There are rare instances where the focus is on the consequences of a pandemic rather than who is to blame – most notably The Andromeda Strain or last year's star-heavy Contagion, which plausibly showed the rapid disintegration of society as a lethal infection spreads round the world.
When it kills, a corpse becomes a lethal and untouchable reservoir of contagion.
It's worth noting that in Contagion, Gwyneth Paltrow's character contracts the lethal virus while on a business trip to China, where she is cheating on her husband, before unwittingly bringing the virus back to the US.
There's a double helping of Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau (4 Mar) – in which he and Emily Blunt dodge the agents of Fate – and Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (21 Oct), where he faces a "lethal airborne virus".
But unlike many of its predecessors, "Contagion," which tracks the global spread of a lethal flulike virus, resists the sheen of science fiction or fantasy and instead stresses the chilling plausibility of its nightmare situation.
The opportunity to collaborate on a major project came about 2 years later, when a Canadian marketing agency asked CURB Media to create a 'living poster' for the premiere of Contagion, a medical thriller that follows the spread of a lethal virus around the world.
The Romero-type zombie, very much the dominant form these days, multiplies by contagion, like a virus: it feeds on flesh, and its bite is lethal, so even those semi-fortunate humans who aren't wholly devoured, but merely gnawed upon, die and come back as shuffling, hollow-eyed flesh-eaters themselves.
Our proximity to migrating animals, rodents and livestock, combined with environmental upheaval, has created conditions that make animal-borne epidemics more likely –- a theme the new film "Contagion" embraces with enough zeal to throw Gwyneth Paltrow into a fit of lethal convulsions.
