<div>Mad Max meets Billy Graham. That’s the elevator pitch for <em>Growing Up Apocalypse, </em>my multimedia film/stage/written word project that I began as a Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow at CU - Boulder in the 2023 - 2024 academic year.
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<div><strong>The film combines archival film footage from twentieth century American subcultures obsessed with a soon-coming apocalypse and my own personal tales of an ‘old, weird America’ (the phrase is Greil Marcus’s): growing up in a world of Blood Moons, Antichrists, Marks of the Beast, One World Governments, and the World’s Final Days.</strong>
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<div>How strange it all seems now that my childhood’s old weird America is now the new, surreal America, where the apocalyptic impulse dominates much of public discourse and culture in religion, politics, and film (The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, and so on.)
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<div>Since the peak of the Covid pandemic, I have spent countless hours traveling, researching, and investigating the spaces and haunts where apocalyptic dreams and nightmares gestate and form into social movements.
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<div>After this and sorting through archival film footage from tent revival meetings to mainstream secular apocalyptic films, <em>Growing Up Apocalypse</em> is ready to move to the next level, and I need your help in getting there: for basic day-to-day expenses, to finalize archival research and complete the first cut of the film.
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<div>The apocalyptic impulse is not unique to America. As early as the 11th century, the First Crusade was born out of the assumption that the crusaders could bring about Armageddon. An eccentric character of the time, Peter the Hermit, led at least 40,000 common people on a quixotic and deadly march to overtake Jerusalem before the papal-sanctioned crusade began. Worlds end every day.
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<div>At this point in history, not just a sense, but a strong expectation of an ending (a fairly recent Pew Research Foundation poll found that forty percent of Americans expect an apocalyptic ending by the year 2050) is particularly dangerous, leading as it does to apathy, to fatalism, and escapist expectations.
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<div>If you believe that you're either going to escape an apocalypse through some supernatural means or that the Earth is going down and you with it, your concerns for the world beyond your doorstep tend to be very limited. Fatalistic beliefs and escapist beliefs are equally dangerous.
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<div>We don’t need a Mad Max scenario for society to collapse. In a wired world, disinformation and deep lies are all that is required. In ‘Growing Up Apocalypse,’ through personal stories and revealing this dark strain in American culture, I hope to combat both.
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<div>Thank you for your support.
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Thomas Yulsman

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