Epidemic Cinema: The Rise of a Genre

The book Epidemic Cinema explores the recent trend in global cinema to feature infectious disease, tracing the evolution of the genre from its early cinematic origins to establish the founding principles of a genre 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 between free-floating phenomena and the impulse to control and resist them.

Format: Hardback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 08 December 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

The recent trend in global cinema to feature infectious disease is explored in-depth in this comprehensive book. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, it brought to the forefront the anxieties and discourses of world risk that had long been portrayed in popular media. In response, Epidemic Cinema offers a novel definition of the epidemic film genre and provides a systematic analysis of the narrative and stylistic conventions that characterize it.

Epidemic Cinema traces the evolution of the genre from its early cinematic origins to establish the foundational principles that define it as a genre that straddles science-fiction and horror. Through close textual analysis, the book demonstrates how the pandemic reified one of the central predicaments of epidemic narratives: the constant tension between free-floating phenomena and the impulse to control and resist them. This tension is ultimately embodied by the trope of the border, which serves as a symbolic representation of the boundaries between different worlds and the struggles to navigate them.

Showing how infectious diseases offer a rich allegorical frame that cinema uses to articulate timely anxieties of growingly invisible and deterritorialized risks, the author presents the prevalence of contagion in popular culture as a symptom of this increasingly viral and virus-ridden context. In both its literal and metaphorical sense, the book explores how infectious diseases permeate various aspects of society, from media and entertainment to politics and healthcare.

This insightful study will appeal to students and scholars of film studies, global cinema, science-fiction, horror, popular culture, and genre theory. It provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the ways in which cinema responds to global crises and the role that it plays in shaping our perceptions of risk and vulnerability.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032541358