Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in popular culture

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the derived term Four Horsemen have appeared many times in popular culture.

In real life The "Four Horsemen" is a professional wrestling faction that competed in the National Wrestling Alliance and World Championship Wrestling in the 1980s and 1990s. The faction's original incarnation consisted of Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, Ole Anderson, Tully Blanchard, and J. J. Dillon, with other members including Lex Luger, Sid Vicious, Sting, Steve McMichael, Dean Malenko, Chris Benoit, Brian Pillman, Curt Hennig, Barry Windham, and Paul Roma. In NXT, Flair's daughter Charlotte, Sasha Banks, Bayley, and Becky Lynch were nicknamed as "The Four Horsewomen" due to their matches helping to push the female wrestling roster in the show, even though the four of them were never on the same faction at the same time. "The Four Horsemen" was an informal discussion (on 30 September 2007) between Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, during which they discussed definitions of atheism and the legitimacy of their criticism of religion. Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse, a term for Internet criminals, or the imagery of internet criminals. The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame was a group of football players at the University of Notre Dame under coach Knute Rockne in 1924. They were Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden. A United States Postal Service stamp was issued in their honor in 1998 bearing a black-and-white image from 1925 of the four players all on dark horses. "The Four Horsemen of the Supreme Court" refers to four United States Supreme Court justices Pierce Butler, James McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter, who consistently voted to overturn much of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives during the Great Depression. Psychologist John Gottman uses the term to describe the four most destructive behaviors harming relationships in his Cascade Model of Relational Dissolution. They are: criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. "The Hideous Four Horsemen – Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration, Despair. Unhappy drinkers will understand!" is an important reference within the Big Book by Alcoholics Anonymous. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in linguistics, Paul Postal, John R. Ross, George Lakoff, and James McCawley, initiated and did early work with generative semantics. This went against Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics. The companies Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have been described as the "four horsemen of tech(nology)".Hower, L., Hunting the Four Horsemen of Tech, published 5 May 2017, accessed 25 January 2019

In entertainment and media

Film (Chronological) In The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), a silent film produced by Metro Pictures Corporation, based on the eponymous novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, the Four Horsemen were implied to be the result of human greed and war. The Four Horsemen make a brief appearance at the beginning of Faust (1926), directed by F. W. Murnau. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962), another film based on Ibáñez's book that changes the timeline from the First to the Second World War. Starring Charles Boyer and Glenn Ford, and directed by Vincente Minnelli. Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985) also alludes to Death on a pale horse, played by him. At least two of the Four Horsemen appear near the end of The Rapture (1991). However, their role is mostly off-camera and allegorical. Also, the film changes War to the first Horseman. The opening credits of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) show four burning spring rocker horses as the allegory of the Four Horsemen.. Retrieved June 6, 2017. In Tombstone (1993), during the opening in a Mexican town, Johnny Ringo quotes the biblical Book of Revelation: "Behold the pale horse". The man who "sat on him was Death... and Hell followed with him". In True Lies (1994), Juno Skinner (Tia Carrere) is an arts and antiquities dealer who shows Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) four giant statues from ancient Persia saying: "I call them The Four Horsemen". In Elf (2003) the Central Park Rangers are presented as four shadowy figures on horseback, set to stop Santa Claus from saving Christmas, similar to the Four Horsemen as the harbingers of the apocalypse. In The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005), four satanic cult members call themselves after the non-Biblical Four Horsemen – Death (David Boreanaz) who drives a black car, War (Marcus Chong) who drives a red SUV, Famine (Tito Ortiz) who drives a sickly yellow muscle car, and Pestilence (Yuji Okumoto) who drives a green Ford Pinto truck. Horsemen (2009) features murders that are inspired by the Four Horsemen. Now You See Me (2013) features a group of magicians who go by the name of The Four Horsemen. X-Men: Apocalypse is a (2016) film whose lead character Apocalypse is seen in a post-credit teaser in the film X-Men: Days of Future Past with the Four Horsemen watching as he builds pyramids. During the film, his initial Horsemen are killed when he is betrayed and sealed in his own tomb, but he escapes centuries later when a cult discovers his final resting place, emerging into the modern world. Apocalypse recruits Magneto, Psylocke, Storm, and Archangel as his new Horsemen, enhancing their powers to ensure their service to him. Knock at the Cabin is a 2023 film in which a girl and her two dads, while vacationing, are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make a choice to avert the apocalypse.

Literature and comic books (Alphabetical by author or comics publisher) Emerson Abreu, one of the writers of the Brazilian comic book series Monica Teen, presents a variation of the mythology, where the Horsemen are called Horses and they serve an evil mysterious entity named the Serpent (possibly alluding to either the Biblical Genesis Serpent or Ancient Serpent). Each Horse is presented every two years, with their roster including the spoiled high-school girl Penha as the Red Horse of War, the evil creature known as the Flying Donkey (resulting from the merging between sorceress Berenice and the spirit of her deceased daughter) as the Pale Horse of Death, and Captain Fray (a supervillain with power over pollution) as "The White Horse of Decay". Incarnations of Immortality, a long-running series of fantasy novels by Piers Anthony, was influenced by the mythology of the Four Horsemen. The titles of two books in the series, On a Pale Horse and Wielding a Red Sword, refer to Death and War respectively, though they are not formally titled such; the books revolve around characters whose supernatural duties are similar to those of the Horsemen. The Incarnation of War has four associated lesser incarnations in a seeming of the Four Horsemen: Famine, Pestilence, Conquest, and Slaughter. In Archie Comics' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #38–39 and Mighty Mutanimals #6 ("United We Stand, Divided We Fall"), the Four Horsemen are represented as Famine, War, Pestilence and Death, the former three appearing as colorful monsters and Death resembling the Grim Reaper. War also appears as a playable character in the Super NES version of the Tournament Fighters video game. In Blart: The Boy Who Didn't Want To Save The World, by Dominic Barker, Blart and the gang, when facing Zoltab, have to fight the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Women of the Apocalypse, an anthology of four novellas by Eileen Bell, Roxanne Felix, Ryan T. McFadden, and Billie Milholland () features four modern, Albertan heroines facing down the Four Horsemen, in four speculative fiction variants on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In The Talismans of Shannara by Terry Brooks, Shadowen who have taken the forms of the Four Horsemen are dispatched to kill Walker Boh. The title of Agatha Christie'''s 1961 novel The Pale Horse is an allusion to Revelation 6:8, where it is the horse ridden by Death. In Army of Darkness comics, published first by Dark Horse Comics and then Dynamite Entertainment, Ash is faced with the Four Horsemen. In DC Comics, the Four Horsemen of Apokolips were foretold in the Crime Bible. They were created by a coalition of evil scientists and caused Black Adam to go insane by killing his brother-in-law Osiris and his wife Isis. Sobek, an anthropomorphic crocodile who is initially presented as a friend of Osiris, is later revealed to be the Horseman of Famine, Yurrd. The back cover of MAD magazine #146 (October, 1971) (published by EC Comics) depicts "The Four Horsemen of the Metropolis", four riders who come forth to destroy the city. Their names are Drugs, Graft, Pollution, and Slums. In the Unicron Trilogy portion of Transformers, co-published by Hasbro and Takara, the Four Horsemen are Transformers who serve under Unicron. Jonathan Hickman's East of West features three of the Four Horsemen (War, Conquest, and Famine) as they seek revenge on the fourth (Death) and work towards bringing about the Apocalypse. Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), a Spanish novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez whose English translation by Charlotte Brewster Jordan was the best-selling novel in the U.S. in 1919 (). The Lords of Deliverance series by Larissa Ione feature the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse named as Pestilence, Famine, War and Death. In the series they try to avoid breaking their seals and causing an Apocalypse. Seraph of the End, a manga series written by Takaya Kagami, is set in a post-apocalyptic setting with creatures called the "Four Horsemen of John" that roam the ruins. Some of the main cast also carry the weapons of the Horsemen: Yoichi carries a bow, Yu carries a sword, Kimizuki carries twin swords (in place of scales) while Shinoa carries a scythe. In Chainsaw Man Part 1, the main villain is the Conquest Devil, Makima (translated as "Control Devil"), and in part 2, the War Devil, Famine Devil, and Death Devil are all introduced. In Marvel Family #48, the Marvels face the Four Horsemen in a story titled "The Four Horsemen Ride Again", wherein they try to cause disasters through humans. They are classed as Famine, Fire, Plague, and War. Unlike most depictions, it is claimed War is caused by the others. The Horsemen of Apocalypse are a team of Marvel Comics supervillains (usually manipulated superheroes; Angel, Wolverine, and Gambit, for example, all had stints as Horsemen of Death) who serve Apocalypse, an ancient, evil mutant who believes in survival of the fittest and causes disasters to this end. Those who come to retrieve Sethe in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved are referred to as the Four Horsemen: "When the four horsemen came—schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff—the house on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late" (174). The title of best-selling author James Patterson's fifth book in the Women's Murder Club series, The 5th Horseman, is a reference to the Biblical story. Terry Pratchett has parodied the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse several times. In Good Omens, co-written with Neil Gaiman, the Four Horsemen (or Horsepersons, as War is female) ride motorcycles. Pestilence is changed out for Pollution, who took over in 1936 when Pestilence left "muttering something about Penicillin." War is a war correspondent, and Famine is the author of a bestselling diet book. They have aliases that allude to their traditional colors (i.e. Raven Sable, Carmine Zuigiber). There is also a group of four Hells Angels that follow them, taking the names of more mundane plagues such as Cruelty to Animals and No Alcohol Lager.