Best Apocalyptic Wallpapers

Are you looking for a nightmarescape to haunt your desktop background as the autumn lurches toward its zenith? Then you might find these nightmarish images suitable. In one way or another, each piece in this post imparts the same this-cannot-really-be-happening! feeling that was strongly bound up in Rod Serling's doom obsessed television series, The Twilight Zone. The febrile nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch, like the painting above, are an excellent place to start in the search for apocalyptic nightmare fuel.

Each is a vision of hell. The Twilight Zone was a series that mastered the art of dystopia, showing the gruesome heights man's imagination can reach when envisioning our worst fates. Whether it's the fanciful Medieval hell promoted by Hieronymous Bosch, or a downfall inflicted by resurgent Old Ones, nuclear war, or economic collapse, man has always sought a peek at his own grave.

The Eastern spiritual traditions took this impulse to the extreme. Buddhism's Girimananda Sutta is a forced look at a decrepit state of affairs in the body, which might be extrapolated to all organic existence. The macabre practice continues today among some monks, and reportedly lends a wisdom blessed with calm and clarity to those who can get beyond the rotting flesh, the pain, and the horror. While anyone may wish to avoid deep meditations of this nature while staring at their computer monitor, a little reminder of our nightmares and our civilization's secret nightmare couldn't hurt, and these wallpapers are an easy way to get it.

-Grim Blogger