A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic: Depictions of Plague and Pandemic on Film and TV

“I have had a headache all day. I am afraid of what will happen next.”

A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic is a film book like no other. It opens with the author’s first-hand account of the Covid-19 pandemic and life in lockdown. His sense of dread, and anxiety about his state of health, were experiences shared with millions of others across the world. For author Richard Scheib, already committed to writing a book about plagues and pandemics in popular culture, Covid-19 felt like a perverse twist of fate. Media depictions of deadly contagions had, to this point, been speculative and often off the mark; his book takes an in-depth look at what filmmakers imagined would happen and contrasts it with the reality.

International in scope, A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic examines films in a wide variety of genres, from the silent era to the present day. Black Death, Ebola, Mad Cow Disease, Bird Flu ― it explores fictionalized accounts of plague and pestilence such as box-office hit Outbreak (1995), as well as documentary treatments of real-life incidents. Whether the threats depicted have a basis in reality ― the biowarfare of the Cold War era, for instance ― or are, like zombies and vampires, more fantastical, Scheib demonstrates how the fear of contagion has provided a wealth of inspiration for the big and small screen.