Plagues, pandemics and zombies: History professor publishes book on diseases in film
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
Media Contact: Elizabeth Gosney | CAS Marketing and Communications Manager | 405-744-7497 | egosney@okstate.edu
Oklahoma State University Department of History professor Dr. Merle Eisenberg has published a new book titled “Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies” supported by a book subvention grant from the College of Arts and Sciences.
The book demonstrates how movies have shaped our expectations of disease outbreaks over the past century, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Diseases in movies reflect and reinforce American expectations about the death and chaos that outbreaks in real life may lead to,” Eisenberg said. “We realized that movies over the last 100 years have shifted from a story about a limited, containable outbreak to stories about mass death and global pandemics.”
Eisenberg collaborated with Robert Alpert from Fordham University and Dr. Lee Mordechai from Hebrew University of Jerusalem to combine their expertise in history of disease, film studies and environmental history.
“We realized there were three historical stages of disease movies,” Alpert said. “First, the beginning of film through the early 1990s where there was a limited, containable outbreak. Second, in the early 1990s through early 2000s, is what we call 'imagined containment’ where the disease is generally stopped, but often by a single hero.
“The third and most present period begins in the mid-2000s. Movie stories of our current times have become much darker, and diseases are now terrifyingly global pandemics that overwhelm human societies and their responses — as in many post-apocalyptic and zombie movies.”
The professors’ book uses specific films to demonstrate how story plots have shifted. “Panic in the Streets” (1950), for example, shows heroic doctors and modern science protecting America from containable outbreaks, whereas “Contagion” (2011), assumes the ineffectiveness of government institutions and depicts mass death and the extinction of humanity.
“Early movies show how disease is contained with low and local mortality,” Eisenberg said. “This happens through the actions of government officials or individual scientists heroically working to protect their community and the world, not for personal profit. Today, the civil servant or ordinary individual as hero is completely out of place and gone from the screen.”
Eisenberg, Alpert and Mordechai’s research aims to show how films are a cultural metric as well as a way to track changes in capitalism that underlie the stories.
“We started writing this book well before the COVID-19 pandemic, but what amazed us is how many people watched disease movies in the first few months of the pandemic’s outbreak and used them to think about what was happening or might happen around them,” Mordechai said. “But the movies have become too apocalyptic in the last few decades so that COVID was quite different.
“It did not, of course, lead to the collapse of America or any other country. These movies also never discuss a key aspect of COVID: that it had disparate impacts based on race, ethnicity, gender, age, health, occupation and other factors.”
Learn more about Eisenberg and his work here. “Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics, and Zombies in American Movies” can be purchased on Amazon and through other booksellers.