New York, as they say, is a hell of a town.

Sometimes literally.

I’ve lived in or near New York all my life, and for the past seven months I lived right in the heart of Manhattan, in a neighborhood affectionately known as Hell’s Kitchen. But is there devilry (and devilish cooking) truly afoot?

According to Hollywood and certain comics, you bet.

Unlike DC’s superheroes which exist in New York substitutes like Gotham City and Metropolis, the brain children of Marvel patriarch Stan Lee were living it up in the very real New York City. Spider-man swung from the Empire State Building. The Fantastic Four’s headquarters are found in midtown Manhattan. And Daredevil, the man without fear, has chosen my old neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen, as the area he’s going to defend.

When aliens attack the Earth, they’ll often start with New York, but fortunately the Avengers will always be there to make a stand. (The same was true of the X-men until those lousy mutants recently defected to San Francisco. Boo.)

And there’s more than just the Marvel clan. Hellboy, after all, resides in New York and fights off the demon spawn that may attack it. And then there’s the Watchmen, those angsty heroes desperately in need of therapy, who also patrol New York City, although really they’re just defending us from themselves.

But before you think it’s superheroes who have the market on the supernatural goings-on in the city that never sleeps, take a look at the staggering amount of fantasy or fantasy-esque movies that have taken place here.

The occult has a long history with the Big Apple. One of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen, Rosemary’s Baby (based on the novel of the same name), has its demonic activity going down in the Dakota, the building in Central Park West where John Lennon was tragically killed.

And for the mother of all ghost stories, who can forget the immortal film Ghostbusters, that standard-bearer of 80’s comedy, along with its less favorable but still admirable sequel? Surely the sight of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man strolling through the streets of Manhattan will go down as one of the most infamous images of cinematic New York of all time.

And deep below the streets, in our very sewers, there dwell a clan of four heroes known as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, protectors of the weak and devourers of the pizza. What would they be without New York as their backdrop?

The much-maligned action-fantasy Last Action Hero took the cinematic ideal of Los Angeles and juxtaposed it with the “reality” of New York, much to the dismay of the fictional-turned-real action hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Monster and disaster movies thrive in a setting like New York; how many other cities have such a memorable skyline upon which to wreak your havoc? King Kong, Godzilla, and most recently Cloverfield have done their best to wipe clean the buildings of beloved Manhattan with their monstrous paws, and Independence Day and The Day the Earth Stood Still have brought that destruction from above. The Earth herself has turned against New York in The Day After Tomorrow and the upcoming 2012.

Will Smith memorably carted himself around a New York that had succumbed to the rule of zombie creatures in the apocalyptic I Am Legend. (And what a fascinating future New York it was, with its glimpses of skyrocketed fuel prices and an ad for a Batman/Superman film!)

And perhaps the most iconic image of a post-apocalyptic New York comes from The Planet of the Apes, in which Charlton Heston sees the buried Statue of Liberty, leading him to realize that mankind had destroyed themselves, ushering in the rule of sentient apes. (Oh, by the way, spoiler alert! You’ve all seen the movie, right?)

But I’m going to truly geek out here and admit that might my favorite fantasy film of recent years to feature New York is the slightly sappy yet utterly amusing Disney film Enchanted.

Now, hear me out!

Yes, it’s soft fantasy. Yes, it’s Disney. Yes, there are musical numbers and talking animals. But with Enchanted, Disney really gave its own movies a send-up for their occasionally laughable sappiness, and particularly the shallowness of some of their older stories — a princess and a prince fall in love in a single day?

Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older (I’m in my seriously late 20’s now), but the sight of Amy Adams blissfully singing her way through Central Park is a pure joy, considering how most people doing so in real life would have a hat on the ground for you to throw change into.

Yeah, I’d rather watch that than a monster topple skyscrapers. So what?!

New York is the place to be for some of the finest culture, cuisine, and entertainment in all of the United States. It’s also, as it happens, the place to be for your choicest assortments of ghost, demons, and magical spells. Keep that in mind next time you’re searching for vacation hotspots. After all, as the song goes, if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. Even another plane of existence.

Human beings have always been obsessed with our own mortality. Our earliest cultures invented elaborate mythologies and rituals concerning what happens to us when we die. But never a creature to stop anywhere short of the extreme, we have also been fascinated with not just the end of our own lives, but the end of ALL life.

Most civilizations imagined possible endings to the world as we know it. The Vikings told stories of Ragnarok, the final battle between the good and evil gods. The Mayans famously ended their calendar at the year 2012. And, of course, the final book of the Bible is the Book of Revelation, which depicts the return of Christ and the war with Satan.

Not surprisingly, Hollywood is quick to jump to an apocalypse — interestingly, often as summer blockbusters — when it wants to grab an audience. Here are what we think are the top six apocalypses as seen on the silver screen:

#6: I Am Legend

Will Smith. A dog. And a whole lotta vampire/zombie things. This movie may not have been high art, but one thing it did well was present a vision of Manhattan after all living humans have left. Overgrown with weeds and abandoned cars, the once proud Times Square is now a spooky ghost town, showing how little flashy signs and billboards matter in a world gone to hell.

#5: The Day After Tomorrow

Roland Emmerich is the go-to guy when it comes to blowing up the planet, as seen in his films Independence Day and the upcoming 2012. But rather than aliens or an ancient Mayan prophecy, in 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow the antagonist was Mother Nature, as the environment finally hit back after being abused for so long…and she hit hard. The movie isn’t great, but the visions of destruction are a wonder to behold. (For a great chuckle, check out the South Park episode “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow.”)

#4: Dawn of the Dead

Though both versions of this film were excellent (and to be perfectly honest, I prefer the high-octane action of the 2004 remake), it was George Romero’s 1978 horror masterpiece that created a vision of the future that sent chills up an entire generation’s collective spine. While the movie’s predecessor, Night of the Living Dead, is more famous, Dawn furthers the story by showing an entire world infested with zombies, and follows a tiny handful of survivors trapped in a mall, desperately fighting to stay alive. The movie’s tag: “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

#3: 28 Days Later

Following in Romero’s footsteps some thirty years later was Danny Boyle, when he created this chilling independent British film starring Cillian Murphy as a bike messenger who is conked on the head and put in a coma, only to wake up and discover that most of the world’s population has been infected with a virus called “Rage,” turning them into foaming-at-the-mouth homicidal psychopaths. Much like in Romero’s world, the surviving humans are often far more dangerous and frightening than the infected.

#2: WALL-E

Not every vision of the apocalypse is grim and terrifying. In 2008’s WALL-E, the world has been littered over with garbage, and humanity has departed, leaving trash-collecting robots to clean up the Earth. The plan continues on indefinitely, and eventually only one robot is left working, while humankind drifts through space. The charming love story that ensues between WALL-E and another robot named EVE is one of the most unique ever to be captured on film. If you’re looking for an original film, this is the one.

#1: The Terminator

In 1984, James Cameron gave the world a gift, and that gift was The Terminator. If the apocalypse is all about the battle between good and evil, it has never been exemplified more by this simple tweak: man vs. machine. In the not-too-distant future, the machines that we ourselves invented turned on us in an attempt to eradicate the human race. Leading the human rebellion is the Christ-like John Connor (note the initials) who was not born of virgin birth, but was conceived as part of a time paradox.

Of course, most of the film takes place in the present, when a human-looking terminator played by a certain well-known Austrian attempts to locate and kill Sarah Connor, John’s mother. But that first vision of the nightmare future stuck with film-goers and kept the franchise alive to this very day.

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