Necromunda might exist in the 41st Millennium, but spend enough time in the Underhive and parts of it start to feel strangely familiar.
Towering industrial cities. Lawless gangs. Polluted wastelands. Cyberpunk technology sitting alongside absolute poverty. Enforcers attempting to maintain order in places where order disappeared generations ago.
The DNA of Necromunda can be traced through decades of dystopian and science-fiction cinema. So, if you want to understand where some of the Underhive’s atmosphere comes from, these five films are a very good place to start.
1. Blade Runner, 1982
Perhaps the most obvious place to begin.
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner established one of cinema’s defining visions of the dystopian megacity. Its Los Angeles is impossibly dense, permanently dark and divided between immense corporate power and the people scraping out an existence hundreds of levels below.
Sound familiar?
Necromunda takes that idea and turns the dial until it snaps off.
Hive Primus is a city built vertically on an almost incomprehensible scale. The wealthy inhabit the relatively clean heights of the Spire, while billions live and work beneath them. Descend far enough and artificial light, breathable air and functioning infrastructure become luxuries.
The similarities aren’t simply visual either. Both settings are obsessed with the enormous gulf between technological advancement and quality of life. Humanity can manufacture astonishing machines, yet ordinary people still live in overcrowded, filthy and dangerous environments.
If Blade Runner showed us the cyberpunk megacity, Necromunda asked what it might look like after another 38,000 years of neglect.
2. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, 1981
Leave the relatively civilised parts of a hive behind and Necromunda quickly becomes a very different game.
The Ash Wastes surrounding Necromunda’s hive cities are enormous polluted deserts inhabited by nomads, mutants, prospectors, gangs and heavily armed convoys.
That’s where Mad Max 2 starts feeling particularly familiar.
George Miller’s wasteland is a place where resources are precious, vehicles are survival tools and society has fractured into violent tribes. Machines are repaired, modified and weaponised until they’re barely recognisable from whatever rolled out of the factory.
That’s practically an Ash Wastes campaign.
Necromunda’s Nomads, Ridgehaulers, dirtbikes, jury-rigged vehicles and battles over trade routes all tap into the same fantasy: civilisation has technically survived, but outside its walls, you’re on your own.
3. Escape from New York, 1981
John Carpenter’s Escape from New York begins with a wonderfully grim premise.
Manhattan has become so uncontrollable that the authorities have effectively given up. The entire island is converted into a maximum-security prison, its inhabitants abandoned inside and left to establish their own brutal society.
That sense of a city within a city is pure Underhive.
Necromunda isn’t simply populated by criminals wandering around shooting each other. Entire societies have developed beneath the official civilisation of the hive.
Gangs control territory. Settlements have their own economies. Criminal organisations enforce their own rules. Reputation can matter more than law, and violence is often the most reliable form of negotiation.
Even the archetype of Snake Plissken fits beautifully into Necromunda: the cynical, heavily armed antihero moving through a world populated by gangs, criminals and people you probably shouldn’t trust.
Swap Manhattan for Hive Primus and Snake could probably make a decent bounty hunter.
4. RoboCop, 1987
Necromunda isn’t only about gangs.
Someone has to enforce the law.
Or at least something resembling it.
Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop presents Detroit as a collapsing industrial city plagued by violent crime while enormous institutions attempt to impose increasingly militarised forms of control.
That combination of industrial decay, corporate brutality and absurdly excessive law enforcement fits Necromunda extremely well.
The Palanite Enforcers aren’t friendly neighbourhood police officers. They exist to maintain Lord Helmawr’s law and protect the established order of Necromunda.
And when that requires heavily armoured officers carrying combat shotguns into an Underhive settlement?
So be it.
There’s also something distinctly Necromundan about RoboCop’s satire. Both worlds are so brutally dysfunctional that the horror occasionally becomes funny. Violence is excessive, institutions are ridiculous, and human life can feel frighteningly cheap.
5. The Warriors, 1979
If there’s one film on this list that captures the gang culture of Necromunda, it’s The Warriors.
Walter Hill’s cult classic imagines New York divided between highly distinctive gangs, each controlling its own territory and possessing its own colours, identity and fighting style.
That basic concept sits right at the heart of Necromunda.
House Goliath aren’t simply people carrying guns. Neither are the Escher, Orlocks, Van Saar, Cawdor or Delaque.
Each gang is effectively its own subculture.
They dress differently. Fight differently. Value different things. Control different industries. Occupy different territories. And, most importantly, you can often tell who you’re dealing with before anyone fires a shot.
That’s exactly what makes The Warriors such a useful comparison.
The Baseball Furies, Turnbull ACs and Gramercy Riffs are exaggerated almost to the point of becoming tribes. Necromunda takes that idea and translates it into the far future, where your gang isn’t merely who you run with.
It’s your entire identity.
Welcome to the Underhive
Put these films together and the ingredients start looking remarkably familiar.
Take the oppressive megacity of Blade Runner. Add the wasteland survival of Mad Max 2. Throw in the lawless urban territories of Escape from New York, the militarised dystopia of RoboCop and the tribal gang warfare of The Warriors.
Then add mutants, corpse-starch, plasma guns, giant rats, religious fanatics, millennia of industrial pollution and several billion extremely unhappy Imperial citizens.
Now you’re getting somewhere close to Necromunda.
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