Zombies and doomsday viruses: what is Hollywood really telling us?

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Of what may come. Of each other. If movies and television in the last few years are any indication, we have so much more to fear in this world than losing a job or a relationship or our health. Our “entertainment” is telling us that a terrifying future could arrive at any time in the form of a doomsday virus that threatens to wipe out civilization and all of us with it. Over the past decade, the sheer number of movies and television shows that have focused on killer contagions that threaten humanity with death or some kind of horrible transformation is reaching—forgive me for this—epidemic proportions. And there are more being made all the time. There are so many that it has become impossible to see these shows and movies as being made simply because the topic is “popular.” Something else is going on. It’s downright weird. These entertainment vehicles seem to be telling us that the things that hold our civilization together can disappear overnight. People can turn into vicious creatures, literally feeding off each other as our emotional connections and our biology betray us. The more fundamental message we get is: Don’t trust anyone. Fear your neighbor. Isolation is survival. Movies and TV shows about killer plagues are not new; they have been around for decades. In the 1970s, during a very cynical and anti-establishment time, we had “infectious” David Cronenberg horror flicks like Shivers (1976) and The Brood (1979), the film version of Michael Crichton’s cautionary novel The Andromeda Strain (1971) and George Romero’s zombie plague in The Crazies (1973). Of course, Romero really kick-started the modern popularity of zombie films with Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). After 20 years away from the series, Romero discovered the resurgence of interest in zombies over the past 10 years, so he made three more films on the subject. And in recent years, Dawn of the Dead (2004) and The Crazies (2010) have been remade. The tagline for The Crazies now is “Fear Thy Neighbor.” These films and programs are not only showing us what might happen if a catastrophic viral outbreak were to take place, they are also introducing us to the idea of what life might be like if society broke down and we no longer had anything resembling security or technology or rights. To try to figure out why we have been seeing this bizarre and disturbing trend, it is necessary to consider the concept of “predictive programming.” This refers to the use of entertainment and other cultural artifacts to introduce us to planned societal changes. As we come to see these potential changes as familiar, we also have an easier time imagining them to be normal, acceptable, and inevitable. Frequently, story lines show us the proliferation of video surveillance, electronic eavesdropping, RFID chips, facial-recognition software, and retinal scans to identify us, watch us, and track us. We’ve also become used to the routine appearance of police in full SWAT gear and the accompanying depictions of martial law. The truly dangerous thing is that we’re getting used to all of it—and that’s the idea. When we saw actual martial law imposed in Boston during the search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after the Marathon “bombing,” we didn’t blink an eye. Media commentators didn’t even address the question of whether the limited imposition of a police state was in any way justified. No one seemed to mind that innocent people were being forced to close their businesses and remain in their homes, at least until they were forced to leave them at gunpoint to allow for illegal and unconstitutional searches. It was all seen as a reasonable response to a “bomber” on the run. How did our familiarity with martial law through entertainment aid in our acceptance of this violation of individual rights in Boston? And is it beyond the realm of possibility that powerful interests that want to stifle dissent and tighten controls over all of us would exert influence over which subjects are given vastly increased dramatic treatment? Is it unreasonable to see entertainment as a form of thought control?

The Planet of the Apes series (the first one began in 1968) is now being remade, and guess what caused the apes to take over the world this time? Yup, you guessed it. As we see in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), a virus sweeps the globe and kills most of humanity. This leads to a shutdown of all technology, another theme that has become significant with TV shows like Revolution and Under the Dome. In the ‘90s we had the TV mini-series of Stephen King’s opus The Stand (1994) and the Terry Gilliam sci-fi fantasy 12 Monkeys (1995)—both of which saw most of humanity wiped out by a virus—and Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak (1995), which brought us martial law and the possible bombing of a town to destroy an Ebola outbreak. When it comes to TV success with the apocalyptic zombie genre, it’s tough to top Frank Darabont’s The Walking Dead, which debuted in 2010. So it would seem reasonable to suggest that other producers have simply jumped on the bandwagon. And in some cases this is undoubtedly true. But one “hit” can’t come close to explaining the incredible proliferation of these shows. We also have, starting later this month, a prequel to The Walking Dead called Fear the Walking Dead, which shows how the plague that created all the zombies got started. The catch phrase on the poster is “Fear Begins Here.” Starting in 2008, The History Channel produced the documentary series Life After People, which looked at what would happen to the Earth if people suddenly disappeared. Another British show called Survivors, which ran from 2008 to 2010, looked at a virulent flu virus that wipes out most of humanity. Then we have The Last Ship (2014), which follows the exploits of a group of survivors after 80% of the world’s population has been wiped out by a global viral pandemic. Helix (2014) looked at a viral outbreak in a scientific outpost in Antarctica that turns victims into zombie-like creatures. Guillermo Del Toro has created another contagion show called The Strain (2014) that features a plague spread by ancient creatures that feed off humanity. That one gives us zombies, vampires, and a mysterious infection all in the same show. One of the heroes is from the Center for Disease Control, an organization that pops up often in these programs. A new show called Zoo, based on a James Patterson novel, looks at another pandemic that turns animals against humans. And there is Z Nation, which is about yet another plague that causes yet another zombie apocalypse. It gets really interesting when we note that shows about plagues in past decades are being remade now as if we didn’t have enough shows on the topic already. Both The Stand (2015) and The Andromeda Strain (2008) have been remade as TV mini-series while 12 Monkeys (2015) has been turned into a TV show. Tagline for The Andromeda Strain, “It’s a Bad Day to be Human.” Starting to get the picture? Starting to see a pattern? And that’s just TV. In the past few years, there have also been many feature films that combine zombies with the notion of a viral plague. We have World War Z (2013) about a zombie pandemic that threatens humanity with the UN coming to the rescue; 28 Days Later (2002), about animal rights activists who release animals that carry a deadly virus; and the sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), which shows us London under martial law as it tries to regain control after the plague, only to lose it again. By the way, World War Z 2 is coming out in 2017. For more examples of zombie/plague movies—and there are a lot—check out the list later in this article. But not all plague films deal with zombies; some are just about mass death and the end of the world that we know. Recently, we’ve had Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) with its telling slogan “Nothing Spreads Like Fear.” Other posters for the film (one shown above) feature this teaser: “Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch anyone.” I kid you not. Parts Per Billion (2014) gives us an apocalypse for the mature set (thanks to stars Frank Langella and Gena Rowlands) with its schmaltzy tag, “When the World Ends, Will Love Survive?” Yuck. So we have seen epidemics combined with zombies, but we’ve also seen them connected to the idea of an alien invasion in aptly named films like The Invasion (this 2007 film is the fourth based on the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers), The Signal (2014), and Slither (2006), which combines aliens, zombies, and an epidemic. In 1982, we had The Thing (which was a remake of the 1951 thriller The Thing From Another World) and its delightful slogan “Man is the Warmest Place to Hide.” Not shockingly, this alien contagion thriller was remade in 2011. It appears that we literally can’t get enough of these films. Ironically, it is the aliens that are infected at the end of War of the Worlds (2005). We even have comedy and romantic zombie movies like Shaun of the Dead (2004), Zombieland (2009), Warm Bodies (2013) and the TV show iZombie. Here is a list—undoubtedly incomplete—of films made since 2000 that deal with people being “infected” with some kind of virus that leads to horrifying consequences:

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