Epidemic Films to Die For

Epidemic Films to Die For
Author: Tom Zaniello
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2024-10-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Epidemic cinema remains an enduring genre of contemporary film, ranging from medical dramas to post-apocalyptic thrillers. Using a vast filmography, Zaniello not only details the incredible variety of epidemics and their role in popular culture, but also demonstrates how epidemics, as a rule, have been confronted without proper preparation or deployment of resources in different forms of media. Therefore, Epidemic Films to Die For is the first and the only book that extensively analyzes the history and deployment of films and TV series towards a chronicle of epidemic films. In addition to providing an overview of how widespread disease and illness have been historically depicted via film and media, this book skillfully contextualizes the contemporary ongoing moment in which filmmakers and producers grapple with the cultural imaginary surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

Epidemic Cinema

Epidemic Cinema
Author: Julia Echeverría
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2023-12-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1003823769

This book examines the recent trend in global cinema to feature infectious disease. As the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic materialised the anxieties and discourses of world risk that had long been portrayed in popular media, the book provides a novel definition of the epidemic film genre and offers a systematic look into the narrative and stylistic conventions that characterise it. Epidemic Cinema traces the evolution of the genre from its early cinematic origins to establish the founding principles of a genre standing at the crossroads between science-fiction and horror. It draws on close textual analysis to show how the pandemic reified one of the central predicaments of epidemic narratives: the constant tension existing between free-floating phenomena and the impulse to control and resist such phenomena, ultimately epitomised by the trope of the border. Showing how infectious diseases offer a rich allegorical frame which cinema uses to articulate timely anxieties of growingly invisible and deterritorialised risks, the author presents the prevalence of contagion in popular culture as a symptom of this growingly viral and virus-ridden context, both in its most literal and metaphorical sense. This insightful study will interest students and scholars of film studies, global cinema, science-fiction, horror, popular culture and genre theory.

The Hot Zone

The Hot Zone
Author: Richard Preston
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2012-03-14
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0307817652

The bestselling landmark account of the first emergence of the Ebola virus. Now a mini-series drama starring Julianna Margulies, Topher Grace, Liam Cunningham, James D'Arcy, and Noah Emmerich on National Geographic. A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.

Examinations and Analysis of Sequels and Serials in the Film Industry

Examinations and Analysis of Sequels and Serials in the Film Industry
Author: Seçmen, Emre Ahmet
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 166847865X

There are many elements in the concept of visual continuity, and they are all interrelated. In films or film series that are described as sequels, establishing a visual integrity relationship between films comes to the fore. The concept of the sequel appears in two ways. Sometimes, while the ideas are scripted, the story is divided into more than one part. Sometimes the story is planned as a single movie, and after a certain time, it can be realized as a follow-up movie/film for different reasons. In both systems of expression, it is necessary to seek harmony between all elements of visual design. Examinations and Analysis of Sequels and Serials in the Film Industry examines certain contents through the concepts of cinematography and narrative, focusing more on the practical side of cinema and partially on the theoretical side. It examines samples, sequels, serials, and trilogy universes on the axis of cinematography and narration. Covering topics such as film landscape, repeated narrative elements, and storytelling, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for film industry workers, film students and educators, sociologists, librarians, academicians, and researchers.

Cinematic Prophylaxis

Cinematic Prophylaxis
Author: Kirsten Ostherr
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2005-11-16
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0822387387

A timely contribution to the fields of film history, visual cultures, and globalization studies, Cinematic Prophylaxis provides essential historical information about how the representation of biological contagion has affected understandings of the origins and vectors of disease. Kirsten Ostherr tracks visual representations of the contamination of bodies across a range of media, including 1940s public health films; entertainment films such as 1950s alien invasion movies and the 1995 blockbuster Outbreak; television programs in the 1980s, during the early years of the aids epidemic; and the cyber-virus plagued Internet. In so doing, she charts the changes—and the alarming continuities—in popular understandings of the connection between pathologized bodies and the global spread of disease. Ostherr presents the first in-depth analysis of the public health films produced between World War II and the 1960s that popularized the ideals of world health and taught viewers to imagine the presence of invisible contaminants all around them. She considers not only the content of specific films but also their techniques for making invisible contaminants visible. By identifying the central aesthetic strategies in films produced by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and other institutions, she reveals how ideas about racial impurity and sexual degeneracy underlay messages ostensibly about world health. Situating these films in relation to those that preceded and followed them, Ostherr shows how, during the postwar era, ideas about contagion were explicitly connected to the global circulation of bodies. While postwar public health films embraced the ideals of world health, they invoked a distinct and deeply anxious mode of representing the spread of disease across national borders.

Zone One

Zone One
Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2011-10-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385535015

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys: A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. • "One of the best books of the year." —Esquire After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong… At once a chilling horror story and a literary novel by a contemporary master, Zone One is a dazzling portrait of modern civilization in all its wretched, shambling glory. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!

Contagious

Contagious
Author: Priscilla Wald
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2008-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822341536

DIVShows how narratives of contagion structure communities of belonging and how the lessons of these narratives are incorporated into sociological theories of cultural transmission and community formation./div

Going Viral

Going Viral
Author: Dahlia Schweitzer
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0813593182

Outbreak narratives have proliferated for the past quarter century, and now they have reached epidemic proportions. From 28 Days Later to 24 to The Walking Dead, movies, TV shows, and books are filled with zombie viruses, bioengineered plagues, and disease-ravaged bands of survivors. Even news reports indulge in thrilling scenarios about potential global pandemics like SARS and Ebola. Why have outbreak narratives infected our public discourse, and how have they affected the way Americans view the world? In Going Viral, Dahlia Schweitzer probes outbreak narratives in film, television, and a variety of other media, putting them in conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news organizations that have capitalized on public fears about our changing world. She identifies three distinct types of outbreak narrative, each corresponding to a specific contemporary anxiety: globalization, terrorism, and the end of civilization. Schweitzer considers how these fears, stoked by both fictional outbreak narratives and official sources, have influenced the ways Americans relate to their neighbors, perceive foreigners, and regard social institutions. Looking at everything from I Am Legend to The X Files to World War Z, this book examines how outbreak narratives both excite and horrify us, conjuring our nightmares while letting us indulge in fantasies about fighting infected Others. Going Viral thus raises provocative questions about the cost of public paranoia and the power brokers who profit from it. Supplemental Study Materials for "Going Viral": https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/going-viral-dahlia-schweitzer Dahlia Schweitzer- Going Viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xF0V7WL9ow

Outbreak

Outbreak
Author: Robin Cook
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 353
Release: 1988-02-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 110120348X

Murder and mystery reach epidemic proportions when a devastating plague sweeps the country in this “harrowing medical horror story” (The New York Times) from the #1 bestselling author of Coma “The ultimate nightmare . . . spine-tingling intrigue and fever-pitched action.”—Associated Press When the director of a Los Angeles health maintenance clinic succumbs, along with seven patients, to an untreatable—and virulently contagious—virus, Dr. Melissa Blumenthal is assigned by the Centers for Disease Control to investigate. The California case is merely the first in a burgeoning series of outbreaks that occur in unrelated geographical areas but with puzzling commonalities: The locations are always healthcare facilities, and their victims are only physicians and their patients. As her investigation takes increasingly bizarre turns, Melissa finds that behind the natural threat lurks a far more sinister possibility—sabotage—and soon finds herself facing the wrath of a powerful cabal, sworn to achieve its aims, no matter what the cost in human life—including Melissa’s.

Pandemic Media

Pandemic Media
Author: Philipp Dominik Keidl
Publisher: Meson Press Eg
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2021-01-23
Genre:
ISBN: 9783957960085

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media's adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come.