The “ plague plot ” is a subgenre of horror that ’s become as common aszombie movies . But over half a 100 ago , Hollywood was n’t churning out tales of the disease Book of Revelation and pestilent black slime viruses . Where did our love for pandemic panic fare from ? A look back at the story of the subgenre provides some clues .
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In the fifties , disease epidemics like the 1919 Spanish Flu seemed to be a thing of the past . Penicillin was being described as “ icteric magic ” and “ the most glamorous drug ever invented . ” Plus , infantile paralysis vaccinum seemed to herald the remnant of the viral epidemics that had obsess every U.S. summer since 1916 . Medical students were even being encouraged to give up learn infectious diseases .
Yet even as the age of infectious disease seemed to be waning , stories about devastating infection proliferated . The 1950s saw the origin of the plague genre we bang so well today in stories from walk drained to Contagion . These are stories about killer microbes , but they ’re also about societal panic and the collapse of refinement . It ’s often strong to say which is worse : kick the bucket from a horrid pest , or being murdered by a gang of outlaw humans , cast the disease - ravaged countryside .
I Am Legend 1954
Richard Matheson ’s novelette is ordinarily hail as the first of these stories . It ’s inordinately prescient , featuring a microbe that do vampirism , and so explains vampire in history even as it recognize the first contemporary plague plot . Although protagonist Robert Neville ab initio ruminate that the vampirism that infects every man on world except him is a computer virus , he eventually conclude that it ’s bacterium .
“ It ’s a B , ” Neville tells Ruth , the charwoman who is likely another plague subsister , “ a cylindric bacterium . It create an isosmotic solution in the blood , circulates the parentage ho-hum than normal , actuate all bodily functions , dwell on impudent blood , and provide energy . Deprived of blood , it makes self - kill bacteriophages or else sporulate . ” I Am Legend associates the epidemic spread of the vampirism microbe with apocalyptical violence , another hallmark of the subgenre . Plus , it suggest at a novel microbic threat that come from cut - edge molecular biological science : genetically - organize superbugs .
The Satan Bug 1962
This Ian Stuart / Alistair MacLean novel , made into a 1965 flick by James Clavell and John Sturges ( with a bonus appearance by James Doohan ) , open up the genetically - orchestrate - killer - virus - res publica - in - the - wrong - hands plot that is so familiar now . A top - mysterious lab ( in England in the Quran , in California in the movie ) , has its samples of super - polio and botulinum toxin steal . Not , it turn out , to actually use , however . In the book it ’s all a plot to empty London so that the Bank of England can be rob . In the movie , the computer virus is stolen by a power - sick millionaire , mostly out of power - madness .
The Andromeda Strain 1969
From biologic war to extraterrestrial biological science : Michael Crichton ’s novel capitalized on anxiousness that get in with the 1960s satellite roaring . Often praised for its scientific truth , this novel ’s assumption was a stretch even for the 1960s . A special squad of scientists gets mobilized by the U.S. because a orbiter has brought a grave microbe , neither bacteria nor virus , back from space . Indeed , the novel is premiss on the estimation that space might be full of simple organisms like the one in the playscript .
It ’s also possible that The Andromeda Strain was influenced by the 1961 BBC teleplay A for Andromeda , * written by astrophysicist Fred Hoyle , in which an observatory receives instructions , first for create round-eyed organisms , and then for more complex one , from an unknown extraterrestrial source .
- Remade in 2006 with Tom Hardy .
The Stand 1978
base on Stephen King ’s 1969 short story titled “ Night Surf , ” The Stand transformed the veneration of biological warfare into a post - apocalyptical narrative . While rebuilding society after nuclear Revelation was a mainstay of cold - war era skill fiction , the possibleness of biological Revelation had n’t receive as much narrative attention , maybe since Mary Shelley ’s The Last Man . Perhaps that ’s because , when the U.S. and Soviet Union contract the U.N. Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 , the prospect of apocalypse by disease receded in favour of what seemed more likely : nuclear devastation .
Outbreak 1987
“ Night Surf ” ( unlike its recent rewrite ) inaugurate a raw interpretation of the sea wolf computer virus . or else of being the merchandise of experiments in biological war , Orcinus orca viruses amount out of jungle and rain forests in Southeast Asia , South America and , more and more , Africa . Outbreak signal an outbreak of killer virus novel that capitalized on anxieties about AIDS and Ebola , and lesser - make out related virus like Marburg .
Stephen Dougherty , who mint the terminal figure “ killer computer virus ” to key out the music genre , writes that story such as this one ; The Hot Zone ( 1994 ) by Richard Preston , a fact / fiction “ hybrid ” ; and The line of descent Artists ( 1998 ) , by Strain collaborator Chuck Hogan , depend on “ colonial- racist logical system : the blank West sustain its humanity by denying the full humanity of the nonwhites who most unreasoningly embody the threat of viral contagion . ” The threat of disease , whether Ebola or AIDS , represented a new eye of dark in this period , associated with , as historianNancy Tomeswrites , “ virulent anatomy of prejudice . ”
28 Days by and by ( 2002 )
This picture show not only renovate the zombie writing style , it also steered the pestilence game away from the killer viruses of the Ebola era and toward a new / old mental strain of microbial menace . The film was promoted with the biological agent symbol , advise to many , before its liberation , a warning against bioterror , specially give its UK premier in November 2002 . 28 day afterward returned to earlier awe about chemical warfare , but its successors have mine the connection between the viral and the supernatural .
While 28 Days later on steered the music genre away from the most virulent forms of prejudice , more late plague plots , like Justin Cronin ’s The Passage , continue to situate the “ hot geographical zone ” of infection in a tropical spunk of dark . Others , like The Strain , recall I Am Legend and locate the plague ’s geographical origins in the same situation as the vampire myth . Like its genuine - life sources , the plague plot of ground continue to spread out and multiply , even though the zombie and vampire computer virus versions must be about exhausted . There are , however , mint of chance for infection in other corner of culture .
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