I think horror gets there first because the first gut-reactive emotion to the new is: FEAR.



Anything new tends to scare the masses and so there will always be a horror film to support a general anxiety.

Is it possible to ask Mr. Soderbergh if there is any news on the Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie?.

So little information on the project on a film that COULD be one of the coolest ever/never to be made.....

Did anyone else see Fernando Meirelles' 'Blindness' starring the always fab Julianne Moore? That too comes from a very 'real' perspective the riff being, 'how would the world re-act if everyone began loosing their sight'. It is a zombie film in different clothes and rather good too.

Films like Contagion serve no positive purpose to humanity. Don't get me wrong, it will be a brilliant horror movie, but it won't help us deal with a contagion when it happens for real. It'll show us to be the panicky, self-servicing (too hell with others, I'll have to help my family'), idiots we mainly are. God help us if a world wide contagion acually happens.

@3 - The Blindness is an interesting film and concept but it is ultimately flawed film, which actually for a large chunk is owes more to Lord of the Flies than any Sci-Fi conventions as it focuses on the baseness of the human pysche when the chips are down.



Agree with Mark though for stuff like Rabid (1977) and The Thing (1982) really do capture the kind of panic and hysteria that this films are trying aim for.

@danguardace - I'm so glad you mentioned Rabid, as that was the film that sprang instantly to my mind. It was the first Cronenberg film I saw, in an all-night horror show in 1982 at the Haymarket Newcastle with Shivers, The Brood, Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead, and the bleakness of the Canadian winter was the perfect backdrop to the unfolding horror.



Heck, even Marilyn Chambers was good in it, although you can't help wondering what it would have been like if Cronenberg had got his original choice of Sissy Spacek...

I agree that horror gets their first and often better. I disagree on the vampire films as it seems to me in the main, e.g. near dark, that their metaphor is more akin to drug addiction that infection. Looking forward to contagion very much and your full pithy review (or will that be next week?) Ta.

I have seen Romero's 'The Crazies' but thought it retrod old ground of the "living dead" films, but i'll give it a second look on Mark's endorsement.



As regard to 'Contagion', films like this and 'The Crazies' have their roots in the "paranoid thriller" dating back to 'Invasion of the body snatchers' in 1956 (in my opinion the best version). These films tapped into peoples fear of the breakdown of society and humanity in the atomic age.

If,and it is a big IF,World War Z is very much like the Max Brooks novel that will be the ultimate 'contagion' type film.

"... really, intelligent, smart film..."!?!

ACK!!!

The original "The Crazies" was an awful film, Mark... An AWFUL film!!! There were interesting concepts presented, but the entire production was an 'amateur' effort AT BEST. There is nothing evident in the original version of "The Crazies" that the writer did any research about anything. The military especially are given the short shrift. Romero's image of the military is no deeper than presenting trigger-happy guys in uniform with guns and someone tapping a snare drum in the background. The script is almost as bad as the actors in the film. ALMOST. The soundtrack is AWFUL deviating from the less than subtle mock versions of old military stand-bys to provide some screeching post 60s folk music. These songs are supposed to be meaningful, but are sufficient to cause the viewer (me, at least) to hit the mute button. There is nothing artistic about the way the film was shot, either. They apparently had no idea what lighting is used for. The sound is horrible, as is the editing. There was no mood created even though this was supposed to be bubbling with paranoia. There IS a little gratuity in the guise of character development, but to even say the words 'character development'... that would assume that "The Crazies" was a professionally made movie. It was not. The remake was far superior, and while ('whilst'?) I thought it (the remake) was entertaining, it was still flawed even by low budget horror film standards. Just not as flawed as the original.

I was rather annoyed when people had no knowledge of Romero's Crazies when the 'remake' came out. I would argue however that the context seems vastly different between the two films. Crazies was very much a small town movie of which there are many yet the modern trend views these events in a global scale. If anything Contagion looks like it may owe more to Day of The Triffids, Virus (1980) and other very similiar large level disaster movies; not so much Romero's small scale paranoia as large level hysteria shown at the end of Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead.



I think you have to remember that it is science fiction in the same way as Children of Men is sci-fi. They may cover it in a gritty realism but ultimately the plot is relying on a rather large fantastical concept.

Allot of the shots in 'Contagion' reming me of the extraordinary opening to '28 Days Later' with Cillian Murphy walking through a compleatly empty and silent London.

Contagion does put me in mind of Terry Nation's TV series 'Survivors' from the 70's. (Not the flakey 2008 version). Though it focusses far more on the aftermath, it is none the less chilling in its depiction of a contagious virus.

Movies like Arthur Penn's 'The Chase' or any that incorporate mass hysteria as a a social disease could be said to be contagion movies - the contagion of paranoia and small-mindedness that Atticus Finch would stand up to.

I wonder if anytime soon a film will be made where the contagion is a financial meltdown; food, fuel and rent prices soar beyond the reach of many people, companies and governments can no longer pay employees, organised law and order breaks down and the like.



Horror movies are often credited with tapping into the fears of the zeitgeist, this is an obvious vein of contemporary collective fear explore.

There’s no originality in ‘End of the World’ type mediums now.

They all carry over the same sort of notion that it invariably becomes an unfortunate bore.

‘oh look zombies’ zzzzzzzzzz, ‘oh look a disease’ zzzzzzzzzz ‘oh look alien plants’ wtf? Oh I mean zzzzzzz.



I wouldn’t mind watching or reading something where the future is happy and alive and possibly more positive,but that sounds daft.O bugger it!, where’s my sledge hammer.

OUTBREAK is a much better film than CONTAGION,

because of course in Outbreak, Patrick Dempsey's organs get eaten from the inside out until they're nothing but a festering mephitic soup. Worth the price of admission in my book.

Dr K,

You must have been reading my mind..:-) when I first saw the trailer for Contagion,I immediately thought of Romero's The Crazies. Post Apocalyptic films like 28 Days Later and The Road for instance have always held a huge fascination for me and for thousands of others I'm sure. I genuinely believe as humans we are so fearful of it actually happening, in a bizzare way we want to see more of it. I Remember watching Children of Men for the first time at the cinema and it blew me away, it lingered in my memory for days.Thought provoking and disturbing pieces never fail to make their mark...Why? Because we enjoy confronting our fears.

I love "And The Band Played On". A factually based movie about what was HIV and where it first was diagnosed and how it came to be spread. It was scientific and humanistic, rather than sensationalising the disease.



However, Contagion does look to be interesting. With such a stellar cast, I'll certainly give it a go.

Red State was also terrible, Mark. Decidedly left wing, confused, meandering, poorly written, directed, shot and acted. Smith seems to further regress with each new film. It's what I expected, though.

I can't agree with the doctors oppinion about this movie. He says it's gripping and interessting... I actually found it extremly boring and in some scenes also a little bit silly.

A audio of you calling a Michael Bay film "great" has surfaced https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV4ur2UdnPA

Contagion is a good film, not a great one, certainly not a gripping or distressing one, but simply a good film. It is well acting by its ensemble cast and has a good sense of realism, but I felt emotionally detached from the under-developed characters and it is probably a little too slow-paced and subtle for its own good. All in all though it is still worth seeing if you like this genre of film.



On the topic of The Crazies, I liked the remake much more than the original.

I'm not sure "thriller" is the right classification for Contagion. I'd class it more as a speculative docudrama. We are kept at a cool remove from the ensemble of characters, which rarely given much depth beyond the high profile casting choices.



I found it fascinating and interesting throughout, but it steadfastly avoided the dramatic. If were watching a horror or sci fi with lab techs in tunnel hazmat suits, at some point some unlucky geek will have an unfortunate scalpel related breach to their sterile containment, that doesn't happen here. There are hints of a break down to law and order, as we'd see in any zombie or similar apocalypse, but that strangely goes nowhere and is swept under the carpet in completely unspecified ways by the end. It's worthy attention to detail keeps it from leaving the ground, Andromeda Strain, but all strain without the Andromeda. So apart from reinforcing whatever OCD or hypochondraic tendencies you may have, it's forgettable. Still, you could catch it if it's, say, an in flight movie, although, probably the worst place to see it.



It is nice that Soderbergh chose to be interviewed by phone on 5 Live, he's conscientious about not becoming the next vector. Let's not forget that in Carpenter's The Thing, one of the scientists estimates the time for the Thing to take over the world, should it escape Antarctica, by using a mathematical model for infection.

Well saw Contagion last night and I have to say pardon the pun but it left me rather cold. I felt no connection to the characters mainly through lack of any real development. It made me realise how clever Danny Boyle was with 28 Days Later, that one scene where Cillian Murphy recalls the family moments in the kitchen when he returns to his home is priceless, and I immediately felt a connection, it's a stand out film for me in so many ways, and watching Contagion last only highlighted that fact.