It might seem crazy, but as Vulture's Kathryn VanArendonk writes, "this current pandemic crisis makes me terrified, and a story about exactly that same thing is one way to grapple with that fear. " Their vision is lacking; they do not see us waving and unfurling our banners on the lawn. The crowds are not so lucky in 2012 (2009). The catastrophes portended by the neoliberal cinematic imagination — taking shape before our eyes today — can still be averted. In this bombastic action-horror movie, the contagion isn't making people zombies. Like the protagonist at the start of 28 days later. Director Danny Boyle ("Train-spotting") shoots on video to give his film an immediate, documentary feel, and also no doubt to make it affordable; a more expensive film would have had more standard action heroes, and less time to develop the quirky characters. Like the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, or the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or thousands of others at the hands of police in the US, they are as devalued in death as they were in life. The ending is disappointing--an action shoot-out, with characters chasing one another through the headquarters of a rogue Army unit--but for most of the way, it's a great ride. What fate awaits us? Season of the Witch. This French-Canadian zombie movie is another artful zom-drama entry that really emphasizes the emotional toll of survival, and even includes a large, mysterious tower made of chairs that draws the zombies to it.
Lots of blood and Roth's signature coarse humor. To save his home, Faust makes a bargain with Mephisto, whose goal is dominion over the earth. But then I'm never satisfied. Like the protagonist at the start of 28 days laser eye. The original Crazies was a George Romero movie released in 1973, but this remake from 2010 is actually better. Life imitated art in September 2005, as President George W. Bush looked down from his helicopter at spray-painted pleas for help on the rooftops of New Orleans, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. While not the best film ever created, there's something especially convincing about the "recovered" footage that will truly trick you into believing you've just watched a town burn itself down with madness.
This list has been periodically updated to include new titles. And infected with a deadly pathogen. Like the protagonist at the start of 28 days later crossword puzzle. Defeating COVID-19 also demands mass participation — in ongoing social distancing, and in escalating actions to win stronger economic relief, social insurance, and health care for all. For any hope of recovery, we cannot cede the public square, but rather we must reclaim it — courageously and with care for one another.
In this most melancholy and romantic of pandemic movies, a disease is slowly robbing humanity of its senses, one by one, with each loss being accompanied by an out-of-control emotion: When you lose your sense of smell, for example, you overload on grief. Now they risk losing their temporarily-improved unemployment benefits if their boss demands they go back to work. The reassertion — via mass mobilization — that their lives held intrinsic meaning is cast as a monstrous and violent act, regardless of whether any windows are broken. Spend enough money on this story, and it would have the depth of "Armageddon. " This is an exploitation movie, so of course a scrappy band of survivors has to hightail it out of town amidst explosions, bloody deaths, and an abundance of pulp dialogue. The parasite in this South Korean film drives the infected to drown themselves, and when one man's family is infected, he has to do what he can to try and find a cure as the condition spreads across the nation and the government sends the afflicted into quarantine. The powerful figures in these films are engaged in projects that are more important than the lives of those beneath them. This is a zombie movie, yes, but more than that it is about the monotony of survival and the crushing weight of loneliness when you're the only person in a dead world, which is exactly what one man in this movie experiences after he goes to a house party and wakes up to the apocalypse in an apartment building. The Weaklings and the Rubes. Available on iTunes and Shudder.
That's what happens in the appropriately titled Blindness. Maj. Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) invites them to join his men at one of those creepy movie dinners where the hosts are so genial that the guests get suspicious. Ewan McGregor plays a philandering chef and Eva Green the beautiful epidemiologist who lives next door to his restaurant. The comet that killed the dinosaurs passes by Earth again and this time incinerates most of the human race, leaving those partly exposed to roam as extremely New Wave zombies. If others in the film drown in a tsunami, get tackled by zombies, or succumb to a bloody cough, their deaths carry very little emotional weight, if any. While humanity is being brought to its knees by a rapidly spreading infection, we only experience the crisis through the perspective of an Ontario radio disc jockey who is receiving sporadic reports of the mayhem outside. They jump up and down, wave their arms, and hope that this time it will notice them. When she pierces people with her stinger, they become blood-hungry, zombie-like monsters, and the medical facility where she's being cared for soon becomes a hunting ground. The 1990s was the peak of teen horror, and The Faculty assembled a buzzy cast — Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Salma Hayek, Clea DuVall, Jon Stewart, and more — for this story of a standard American high school overrun by an alien invasion that turns humans into host drones. Vincent Price plays the central prince-slash-Satanist in all his regal, sadistic menace, and Corman's garish stylization adds a veneer of sickly decadence to the proceedings. The plot exudes a distinctly Musk-y odor: the masses are saved by a small group of technocrats who drill down into the core and reboot it with nuclear bombs. Chris Pine, Piper Perabo, and Emily VanCamp star in this movie about a group of friends trying to outrun a pandemic who realize on their journey that the evils of man are just as threatening as any virus. From COVID-19 to killer cops to climate change, morbid symptoms abound. Should they trust the broadcast and travel to what is described as a safe zone?
They have brains and can think, and they perform work that enables life and on which our world depends: caring for the elderly, stocking grocery store shelves, delivering packages, cleaning hospitals, driving busses, and more. They swarm over their victims in a gnashing and terrible blur, transforming them almost instantly into another member of the horde. Larger crowds are made of computer-generated images, people who never even existed in the first place. So once Faust has a taste of the power that comes from darkness, he finds himself in not only a battle for his soul but all of the world. It's a disturbing, complicated look at passion, loyalty, and deception in the heart of a horrific epidemic. The contagion in Daybreakers has turned most of the world's population into vampires, and when the human population plummets, that means the new dominant race is short on food. The results are mind-alteringly great.
They are facing a cruel situation. It's a film noir about efforts to contain a smallpox epidemic in New York City, so of course the disease arrives in the city carried by an unwitting femme fatale; the opening, hard-boiled narration assures us that the "killer" of the title "was something to whistle at — it wore lipstick, nylons, and a beautifully tailored coat … a pretty face with a frame to match, worth following. " The rest of the planet perishes. Yet these actions always take place in the shadow of a threatening horde. The movie audience is itself a crowd — one that is not supposed to speak, but only listen.
The Masque of the Red Death. That 20-second limit serves three valuable story purposes: (a) It has us counting "12... 11... 10" in our minds at one crucial moment; (b) it eliminates the standard story device where a character can keep his infection secret; and (c) it requires the quick elimination of characters we like, dramatizing the merciless nature of the plague. They're barricaded in a high-rise apartment, and use their hand-cranked radio to pick up a radio broadcast from an Army unit near Manchester. But we should not despair that they ignore and overlook us. Dawn of the Dead (1978). After a scientist murders a teen girl and then himself, it is discovered that he's been doing experiments with deadly parasites that are now matriculating among the general population. In the film itself, they become texture, non-characters, dissolving into the background.
So opens "28 Days Later, " which begins as a great science fiction film and continues as an intriguing study of human nature. But since he saved himself with an experimental vaccine treatment, he might be able to cure others if he finds more healthy survivors. At the same time, he meets a woman (Samara Weaving) who was just screwed over by his company, and together they agree to kill their way to the top. Many of the films' most gruesome events are not what the infected do to the people, but rather what the people do to one another. In a lesser movie, there would be a love scene between Selena and Jim, but here the movie finds the right tone in a moment where she pecks him on the cheek, and he blushes. These zombies are capitalism's worst nightmare: an unruly and destructive crowd whose ascendancy breaks down the existing order that produced them. Anna is sweet little zom-comedy musical about a high school girl who just wants to get out of her small town, but has her plans railroaded by a zombie epidemic. We've seen a lot of movies about pathogens turning all of humanity into blood-thirsty zombie creatures, but what if there was a disease that just made everyone go blind in one city? The world has descended into chaos, but if there's a hope for humanity, it might come in the form of a depressed Clive Owen, his activist ex-wife, Julianne Moore, and a young refugee woman. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a man whose daughter (Abigail Breslin) is bit, and he decides to care for her at home over the weeks it will take her to turn full undead cannibal. Highly literary and earnest, it is nevertheless a beautifully acted and elegantly mounted tale, balancing the intimate and the epic, and grandiosity with harrowing tragedy. She has an affair with Liev Schreiber, which prompts her husband to demand that she accompany him to the heart of a rural cholera outbreak. Resident Evil Franchise. Witness this early talkie, based on Sinclair Lewis's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1925 novel, which tells the story of an ambitious research scientist who becomes a country doctor to be with the girl of his dreams, then makes a medical breakthrough that eventually leads him to the West Indies to combat a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague.
The setup is a familiar one, but the portent, the violence, the sense of a world abandoned by God's mercy would give Paul Verhoeven a run for his money. We come to realize she was not born tough, but has made the necessary adjustments to the situation. The story may be symbolic, but the tension throughout the film is still immensely powerful. So get ready to sing, but also to cry. Available on iTunes. I can understand why Boyle avoided having everyone dead at the end, but I wish he'd had the nerve that John Sayles showed in "Limbo" with his open ending. In Paul Verhoeven's ridiculously sleazy and disturbing 1985 medieval epic, Rutger Hauer leads a group of mercenaries and captives (among them Jennifer Jason Leigh) into a castle infected with bubonic plague.
A mysterious illness prompted every woman in the world to miscarry in the early 2000s, and for nearly 20 years since that event — which happened around the same time as a highly deadly flu pandemic — no new children have been born. Anna and the Apocalypse. Just as in our disaster movies, the politics of the last few decades has offered little room in the frame for the crowd. The audience wouldn't stand for everybody being dead at the end, even though that's the story's logical outcome. Zombie movies are always so bleak (which is fair), but Bodies imagines, "What if they could still feel? " World War Z. Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos star in this epic contagion movie that features maybe the largest mass of sprinting zombies ever put on screen. Available on YouTube, iTunes, Amazon Prime, and Google Play. The first feature film from director James Gunn, Slither is set in a small town where everyone knows each other that is overrun by an alien plague. Those being served by our current system — a bipartisan coalition similar in class character although tonally distinct — are quite used to being asked: may I take your order? So you won't care as much. " Now streaming on: Activists set lab animals free from their cages--only to learn, too late, that they're infected with a "rage" virus that turns them into frothing, savage killers. The horde is at the gates. Melting into a boiling San Francisco Bay. Life After Infection (and, Still, Some More Zombies).
Naomie Harris, a newcomer, is convincing as Selena, the rock at the center of the storm.