it killed, and he was an expert long-distance runner. Now that he’s undead, he’s faster than a horse and never tires. If you want the blade, you’ll have to find a way to catch him.
• Scientists create a chemical that gives zombies back their original personality and memories and takes away their craving for human flesh. The undead seek to reintegrate into society but struggle with fearful humans and persecution.
• A loving husband still celebrates his wife’s birthday, even though she was turned into a zombie years ago. He just has to keep her from eating her friends until the party is over.
• Aliens visit the Earth to study humanity. Unfortunately, it’s the middle of a zombie outbreak. The aliens are confused by these strange life forms that have no heartbeats or brain activity but still manage to move around. The zombies are poor test subjects and would rather eat the aliens than be examined.
• During a zombie outbreak, a group of military scientists develops a mind control collar they can attach to captured undead. They use remote controlled zombies to battle hordes of the undead. The best zombie “pilots” quickly move up the military ranks and end up in charge of their own undead army.
• Due to the vast interstellar distances, humans would die long before they reach the next inhabitable planet. Earth decides to send the undead to explore the galaxy, using an engineered zombie virus to create zombie astronauts.
• During a zombie apocalypse, a group of survivors comes across a theater of the undead. The zombie actors still go through the motions, performing their last play over and over. The survivors wonder if it’s safe to stay and watch the show or if this is some kind of trick by intelligent undead seeking to lure the living to their doom.
• A zombie virus causes the undead to seek each other out and merge, becoming multi-limbed monstrosities. Zombie hunters quickly discover that it’s harder to take down a zombie with a head shot when the zombie has six heads.
• The survivors of a zombie apocalypse are terrified to come across a group of zombies with guns. Someone is giving weapons to the undead and training them how to shoot.
• During a zombie apocalypse, geneticists engineer zombie-eating bears to clean up the infestation. The bears are very good at their job and quickly run out of zombies to eat. The bears decide to just make more dead humans.
• Corporations capture zombies and force them to work retail
• Every time they eat a human, they get smarter
• As the zombie menace grows, the government begs the scientific community for solutions. One scientist has an unusual plan: bring back the dinosaurs. One tyrannosaurus rex versus an army of the undead.
• The members of a cult are rather disappointed by the afterlife: eternity as a flesh-eating zombie
• The zombies are all former celebrities
• The government spends decades fighting the zombie menace, but it just gets worse. One day, a telepathic NSA agent discovers something horrifying: the zombies are thinking.
• Due to a food shortage, the zombies are captured and eaten by the living
• A tobacco company invents a new cigarette that doesn’t cause cancer or heart disease. It does make you one of the undead, but at least you get to smoke…
• As the number of zombies grows, the folks in Washington wonder if they should be given the right to vote.
• When the government goes to war with a tiny, Middle Eastern country, the soldiers run into a little problem: no matter how many times they shoot the enemy, they keep getting back up.
• A pet store is exposed to chemical weapons, killing the animals inside. The shop clerk is frightened to find that the animals don’t know they’re dead…
• A woman is forced to give up her baby for adoption. Twenty years later, her son sets off in search of his birth mother. Unfortunately, he’s been dead for six months…
• Radiation brings the figures at a wax museum to life, and they menace the surrounding town. Things get much worse when the wax figures discover that covering corpses in wax brings them to life, as well.
• An actor in a low-budget zombie movie discovers that his costars are actual zombies being controlled by the director.

Other

• We thought the end would come from war, or climate change, or an asteroid. We never suspected insects. Something took control of the ants. They devoured our food, chewed through the wires in our machines and electronics, swarmed us and ate us alive. An entomologist comes up with a plan to find what’s controlling the ants and turning them against us.
• An unknown force develops an electromagnetic pulse bomb that affects the entire planet. Electronics are destroyed. A private detective heads to Washington, DC, determined to find out who destroyed the world.
• A mad scientist invents a gloomsday device. Instead of dooming the world, it just makes everyone incredibly depressed. Too depressed to fight back.
• The country is hit by a biological weapon. Millions grow sick and die. A group of survivalists escapes to an underground shelter, hoping to wait out this new disease.  They are soon under attack from above and below. Above them, a group of survivors, mutated by the biological weapon, attempt to drill their way into the shelter. Below them, a new species of carnivorous worms dig their way into the shelter’s gardens, attacking anyone who attempts to harvest the crops. How will they survive?
• The military is called in to deal with an eight-year-old’s science fair project: a miniature black hole. The black hole starts out the size of a grain of rice but it quickly escapes its containment field and threatens to destroy the school, possibly even the world.
• A group of mad scientists compete every year to build the best doomsday device. None of them actually want to destroy the world, but they enjoy showing off that they could if they wanted to. One year, as the judges are examining the entries, all the devices are stolen. The scientists must find the thief and prevent him or her from causing dozens of different apocalypses.
• A team of police detectives investigate a restaurant where the head chef is suspected of arms trafficking. The Scotch eggs are actually the eggs of a dangerous, alien creature. If allowed to reproduce, they could quickly overwhelm an entire planet. The detectives arrest the chef, but he reveals that he has hidden eggs all over town. If they don’t release him, it could mean the end of the world.

Post-apocalyptic societies – The End Is The Beginning

• A team of spelunkers discovers an underground city. The city was built as an elaborate bomb shelter. Generations ago, thousands of people fled underground to escape a nuclear attack. The attack was a false alarm, but they never found out. Generations later, their descendants have forgotten that the surface world even exists. The spelunkers attempt to convince the residents to return to the surface, but they are viewed with suspicion and fear.
• After the world is destroyed by war, a musician searches for survivors. Playing music for himself has gotten dull. Somewhere out there has to be an audience.
• A group of robot actors walk to what used to be the park and put on a production of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”.  They discover they are being watched by something they thought was extinct: a human.
• Decades after humanity is destroyed by a plague, a robot college professor teaches aliens about human culture. Unfortunately, everything he knows is based on old cartoons.
• A robot rock musician searches a post-apocalyptic landscape for any surviving humans to listen to its tunes. When alien archeologists come to examine the destroyed planet, the robot finds an entirely new audience.
• In a post-apocalyptic world, there are no more prisons. Those who steal or horde resources are punished by being used as monster bait. They are chained and lifted high on a wall or a flag pole until a crowd of monsters gathers below. A former magician escapes from his chains and runs from his punishment, hiding from monsters and angry survivors.
• After a nuclear war, a small band of survivors lives together in a dilapidated shopping mall. After a few years, the survivors see something they thought no longer existed: a woman. The woman soon has thirty men fighting for her affections. She soon learns how easily manipulated lonely men can be.
• After an alien invasion destroys the Earth, a handful of survivors find that a former NASA scientist is still alive. The man from NASA operated the most powerful telescope in the world and must have seen the aliens coming, but he chose not to warn anyone. When asked, he refuses to say why he didn’t give a warning, telling them they “just wouldn’t understand.” The survivors decide to torture him until he gives up his secret.
• After all of humanity is killed in a nuclear war, only a handful of androids remain. They decide to recreate the human race via cloning. Unfortunately, they only have two usable samples of human DNA, one male, one female.
• After a near-apocalypse, all historical records are lost. After the survivors rebuild, they make what they think is humanity’s first trip to the moon. They are shocked to discover a strange flag on the moon’s surface. The astronauts take the flag back to earth, and scientists try to interpret the meaning of its symbols. “Maybe the fifty stars represent the fifty different alien races in some sort of Interplanetary Alliance?”
• After the destruction of nearly all life on Earth, the survivors decide to use all of their medical resources to make one of them immortal. This immortal survivor’s job will be to serve as a constant voice of warning, reminding humanity to never start another global war.
• After a near-apocalyptic war, humanity is beginning to rebuild and reproduce. A team of archeologists is on the hunt for lost historical records, desperate to discover what caused humanity’s near-destruction. All that remains of the records is a single, handwritten journal, the journal of the last President. The information contained in the journal could allow humanity to learn from its mistakes and, thus, not repeat them. Or, if it fell into the wrong hands…
• Aliens attack the earth with a bizarre weapon: the chronobomb. Entire cities are instantly transported into the past. A chronobomb strikes a college dormitory, transporting back to the Jurrasic. The coeds struggle to survive against dinosaurs, disease, and a murderous fraternity.
• After the earth’s population is decimated by asteroids, the survivors reorganize into an anarchist society. They learn to grown their own crops, have a new Industrial Revolution, and eventually reinvent technology. After years of peace and prosperity, an archeologist discovers a dangerous artifact from the earth’s past: a book, The Beginner’s Guide to Politics.
• After the earth’s population is decimated in a nuclear war, the survivors discuss how to begin again. The women decide that, as men were responsible for the war, they must never allow men to control anything ever again. The surviving men soon find themselves reduced to the level of family pets.
• A global disaster destroys earth’s technology, reducing America to a nomadic, subsistence-level society.  A man explores the ruins of a city, and stumbles upon what’s left of a high school archery range. He gathers up the weapons, making his tribe the most powerful people in the world. They wage war against the other tribes, nearly unstoppable. A rival tribe finds the ruins of a museum, where they find a full-scale replica of a medieval catapult, now the most powerful weapon in the world. The conflict rages on, as the tribes engage in an archeological arms race.
• An engineer who designs weapons for the government becomes terminally ill, and volunteers to have himself frozen until a cure can be found. He is revived thirty years later and healed. After a global war, the population of the world has gone from billions to a few hundred thousand. The engineer discovers that a team of archeologists is on their way to Washington, D.C. to search for lost historical records. He must stop the archeologists, lest they discover that he invented the weapons that destroyed the world.