It's beginning to look a lot like the end of the world.
As COVID-19 rates spike across Europe and Italy enters a countrywide lockdown, anxiety about what the future might bring is taking hold. For some people this means avoiding the news for the sake of their mental health. Us? We like to take comfort in seeing how contagious illness pandemics play out in fiction.
If that sounds like you, then here's a list of everything you can binge-read, stream or play, because should you find yourself quarantined you'll have a lot of time on your (very clean) hands. Though do take the stories featuring monsters with a pinch of salt.
Films
The Host
What’s worse than a chemically-enhanced river monster kidnapping your children? A chemically-enhanced incubus of viral plague, that’s what. Bong Joon Ho’s The Host tackles that nightmare in full, as one family battles through a quarantined Seoul to rescue their missing daughter. While special effects may have come a long way in 14 years, the film’s tragic portrayal of family dynamics in a time of crisis stands up – and deftly demonstrates why the Parasite director proved so formidable on this year’s awards circuit.
Children Of Men
Eighteen years of global infertility sounds welcome blight if you’ve ever commuted on the Central Line. But in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 adaptation of PD James’s novel, Children Of Men, the widespread lack of knocking up has put humanity on notice. Cue Clive Owen and Julianne Moore being forced to navigate a world of xenophobic rage and violence in a bid to protect its only hope: a young illegal immigrant named Kee who has miraculously fallen pregnant.
WATCH
Rec
Forget the hammy farce that was 2008’s Quarantine: its source material, Rec is a superior film, and a good indication of what your block of flats would look like under military lockdown. Set in modern-day Barcelona, one regrettably nebby reporter shadows firefighters on a routine call, and soon enough, discovers why the local residents have called in sick. Really sick. As in sick as a dog.
The Girl With All The Gifts
Based upon the acclaimed 2014 novel of the same name, The Girl With All The Gifts is a masterful exercise in world building, as the last remnants of the UK band together against a fungal disease that turns humans into ‘hungries’. The titular scion – one of several second-generation children who retain cognitive function alongside typical zombie habits – isn’t just another ‘chosen innocent’ trope either, as Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close and Paddy Considine reason whether they should accept such gifts at all.
Contagion
Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is probably the closest Hollywood got to a premonition. An ensemble cast of Very Big Names (Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Matt Damon et al) impress as vessels and barricades in the global spread of a virus abetted by fake news, civil disorder and mass transit plague farms formerly known as airports. Sound familiar? *cough cough*
Books
Severance by Ling Ma
Candace Chen works in a high-rise building near Times Square, producing different types of Bibles for a publishing company. Her parents are dead and her boyfriend has moved out of the city to escape the capitalist rat-race. When a worldwide epidemic of Shen Fever, from Shenzhen, China, sweeps through the city, she stays, watching as New York becomes a ghost town. Ma's 2018 debut novel is an impressively restrained vision of how the end of the earth might could look like just another boring day at work.
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
In Station Eleven there is still Shakespeare – even after the apocalypse. The book opens with a performance of King Lear on the night that a flu pandemic breaks out in America. Twenty years later, after the illness has ravaged the world, a young girl who appeared in that same production tours the country with the Travelling Symphony while sharing the tales of the Bard. Though the illness is touched upon in the book, what stays with you is the characters wrestling with how to carve out meaning in life after the world has ended.
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
Perfect for those keen to see how an illness might rip society apart in gruelling detail, Pulitzer Prize-winning Zone One picks up in a Manhattan segregated by an illness that has divided people into the infected and uninfected. Telling the story of one of the people tasked with removing the former while keeping order, Whitehead conjures a frighteningly believable world and what preceded it in the events of just three days.
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Nobel Prize-winning author Saramago's 1999 novel starts with a man who goes blind while waiting for a traffic light to change. As his affliction becomes a city-wide contagion, people are rounded up into asylums where violence is rampant. An anxiety-inducing masterpiece about the fear of losing what we have taken for granted, Saramango writes beautifully about anxiety, mass panic and a society on the brink.
The Plague by Albert Camus
A deadly plague forces the people of the town of Oran into quarantine in this 1947 novel by philosopher Camus. As hysteria mounts, people respond with anger, fear or blame, sewing further paranoia and division amongst the group. First intended as a metaphor for the French occupation of Nazi rule during WWII, Camus gives enlightened answers for how we can, and how we should, respond when humanity is pushed to its limits.
The Stand by Stephen King
So striking are the similarities between Stephen King's The Stand and the COVID-19 outbreak that the author himself recently tweeted to point out the differences. In his post-apocalyptic horror novel, a car crash at a petrol station accidentally sparks the spreading of a deadly super-flu called 'Captain Trips', a virus engineered by the government. King maps out how it decimates America, leading to widespread violence, failed attempts at martial law and the death of 99.4 per cent of the population.
The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz
Conspiracy theorists are claiming this 1981 novel has predicted the coronavirus, due to its eerily prescient story of a virus originating in Wuhan, China (the same place COVID-19 first emerged, for those who haven't been anxiously refreshing the news). The thriller follows a woman's attempts to understand the death of her child, leading to her unveiling a sinister government plot involving a virus called 'Wuhan-400', which has a kill-rate of 100 per cent which has been developed as the “perfect” biological weapon.
Documentaries
Pandemic: How To Prevent An Outbreak
Netflix releasing this new documentary at the start of this year was ominously well-timed, but the producer behind Pandemic has said that rather than predicting the virus, they saw it coming "because some of us had seen the system tested in smaller ways and knew its vulnerabilities." In the documentary we see the global risks of pandemics and the people tackling them on the frontlines.
Influenza 1918
The deadly outbreak of influenza in 1918 was the most severe pandemic in (comparatively) recent history, killing an estimated 50 million people worldwide. This documentary tracks how a deadly strain of the virus caused hospitals to spill over and mass graves to be dug, detailing how the illness strangely went away almost as suddenly as it began.
We Were Here
This award-winning look at the impact of the AIDS crisis on San Francisco is a vital and emotional watch. We Were Here focuses on five individuals who were key in the battle against HIV/AIDS, from nurses to activists to counsellors. We Were Here shows the devastating death toll which hit the city and shows how communities rallied together to support each other.
Games
The Last of Us
An outbreak of a mutated fungus is turning people into violent, cannibalistic creatures. You control Joel, the man tasked with getting Ellie, a young girl who could be humanity’s salvation, across America to a lab. Just to give you a feel for the atmos of The Last of Us, Chernobyl head writer Craig Mazin has been tapped up to work up a TV adaptation. It’s a bit heavy, but the depth of its characters and its weaving, heartbreaking story is gripping.
Resident Evil 7
Again, a fairly bleak one, what with being presented with the necessity of shooting your diseased wife in the face within the first 10 minutes or so. There’s also a few impossible moral quandaries to riddle out on your way to sorting out exactly why there are so many reanimated monsters kicking about. The sense of creeping dread’s pretty on-trend too.
Pandemic
The you-versus-the-world-plus-a-virus dynamic of the other games might be a bit of a bad vibe, so try this co-op board game instead. Four players, each with a different special skill from medical research to communications, work together to stop the spread of a virus. All very wholesome, and always handy to have something to turn to when the rolling blackouts come.
Plague Inc
Then again, things can be just as fun on the other side of the hazmat suit, as spikes in sales of Plague Inc during the Ebola outbreak and the current crisis show. This strategy sim puts you in control of a plague that has got into a patient zero. Your aims vary depending on what kind of infection you are, but you’re basically looking to infect the entire world. Meanwhile, those pesky humans are racing against time to create an antidote.
Bloodborne
The Paleblood disease is claiming the inhabitants of Yharnam, and you have to stomp through its slightly dreamlike, Gothic Victorian cityscape trying to sort out where this outbreak came from. While it might look at first glance like a pretty workaday infection with some pretty sharp symptoms, it turns out to be a lot more cosmic and ancient than your usual.
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