"Unlike the blockbusters that blow the world to smithereens, but gloss over the big questions, these are films that go deep, that take their time - and they can be very powerful."

In the power stakes, it will be hard to outdo last year's The Turin Horse by Bela Tarr, a bleak, Nietzsche-inspired film about a world headed for darkness - which the Hungarian director has said would be his last.

But filming the end has never been the sole preserve of the blockbuster.

"You can offer a true vision of the apocalypse with a scrap of wasteland and a few gas masks," says Vanini, pointing at the work of Russian art-house masters like Konstantin Lopushansky or Andrei Tarkovsky.

The history of on-screen Armageddon opens in 1931 with The End of the World by France's Abel Gance, a sci-fi movie and pacifist propaganda piece about a comet hurtling towards Earth.

"You can sense the fear of the world pitching back into conflict - which is what will happen with World War II," says Vanini.

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Cut to the Cold War era, and fears of a nuclear apocalypse haunt the screen - from Stanley Kubrick's cult 1964 satire Dr Strangelove, to Fail Safe by Sidney Lumet the same year, or The World, the Flesh and the Devil in 1959, by Ranald MacDougall, about a lone survivor of nuclear holocaust.

"All these films are more than just entertainment," says Vanini. "They hold up a mirror to society's fears at a given moment."

In 1965, The War Game by Peter Watkins - a documentary-style drama commissioned by the BBC that depicts the effects of a nuclear war in Britain - was deemed so disturbing it remained unshown at home until 1985.

For today's globalized world, the pandemic is an apocalyptic theme of choice - the spectre of an unknown, killer disease racing around the planet faster than virologists can track and fight it.

Stephen Soderbergh's Contagion mined the theme to chilling effect in 2011, as did 28 Weeks Later by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo in 2007, Blindness by Fernando Meirelles in 2008 or Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys in 1995.

Environmental meltdown has inspired just as richly - from the new ice age bearing down on the US East Coast in the 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, to the haunting post-apocalyptic vision of a man and his son trekking through an American wasteland in John Hillcoat's The Road.

Adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road is also an example of a rich sub-genre - the post-apocalypse movie, about surviving Armageddon - of which the 1979 Mad Max is among the best-known.

"You wake up, the world has been destroyed, a handful have survived - mostly men, usually at least one woman. Where do you go from there?" sums up Vanini.

Agence France-Presse