Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies

American movies about infectious diseases have reflected and driven dominant cultural narratives during the past century. These movies – both real pandemics and imagined zombie outbreaks – have become wildly popular since the beginning of the 21st century.
They have shifted from featuring a contained outbreak to an imagined containment of a known disease to a globalized, uncontainable pandemic of an unknown origin. Movie narratives have changed from identifying and solving social problems t...