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This book examines the recent trend in global cinema to feature infectious disease.
As the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic materialised the anxieties and discourses of world risk that had long been portrayed in popular media, the book provides a novel definition of the epidemic film genre and offers a systematic look into the narrative and stylistic conventions that characterise it. Epidemic Cinema traces the evolution of the genre from its early cinematic origins to establish the founding principles of a genre standing at the crossroads between science-fiction and horror. It draws on close textual analysis to show how the pandemic reified one of the central predicaments of epidemic narratives: the constant tension existing between free-floating phenomena and the impulse to control and resist such phenomena, ultimately epitomised by the trope of the border. Showing how infectious diseases offer a rich allegorical frame which cinema uses to articulate timely anxieties of growingly invisible and deterritorialised risks, the author presents the prevalence of contagion in popular culture as a symptom of this growingly viral and virus-ridden context, both in its most literal and metaphorical sense.
This insightful study will interest students and scholars of film studies, global cinema, science-fiction, horror, popular culture and genre theory.
List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Plague-Metaphors in the Age of the Virus
Chapter 2. The Origins of the Genre
Chapter 3. Defining the Epidemic Genre
Chapter 4. Connectivity: Contagion and Viral (Dis)Information
Chapter 5. Territorial Conversion: Children of Men and Viral Fear
Chapter 6. Bodily Conversion: Warm Bodies and Viral Love
Chapter 7. Containment: Blindness and Viral Media
Conclusion
About the author
Julia Echeverría is a Doctor in Film Studies from the University of Zaragoza, Spain, where she works as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Humanities
Summary
This book examines the recent trend in global cinema to feature infectious disease.
Report
"When it comes to defining the genre of epidemic cinema Echeverria's book is certainly one of the best, if not the best, in laying out the conventions of the iconography of a genre that has finally received its proper attention in cinema studies. Its delineation of the genre's epidemiological characteristics of connectivity, containment, and conversion is superb. A must-read for anyone interested in how cinema reflects and shapes our understanding of global crises, collective vulnerability, and the cultural logics of contagion."
-- Tom Zaniello, Northern Kentucky University, USA
"Epidemic Cinema: The Rise of a Genre is absolutely timely, yet its author, Julia Echeverria, had already identified the centrality of the epidemic narrative long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Echeverria makes the bold claim that the epidemic narrative has evolved into a full-feldged film genre, with affinities to horror, science fiction but also melodrama and the action movie. Her book sets out to delineate the genre's contours, its history and its function as reflecting contemporary anxieties. More specifically, Echeverria pays special interest to the epidemic as a fundamentally transnational issue in a globalized context and, thus, as a prism through which to investigate the potentials and limitations of cosmopolitanism. Illuminating both obvious and less obvious case studies through rigorous formal analysis, Epidemic Cinema is without doubt an indispensable contribution to the fields of horror, science fiction and transnational studies and essential reading to anyone with an interest in the representation of disease on screen."
-- David Roche, Université Paul Valéry, France
