Epidemics in Popular Culture
If you are someone who is drawn to sci-fi and horror in what you read, listen to, and watch, you are not alone, and fictionalized accounts of pandemics are likely to be of interest. One might imagine that filmmaker Fritz Lang anticipated such an audience when, in 1919, he wrote Pest in Florenz [Plague of Florence], a short silent film about the first outbreaks in Italy of the Black Death. That interest continues into the present. Even in the midst of a pandemic--or maybe because people have more time on their hands during the current COVID-19 pandemic--this genre is wildly popular in pop culture.
Here is a selected list of items, some of which may be new to you.
Articles
- Epidemic Entertainments: Disease and Popular Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America
- Viral Hits: Your Pop Cultural Guide to Pandemics
- From Albert Camus to The Walking Dead: A Look at Pandemics in Culture
- Social Responses to Epidemics Depicted by Cinema
- Infectious Diseases in Cinema: Virus Hunters and Killer Microbes
Books
- The Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael Crichton
- The Book of M (2018) by Peng Shepherd
- Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
- Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) by Katherine Anne Porter
- The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus: novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature
Television and Movies
- A graphic scence from the HBO miniseries John Adams, in which Abigail Adams exposes herself and her children to smallpox.
- Contact tracing scenes in the film Contagion
- I Am Legend (2007): Streaming on Netflix; rentals on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, YouTub
- Panic in the Streets (1950): directed by Elia Kazan
- The Plague (1992): Movie based on the novel La Peste by Albert Camus; Director: Luis Puenzo
Podcasts