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This is the seventh episode in our new RAH! Podcast mini series – A Short Introduction to…
In this episode, Xavier Aldana Reyes will be giving us an introduction to Contagion Films with a focus on the Zombie.
In this episode, Xavier Aldana Reyes will be giving us an introduction to Contagion Films with a focus on the Zombie. We will cover:
Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript below.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.
Rah! Opening Jingle
Lucy Simpson: Hello, and welcome to the Rah podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University and to our seventh episode in our new miniseries. In this episode I will be speaking to Xavier Aldana Reyes about his research in contagion films and the zombie. We will cover:
Rah! Mini Jingle
Lucy: Okay, so I'm here with Xavier Aldana Reyes, and today we're talking about pandemic films. So welcome, Xavier to the podcast.
Xavier: Thank you for having me.
Lucy: So would you like to introduce yourself?
Xavier Aldana Reyes: Yes, I am a reader in the English department and I teach film and literature mostly.
Lucy: So when I first started trying to think of kind of pandemic films, then the most obvious that came to mind were zombie films. And we seem to have a kind of obsession with zombies in the 21st century. And so how do you think the messages about kind of disease or contagion have changed over time or culture? And why do you think we do have this obsession with zombies now? Maybe?
Xavier: Well, I think that in many respects, zombies are the perfect embodiment for viruses. Because they're not necessarily cognisant. You know, they don't think they act on instinct. And they're also very much obsessed with reproducing or you know, the the zombies tagline normally is brains, isn't it? You know, it just wants to eat and normally a zombie bite will mean either instant contagion or gradual contagion. So in that respect, I think that zombies are, in a sense, the embodiment of viruses of pandemics. I also think that unlike, say vampires, which have more of a history that sort of like, is steeped in folklore and religion, you know, if you think about vampires, you normally think about the cross, or holy water as a way of guarding against them. Zombies, especially since the 1960s, are much more secular in the way that they're represented, you know, we don't get rid of zombies with any kind of religious tool, we normally either have to shoot them in the head or you know, or dispose of them in some other way. So I think that they're very sort of like materialist, and they speak well to the kind of concerns that we have nowadays, which are to do with things that we can't control like pandemics. You know, that's one of the reasons why I think they've been so popular, they sort of speak well to the kinds of global concerns that we have now. If you think about the way that zombies they're always all over the place at the same time. You know, again, that's, I think that mirrors our concern with like immediate travel. You know how easy it is for contagions to spread. And so on. And I think one last thing that I'd say about why zombies are significant is I think that in many ways, because the there's been some erosion between what a zombie is and what a rabid human is, you know, in a film like 28 days later, technically, they're not really zombies. They're rabid humans, but they operate and work like zombies. We sort of like used a lot of that language that comes from zombie films to sort of talk about epidemiology. I remember there were articles coming out during the Ebola crisis and SARS that sort of used the same language as zombie films. So yeah, I think they speak to each other. And zombies in a way have sort of like become a contemporary focus of attention. But obviously, it's been there, always our interest in contagion.
Lucy: Well, the more I started thinking about it, the more films I started to think of that would fit into this category of kind of pandemic films, from kind of post-apocalyptic stuff to kind of comedy stuff to historical films as well. And so why do you think that the breadth of this category can be so large and does the way that disease is represented change across genres?
Xavier: So contagion is something that can sort of crossover into very various different genres. And it's something that's always obsessed us because you know, for as long as we've existed, virus have existed, and they're something that we cannot see. So obviously that creates a certain sense of anxiety of not knowing what happens and our knowledge of virus viruses is quite recent as well. So for that reason it contagion as a trope, it's been there for a long, long time. I think, in that respect, we could sort of say that generally, irrespective of genre, you normally have the healthy person or the doctor, you know, the person who can sort out the virus as the good one. And you normally have either the infected or the monster that stands in for the infected as sort of the baddie. Normally you're rooting for the person to eradicate the virus. We're sort of like different genres do different things is for example, the noir normally tells tends to sort of embody the virus in one person. So you'll sort of sort of have it reduced to a vector of contagion. And that will be the person that that's looked after that's sort for, you know, that needs to be either quarantined or eradicated. So I'm thinking of films, for example, like the killer that stalked in New York from 1950, where it's a sort of an outbreak of smallpox, and it can be whittled down to this one woman who travels from Cuba, who is spreading the virus. And so the whole film is about finding her. You know, that's kind of what film noir can do really well, when I'm thinking of like sci-fi and horror, for example, what you can do with that is sort of monsterize the virus, you know turn it into a monster. So in something like the Andromeda Strain, you know, it's an alien virus. We don't know anything about it, which is what tends to happen when a virus first, you know, breaks into the social sphere. So it represents that very well. With horror, we tend to be more interested in sort of, like the dramatics that come with it. The panicking that comes with it. And then of course, there's the melodrama side of things, you know, from a film like Jezebel in the 30s to later, melodramas, like Philadelphia in the 1990s, about the AIDS crisis, those films tend to be more about the human cost of pandemics. And they tend to sort of centre on how a particular illness gets in the way of either a romantic relationship or some sort of family drama. Not unlike say how wars, for example, come into relationships, say like Gone with the Wind. So there's sort of like a certain strand that remains the same but different genres, pick on on different aspects, to sort of develop that sort of speak more, that speak better to their interest, that romantic interest of that genre.
Lucy: And obviously, the horror genre that you mentioned, has a huge kind of element of fear in how we conceive of pandemics and the infected in those films. So how does fear play a role in kind of how we conceive of pandemics more more broadly? And how disease is conceived of on screen?
Xavier: That's a very good point because obviously horror is ultimately consumed with you know, creating fear and its subsidiary emotions you know, whether that's dread or the shock you know, the discovery of you know, the infected or whatever. I think what horror does really well of course, is sort of channel panic, you know, as a reaction. So, when I kept seeing those videos of people stocking up loo roll, for example, I kept on thinking, you know, that's the kind of reaction that you get in survivalist horror, you know, it's every man for themselves. So I think horror can do that really well can sort of explore the panic side of contagion really well, it's sort of what what's human about those reactions, you know, the idea of protecting yourself, especially in American films of protecting your family, that sort of vigilante style, sort of attitude to you know, that we've seen in something like The Walking Dead. So I think horror can sort of channel that better than other genres, but ultimately, of course, it will be interested in creating some sort of emotional empathy in the viewer. And so contagion will be used, perhaps exploitatively to sort of scare you as well.
Lucy: And one thing that struck me was kind of the fear is largely about people too. About kind of people who might be carriers, people who might be kind of desperate to survive, and that kind of every man for himself thing that you mentioned, and also kind of people in power who might not make the right decisions about how to kind of control the crisis. And so I just wondered if you could say a little bit about that.
Xavier: Yes, definitely. These narratives are always about societal collapse, and they're always about exactly what do we want to bring back from society that collapsed? Obviously, that speaks to our concerns about, you know, our governments acting the way that they should, you know, no, no government reacts in exactly the same way. So which is the best way, which is the worst way, in terms of what you were saying about survivalism. That's such a significant part, especially what we were talking about before. For the zombie film, they're very much about the idea of a sort of moral relativism, that what's good for, for a group of people, for a community of people might not be good for another community of people, but ultimately communities of people is how we function socially. So the Walking Dead has done that really well, in terms of exploring, you know, the particular trajectory of one group of survivors and how like their coming into contact with other groups of survivors is not always the best thing for either side, because they're all just trying to survive. So I think these stories, contagion horror, if you like, tends to sort of question whether there is such a thing as a general good, or whether good is always effectively a selfish thing, which I think is interesting, so many films, like from Carriers to The Road, It Comes at Night, for example, is another film that sort of like, you know, puts this much fear on others, you know, the fear of the person, especially people who come from outside the community into you know, a surviving community that sort of questions that, I think also much more than ever before we're imagining the apocalypse, you know, the end of things, perhaps that’s sort of a reaction to what we perceive as an unsustainable economic system. I think climate change has had a lot to do with it. There's a lot of overlap between apocalyptic fiction, zombie fictions, contagion fictions, and climate change, cli-fi I think, I think it's called now. And what's interesting about them because we've always had dystopian fiction is that they are placed a lot sort of closer in the future than they used to be. We used to fantasise about the end of the world 100 years in. Now, it's more like 10, 20, 30 years. So I think it has to do with our perception that some of the habits that have become sort of like, day to day habits for us are not necessarily sustainable in the long term.
Lucy: And another thing that I thought of when I was kind of thinking of these films was the kind of strain of comedy zombie films and kind of Sean of the Dead, Zombieland, and things like that. And I found that really, really interesting and a little bit strange that that fear that you've already described can also kind of lend itself to comedy. And so why do you think that is?
Xavier: Well, I think sort of horror in its Gothic, bent or otherwise has always sort of been a source of parody from the very beginning. If you think about, say, for example, the very first trick films, you know, where ghosts most of the time not real, yeah, it's som- somebody, you know, it's a hoax, or somebody sort of trying to convince someone else that a ghost exists so that they can, I don't know, take over the house or something. I think the potential has always been there to sort of, like poke fun at it. And I think what makes zombies particularly a good source of humour is that they embody all of the corporeal side of us, you know, in its most abject form, you know, they ooze, they break, all the icky things about being humour, they lend themselves to that kind of slapstick kind of humour. And they're also as I said before, they don't necessarily Think. I think the conscious zombies are a case apart, but the sort of like unconscious, instinctual zombie is sort of like a modern version of that typical figure of comedy The Fool, right? They can just be driven into places they can be sort of, like played with, I think at one point in Shaun of the Dead, you know, when they throw the, what is it, the LP and it sort of, like, gets stuck in the head, it's a moment of comedy, because also the thing with zombies is, you can hurt them in many ways, because they don't actually hurt. They're already dead. So yeah, that that lends itself to all sorts of slapstick numbers, I think.
Lucy: And I mean, I'm a big fan of Sean of the Dead, so I kind of had to ask that question. And but so what would be your kind of pandemic film recommendation then?
Xavier: I think I have two. One if you're up for something bleak, and then another one if you're up for something a bit more upbeat, although of course, these are contagion films about the end of the world. So maybe, maybe upbeat is not the word. The bleak one, I would probably have to say The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman 1957 film, it's a great sort of reflection not just on pandemic and the helplessness of sort of dealing with something that you've no ultimate control over. It's a great reflection of how we take to religion as an answer, for example, but it's also an interesting introspective view of death. There's a really interesting game of chess between death and one of the characters whose trying to distract death so that he will save himself and others. At one point death, you know, sort of says no one escapes me. It just strikes me as an interesting concept. And it's got this beautiful image at the end of a sort of like a dance macabre on a mountain. So that's, that's one for the introspective person who does not mind a bit of bleak. If you want to think a bit more uplifting, I've always loved The Stand the Mick Garris miniseries. It's a really interesting adaptation of the Stephen King novel, were sort of survivors of this, you know, cataclysmic pandemic that's killed 99% of the world, starts sort of like gathering together, you know, some of them gather into the side of good and the other half sort of gather in the side of bad. And unlike the novel, it has a positive ending. And I've always found it one of the most compelling horror films to watch, especially regarding contagion.
Lucy: Well, thanks Xavier for joining us on the Rah podcast.
Xavier: Brilliant. Thank you for having me again.
Rah! Mini Jingle
Lucy: Thank you for listening. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates. You can find us at @mmu_rah. Tune back and soon for more episodes.
Rah Closing Jingle
Lucy: This episode of the Rah podcast was produced presented and edited by Lisa Simpson and mixed by Julian Holloway.