Amid senators dumping stock while lying to the public about the true danger of the virus, rumors of Trump seeking to profit from a potential COVID-19 vaccine, the farce of the American billionaire philanthropist, and the idea that grandparents should lay down their lives for the sake of the stock market, cries of “eat the rich” ring out on social media.
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While you’re locked in, have you been watching movies about zombies? Horrifying viruses? Scorched nuclear wastelands? You’re not alone. Watching exaggerated virus-based apocalypse scenarios play out on screen can be oddly comforting and even informative during our pandemic shutdown. Surprisingly useful information can be hidden in the plot lines of gory zombie romps and desolate dystopian nightmare films. Here is your (spoiler-riddled) four-film manual to surviving the COVID-19 epidemic.
Pandemic (2020)
Listen to the fucking doctors and the goddamn scientists (and vaccinate your shit-ass kids).
The docuseries Pandemic is Netflix’s eerily timely examination of the global fight against the spread of infectious disease. The series follows epidemiologists tracking the flu in bats and birds in Egypt, a beleaguered doctor in a critically understaffed rural hospital, and vaccine developers in bustling tech-hub San Francisco. On opposite coasts and opposite ends of the battle between science and bunkum, Dr. Syra Madad scrambles to gather funding and prepare personnel for an epidemic to hit New York City, while nouveau-hippie mothers in Corvallis, Oregon, refuse to vaccinate their children, turning instead to placenta capsules and essential oils for protection against disease.
As Dr. Madad runs Ebola drills in a New York City hospital, Dr. Michel Yao fights Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and must battle both the disease and the superstitions of local people who are not familiar with modern medicine, primarily due to the lack of medical resources in their country. The people Dr. Yao encounters have suffered war, famine, poverty, and coup after coup, and are understandably skeptical of men in uniforms and hazmat suits who promise their intentions are pure.
Here in America, the woe-is-us pontificating of Corvallis anti-vaxxer moms comes off not as true and innocent ignorance but as arrogant and willful disregard of decades of solid medical science.
The world over, scientists and doctors make the ultimate sacrifice in the hopes of saving humanity, only to be doomed by a woman with a pilfered Indian name like Lakshmi who refuses to vaccinate her kids.
If we’re going to survive this waking nightmare, we need to do the opposite of every zombie-apocalypse naysayer and every placenta-eating white privilege guru with their head in the sand.
We need to listen to the doctors and the scientists we’ve failed to heed for so long.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Racism will have you forgetting who the real enemy is.
Night of the Living Dead is at once the foundation of all American zombie horror and the playbook on how to couch a social issue (like racism and police violence) in the subtext of a bloody zombie survival flick.
Ben, played by Duane Jones, is the only character who keeps a level head as the living dead lay siege to a farmhouse where Ben (who is black) is holed up with a bunch of hysterical white people who several times sabotage his plans to barricade the doors and outlast the dead.
Ben becomes the first of many black men who don’t live to see the credits roll when he is shot dead by police and burned amongst the piled corpses of the now truly dead.
Written and directed by horror titan George Romero, the film was released in 1968 as unrest and tension continued to reverberate through the nation following the civil rights movement and events like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Night of the Living Dead did not kill Ben off right away like many horror movies that sacrifice a black dude immediately for the sake of cheap exposition. Romero had Ben fight off ravenous, reanimated corpses and contend with the even more deadly tears of unreasonable white women only to be sniped out by faceless jackbooted cops.
Between Trump referring to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus” and Republican Texas senator John Cornyn claiming that COVID-19 was caused by Chinese people eating bats, blatantly racist bullshit linking Chinese culture and Chinese people to the spread of the virus has spread almost as quickly as the virus itself.
Chinese and Asian Americans have reported being harassed, stalked, hit, spit on and even stabbed.
To be sure, Ben’s death cannot be applied to all situations about racism during times of crisis; his death was and is about anti-black violence and especially violence committed by police. However, during the panic of COVID-19, Ben’s predicament mirrors that of Chinese and Asian Americans. Like Ben, Asian Americans are being labeled the threat, othered and dehumanized, and inevitably targeted in violent racist attacks.
During a pandemic, racism will have you forget that if humanity is to defeat the virus we need to remember that the virus is the enemy. Asian Americans are not part of the inhuman threat we face. They are part of the human us, and we are all in this together.
(It is also worth noting that racism and police violence against black Americans will not simply vanish during the pandemic, and that the fight for black lives has not gone away, it has simply moved indoors.)
Pontypool (2008)
Talk is dangerous.
Pontypool is a criminally underrated bloody indie horror delight in which morning radio host Grant Mazzy finds himself grappling with a horde of parroting fiends. A virus unlike any other has taken over their small town, and is spreading rapidly through language.
After being infected, the mindless assailants infect others, then quickly kill themselves and as many others as possible in a bizarre string of kamikaze attacks.
The message of Pontypool has never been more clear or more applicable than in the time of COVID-19: Talk can kill.
After the misconception that COVID-19 was no more harmless than the flu, people failed to take proper precautions and rates of infection skyrocketed. Dangerous miracle “cures” or “proven treatments” such as methanol, colloidal silver, and even consuming bleach were hailed as the answer to COVID-19.
In what may be the only “on the nose” moment in the film, Grant Mazzy looks to his microphone in desperation: “But we need to tell people about this, people need to know, we have to get this out,” he says.
“Well it’s your call, Mr. Mazzy,” says Dr. Mendez, a virologist who escaped the horde and is holed up in the radio station’s sound booth. “Let’s just hope what you’re getting out there isn’t going to destroy your world.”
Misinformation spreads quickly, and once it’s out there, the damage is done. Before sharing or even believing any information related to COVID-19, check it against fact-checking sites like FactCheck.org, snopes.com, and against sites with credible information generated by doctors and scientists on the front lines, such as the CDC, WHO, NIH, and FDA.
Mayhem (2017)
It isn’t enough to eat the rich, we have to eat the system that allows people to hoard wealth in the first place.
In Mayhem, Steven Yeun is Derek Cho, corporate lawyer at Towers and Smythe Consulting, in his own words, “a firm fueled by greed, duplicity, and moral decay.”
Samara Weaving plays Melanie Cross, whose house is under foreclosure, while the vultures at TSC represent the bank that is about to collect.
Just as Melanie is dragged off by security, Derek is framed for bungling a deal with a multibillion-dollar client, and summarily shit-canned.
Minutes later, before Melanie and Derek can be thrown off the premises, the entire nine-story office building is locked down after being infected with the ID-7 virus.
The virus activates the id, the host’s basest desires to fuck, kill, and consume. Though their inner animal comes out to play, “redders,” named for the red eye they sport while infected, retain their reason and cunning. Unlike their brainless zombie counterparts, redders can plot and connive.
Derek and Melanie hatch a plan to get Derek’s job and Melanie’s house back from TSC. Their climb to the ninth-floor penthouse boardroom is symbolic of climbing the corporate ladder; they lose a little more humanity with every floor as they maim and kill their way to the top.
Mayhem is not only a commentary on corporate greed, but an indictment of people like Derek, who despises The Nine (the board of directors who make all the decisions) for their corruption and avarice but will stop at nothing to claim a seat at the boardroom table.
Amid senators dumping stock while lying to the public about the true danger of the virus, rumors of Trump seeking to profit from a potential COVID-19 vaccine, the farce of the American billionaire philanthropist, and the idea that grandparents should lay down their lives for the sake of the stock market, cries of “eat the rich” ring out on social media.
Eating the rich won’t be enough. To prevent people from becoming resource-hoarding assholes, we have to dismantle the system that bases a person’s worth on their wealth.
