Dead City: The Semiotics of Post-Apocalyptic Urbanism in Contemporary Cinema

The city is viewed as the quintessence of human civilization – a space where architecture, infrastructure, and social practices form a unified semiotic mechanism for the production of meaning. This study focuses on the transformation of this mechanism following the disappearance of its primary actor, the human. Drawing on key genre works – 28 Days Later (2002), I Am Legend (2007), The Road (2009), A Quiet Place (2018), Mortal Engines (2018), and the television series The Last of Us (2023) – the article analyzes the visual and acoustic semiotics of the “dead city.” Particular attention is paid to iconic imagery: the deserted Westminster Bridge (28 Days Later), where the absence of urban noise generates the effect of “silence as text;” a vegetation-overgrown New York City (I Am Legend), where nature consumes the architectural symbols of capitalism; and the post-industrial ruins in The Road. Through the theoretical lenses of Marc Augé, Jean. Baudrillard, Yurii. Lotman, Michel Foucault, and Andrey Tarkovsky, the transformation of urban space from a locus of vital activity into a zone of semiotic entropy is examined. The research methodology combines visual film semiotics, the cultural anthropology of urbanism, and phenomenological spatial analysis. A frame-by-frame analysis of key scenes reveals the specifics of post-apocalyptic representation: the capturing of the city as an archaeological monument to itself (28 Days Later); the transformation of the soundtrack into an instrument of terror (A Quiet Place); and the phenomenon of natural recolonization that creates a visual palimpsest where nature and culture enter into dialogue (The Last of Us). The study also conceptualizes the phenomenon of “automated systems without humans” – an infrastructure that continues to function in the absence of its creators. Three key dimensions of post-apocalyptic urbanism are identified: visual ruination (architectural decay as a metaphor for civilizational collapse), acoustic inversion (the replacement of urban noise with anxious silence), and natural recolonization (the return of the biosphere to anthropogenic space). The dead city is shown to function not merely as a backdrop for catastrophe, but as a complex semiotic text that encapsulates not only the end of civilization but also a critique of contemporary urbanism, anthropocentrism, and technological progress.