I’m going to start off by saying I have NOT done research on what I’m about to say. Normally I like to be backed by some sort of vetted article from JSTOR or an encyclopedia, but this article will be more about feeling.
As you are aware (I hope) the Coronavirus has become the pandemic of the decade (and we are barely 3 months into the roaring 20s). Around me senior centers are shutting down, schools are shutting down, the stock market is tanking, places, where large people gather together, are closing. I work for a university and a theatre, and run my own lil theatre company; my immediate livelihood is becoming more and more precarious.
I recently watched the movie It Comes At Night with my boyfriend, and one thing I brought up was how though I didn’t find the movie to be scary, it fits along with the style of horror that we have seen become a main horror staple of the late 2010s (Birdbox totally beat out It Comes At Night in my opinion).
I feel that we are all fascinated by the idea of pandemics, whether based off of actual pandemics such as The Ghost Map or Love in the Time of Cholera, or fictional, extraordinary pandemics like World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (yes I include zombies, and most other transformation horrors brought on by contact with another being, as pandemic). If you do a basic Google search on books about pandemics, there is a headline by The Vulture named “The Best Pandemic Books to Read During Coronavirus”. And it’s not the only one!
These stories, whether based on fact or purely fiction, play on a very real and viable fear. Getting sick. Because we have all caught something from someone else. That’s the basis of all those weird sex education videos we watched in health class. It’s always something that could happen but it seems far away and distant. We hear about Ebola in Africa all the time and I rarely see that get news coverage. But if Ecoli outbreaks in our precious romaine WATCH OUT! That’s not to make light of the situation, but as soon as that sickness, that outbreak, that pandemic hits home (I guess it becomes an epidemic then?), its all suddenly very real and very scary.
Not only that, but it gives way to xenophobia. And as I touched on in my previous post, America’s climate is ripe for xenophobia and for distinct lines between me and you. Almost all of these stories focus on the survival after the onset of the disease; we are immediately thrust into the barren wastelands of a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world where the protagonist kicks ass, has a trusty sidekick who has a 50/50 chance of catching the virus and dying/turning, and they meet someone along the way who they think they can trust and ends up screwing them over and that is who the protagonist has to overcome. A basic formula, but one we keep returning to. Ridding ourselves of the other and keeping our identity. We are craving to see ourselves survive and triumph.
And I have to admit I have had Mandel’s Station Eleven on my list to read for a while. I watched the movie World War Z with my friend and we swooned over the courage of Brad Pitt. I devoured The Ghost Map when it was required reading in college (and even wrote a very odd slash fanfiction as a gift for a friend because obviously these two people who never came in contact with one another and were busy focusing on solving a deadly disease spreading throughout London were meant to be together).
It’s completely morbid and absolutely horrifying to be living through it, yet we have these best selling novels, some of which become blockbuster movies, flying off the shelves. It’s like living through it isn’t enough. Or maybe it’s too much to live through and it’s better to focus on the bizarre fictional world, or sicknesses that have come and gone and have almost been forgotten. A disassociation by association.
In a fit of curiosity, I wanted to see how mainstream movies about pandemics are in American popular culture…and it seems that the ’80s was when this genre really broke out onto the scene and has continued strong ever since. Blade and Underworld are major franchises built off this genre. In literature, it goes back even further (anyone else had to read The Decameron?).
Pandemics are nothing new, we have lived through them and will continue to do so. I think the presence of social media has made everything that much more immediate. Our fascination for the horror of something real and threatening will never go away. It’s like a sort of weird cousin of the high-place phenomenon. But you can experience it in bed, snuggled up under covers.
This all makes me wonder a couple years down the line, what stories are going to be written about the COVID-19. Who will write the story of a potential 2% of the world population becoming infected (which is well of 6 million people). Will they capture the hushed horror that is blanketing those who are at risk? The outcry at the dropping stock market? The lines in stores for water and toilet paper? Will they even cover what led to the destruction of life as we know it, or jump straight to the action and ignore the panic that happened before? If so, what will our wasteland be? Who will be our protagonist? And will we be saved?
Why We Like Reading 
