Diseased Cinema

Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies

By: Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, Lee Mordechai

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Paperback | 30 November 2023

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264 Pages

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23.4 x 15.6 x 1.9

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Throughout the last century, movies about infectious diseases have reflected and driven dominant cultural narratives. As the projected impact of disease has grown exponentially, these movies have increasingly shifted focus from trying to identify the source of a disease and potentially stopping it, to a dystopian, postpandemic world in which nobody is safe and humans simply try to survive. Diseased Cinema explores how this narrative mirrors and shapes two thematic transformations. Firstly, the narrative change demonstrates how America has shifted from a belief in solving social problems to despair and acceptance of America's failure to fulfil its social contract. Secondly, this altered narrative reflects a development of capitalism which has spread globally with entrenched American ideas about individualism at the expense of the public good. As capitalism becomes more ubiquitous through newly developed technologies and global trade, movies gradually flatten individual differences or advocate for a complete destruction of the present world ostensibly to offer humanity a fresh start. Robert Alpert is an Adjunct Instructor in the Computer and Information Sciences Department at Fordham University Merle Eisenberg is an Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University Lee Mordechai is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Industry Reviews

Diseased Cinema tracks the cinematic fascination with disease throughout the history of film, showing how depictions of communicable disease mutate to reflect changing social and political concerns and how they, in turn, shape expectations about and the experience of actual disease outbreaks. An important work that reveals the power of cinema and the figure of disease to shape a cultural imagination.

--Priscilla Wald, Duke University

The book delivers a fresh look at the ever-growing number of American pandemic movies and their apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic mythology.

--Christos Lynteris, University of St Andrews

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