Worst Slums in Pop Culture

The barely functioning version of civilization presented in Children of Men is horrifying enough, but things get much worse when the film enters Bexhill refugee camp in its third act. 

This ghetto for arrested illegal immigrants is little more than a concentration camp where the increasingly rare commodity that is human life is still pretty cheap. Amid the rubble, fire, and dirt, the slum is also filled with political imagery from today, just in case anyone misses the point that this may be what we're headed towards. It makes the film's previous depiction of Hell on Earth look down right cozy.

The slum of District 9 may hold aliens, but it's based on the Cape Flats slum erected during the South African apartheid era. So while it's occupied by non-human lifeforms, the slum aspect of it is depicted in familiar terms. You don't have unrecognizable alien trash; you have rotting box spring mattresses and discarded beer cans and flaming tires shooting soot into the sky. 

It's easy enough to look down on the inhuman aliens as is. Forcing them to live in sub-human standards only makes it easier. Luckily, this slum is ultimately the arena of a much needed human ass-whooping that is a ton of fun to watch. You can't be too depressed in a movie where a dude gets shot with a pig.

If Gotham City did not have some serious problems, Batman would be out of business. Throughout the many Batman iterations popular culture plows through, one thing remains constant: the slums of Gotham are a nasty, industrial nightmare.

Regular criminals are bad enough, but the poor people of Gotham have a laundry list of super villains to worry about too. The Scarecrow might be flushing your water supply with hallucinogens and the Penguin might be buying your project building only to quadruple rent prices. If you get driven to the sewers, you've got Killer Croc and Clayface to worry about. Even with the ever-expanding Bat Family on your side, Gotham City is a bad place to be poor.

Deadwood is ultimately about the formation of a community, but getting there isn't easy. When even the good guys are willing to kill innocents to get ahead, and the biggest street in town is half mud and half horse poo, it's easy to see why most of the people in Deadwood are either alcoholics or opium addicts or both. You can tell a slum is bad when the best-fed citizens are the human body-disposing pigs.