Dawn of the swine flu
The idea of humanity being destroyed by infection is such a potent one that it is perhaps not too surprising that media coverage of the potential swine flu pandemic quickly became apocalyptic. Even those whom you might hope would stay fairly calm seemed to be caught up in it all, with Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization, reportedly warning that ‘it really is all of humanity that is under threat’.
To be fair, Chan was talking about the potential threat of pandemics in general, rather than the current swine flu outbreak in particular. And, fortunately, it now looks like the outbreak might not be as bad as first feared. Outside of Mexico, the infections have so far been pretty mild and even in Mexico the mortality rate may not be much different from normal flu. The first genetic analyses of the specific viral strain responsible for the outbreak, H1N1, have also indicated that it lacks many of the molecular characteristics of the most virulent flu strains, such as that responsible for the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
But it was striking how similar the first reports of the swine flu outbreak were to fictional accounts of humanity-destroying infections. There was the same panic and confusion over exactly what was happening, combined with footage of people walking around a modern 21st century city wearing face masks. You really could believe it was the beginning of the end.
Such humanity-destroying infections are a common theme in science fiction, from Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (recently filmed with Will Smith) to last year’s remake of the BBC serial Survivors. But it is the zombie film that fully expresses the true horror of widespread infection.
For a brain-dead cannibal whose natural home is the low-budget exploitation movie, the zombie comes with quite a bit of intellectual baggage. In the granddaddy of all modern zombie movies, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the zombie hordes are said to represent Richard Nixon’s ‘silent majority’, the millions of American citizens that were horrified by the permissiveness and liberalism of the 1960s. While in the sequel, Dawn of the Dead, which is set in a shopping mall, the zombies represent avaricious consumers.
But, in actual fact, all zombie movies are about fear of infection. This explains why one of the main criticisms of zombie movies– that zombies just stumble about– is no criticism at all. For escaping from one stumbling zombie is pretty easy, continually escaping from hordes of them is much more difficult.
One wrong step, one lapse of concentration and they’ve got you. One small bite and you’re infected, destined to die before returning as a zombie. It is that dread of infection, of the fact that the zombie hordes are continuously growing and the odds of surviving are increasingly worsening, that is the secret of a good zombie film. Zombies are mindless but relentless: bacteria and viruses in human form.
Indeed, so effective are zombies as a cinematic representation of infection that they tend to be invoked in many ostensibly non-zombie films that deal with the threat of infection. Take Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later, which did much to kick-start the current zombie renaissance. Here, the British population is decimated by an infectious agent released from a laboratory, which turns everyone it infects into zombie-like blood-thirsty killers.
But an even better example is David Cronenberg’s 1976 film Rabid, which – as its name suggests – concerns a rabies-like infection that turns people into zombie-like blood-thirsty killers. Aside from a frankly preposterous explanation for where the infection first came from (a botched cosmetic surgery operation), the film is a very effective imagining of a city under siege from an unknown infection. Indeed, its scenes of people being tested as they pass through checkpoints on public transport systems are eerily similar to the steps being put in place to contain the current swine flu outbreak.
So, like almost all horror movies, zombies and their ilk allow us to face our fears in safety. For as we have just discovered, an influenza pandemic is scary enough in its own right.
