16 Best Movies About Disease Outbreaks and Pandemics
During his presidential campaign, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., promised to suspend infectious disease research for eight years , supposedly because our chances of encountering any kind of infectious disease would be almost zero once fluoride disappeared from our water supply. In celebration of a disease-free world in the very near future, let’s take a look back at films that explore worlds where viruses and diseases (or related metaphors) run rampant.
These films vary greatly in tone and style, but there are some recurring themes: science and scientists (however flawed) are almost always a source of hope, while the effectiveness of politicians and bureaucracies in using technology to provide assistance is mixed, reflecting our deep ambivalence about the power and willingness of government to help us in times of crisis. Some of these films suggest that during a virus crisis we are largely on our own, but only where there is no medicine. Others, with less sense of the inevitable, are developing vaccines or related drugs. At least in the movies, it seems like hope lies in medical science.
Flash (1995)
Wolfgang Petersen’s medical thriller, which combines virology with disaster-movie swagger, may not be the most rigorous in its commitment to science. In Outbreak, an all-star cast fights to stop an epidemic of Motaba, a fictional Ebola-like disease that mutates after being smuggled into the country via an infected capuchin monkey from the jungles of Zaire. I imagine it’s very 90s, with terror coming from the heart of Africa, while efforts to prevent everyone in a small California town from dying from the virus are complicated by factions within the US military who want to keep it secret, potentially to be used as a weapon. Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Donald Sutherland and Cuba Gooding Jr. are among the film’s scientists and accomplices. You can rent Outbreak from Prime Video .
The Killer Who Haunted New York (1950)
It’s tempting to say that there’s a smallpox epidemic raging on the outskirts of this decent if mediocre noir, but it’s the story of the outbreak that elevates this 1950 crime drama. The film is based on the very real 1947 smallpox epidemic in New York City . The unintentional killer is Sheila Bennett (Evelyn Keyes), a diamond smuggler in hiding who is unaware that she is spreading the disease while evading the authorities (the real Patient Zero was a traveling carpet merchant, not a jewel-smuggling femme fatale). In real life, as depicted in the film, a massive vaccination campaign saw civil authorities, pharmaceutical companies and the military teaming up to provide vaccines, along with thousands of volunteers. Just 600,000 New Yorkers were inoculated in the first week, and the smallpox outbreak ultimately killed only two people. Rather, the film sets out to hunt Sheila in hopes that she will do the right thing and provide the contact tracing needed to ensure that those most affected get vaccinated. You can stream The Killer Who Haunted New York on Prime Video and Pluto TV.
12 Monkeys (1996)
A group of scientists approach James Cole (Bruce Willis), imprisoned in the (fast-approaching) year 2035, with a mission: they plan to send him back in time to 1996, when a deadly plague began wiping out most of humanity, in the hopes that he can collect a sample of the original virus to help them develop a cure. Not the wildest medical idea we’ve heard in a while! Unfortunately, Cole is sent back too soon and his mission is jeopardized when he is admitted to a mental hospital. The film’s themes relate to the general stickiness of our choices and the fact that the ball of fate, once it starts rolling, is very, very difficult to stop. You can rent 12 Monkeys from Prime Video .
Masque of the Red Death (1964)
One of Roger Corman and Vincent Price’s best and almost certainly most psychedelic works, this adaptation of Poe is a sumptuous descent into hell. Price plays Prince Prospero, a sadistic nobleman in medieval Italy. When a local woman dies from the mysterious titular plague, Prospero orders the village burned and invites the wealthy nobles to his castle. While the desperate, now homeless villagers scream at the gates, the local nobility celebrate their way through the end of the world, oblivious to the suffering they have caused – at least until the procession of the world’s diseases finds them all drunk and unprepared. A happy ending, you might say. You can stream The Masque of the Red Death on Pluto TV or rent it on Prime Video .
Contagion (2011)
The relative precision of Steven Soderbergh’s drama is as fascinating as it is frustrating: the idea of a respiratory virus evolving from bats, with deaths in the millions, leading to mass quarantines as well as social distancing, and providing plenty of fodder for conspiracy theorists – well, it suggests there were things we might be better prepared for. Although it contains some of the same disaster movie moments as The Flash , this film is overall more restrained and seemingly much more scientifically accurate . You can rent Contagion from Prime Video .
The Andromeda Strain (1971)
Ever-reliable director Robert Wise adapts Michael Crichton’s novel about a microorganism from the Earth’s upper atmosphere that causes blood to clot almost instantly. Which is bad. Paranoid reactions are even worse. It works in the same way as other Crichton stories: the somewhat outlandish premise is played completely straight (think Jurassic Park ) so that you almost get excited about it happening. You can rent The Andromeda Strain on Prime Video .
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
This is the first of three major film adaptations of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend , and Matheson worked on it himself, although he was not very happy with the results. However, the film’s comparatively low budget sets it apart from later, more action-packed outtakes (notably The Omega Man and I Am Legend )—as a result, the film is comparatively more contemplative. Vincent Price is Dr. Robert Morgan, the only person in the world (as far as he knows) not infected by the plague that turned everyone else into vampires. An encounter with a mysterious woman leads Dr. Morgan to believe that the infection is treatable, but can never be cured (it might help if there was more than one human scientist left alive, but I guess you work with what you’ve got). You can stream The Last Man on Earth on Tubi, Pluto TV and Prime Video .
Philadelphia (1993)
There are better films about the darkest days of the first HIV/AIDS crisis, but few have had a greater cultural impact than this popular star-studded legal drama. It was the first time Hollywood approached the topic in any meaningful way, and one of the very first times queer characters were portrayed positively—it’s also a pretty good portrayal of the legal issues and consequences that come with an unchecked pandemic. Tom Hanks plays Andrew Beckett, a successful senior associate at a major law firm in a major city who begins to develop lesions (specifically Kaposi’s sarcoma) related to the AIDS diagnosis he had been hiding. When he is fired without explanation, he hires Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), one of the few lawyers who will take his wrongful termination claim. It is loosely based on the real-life case of Geoffrey Bowers, which was settled eight years after his death. You can rent Philadelphia from Prime Video .
Isle of the Dead (1945)
An unsung classic from producer Val Lewton and director Mark Robson, Isle of the Dead’s plot belies its ominous title, telling the story of a Greek general (Boris Karloff) attempting to maintain a quarantine on an isolated island. Taking a break to visit his wife’s grave during the Balkan Wars of 1912, General Nicholas Ferides arrives with an American reporter at exactly the wrong time: deaths attributed to supernatural forces by some locals are diagnosed by a local doctor as the first signs of an outbreak of septicemic plague. He fights not only local superstitions and disdain for modern(ish) science, but also attempts by less gullible locals to escape the island and thus expose the mainland to a plague that would otherwise be contained. Fortunately, we modern people are not capable of such unscientific stupidity. You can rent Isle of the Dead from Prime Video .
Arrowsmith (1931)
Ronald Colman plays Dr. Martin Arrowsmith in this pre-Code John Ford film that, although it sometimes veers into melodrama, takes science relatively seriously, at least in the abstract. When a young medical student meets the love of his life, Leora (Helen Hayes), he abandons research for a more lucrative practice. However, due to an outbreak of bubonic plague in the West Indies, he was reunited with an old mentor to study the effectiveness of a new antibiotic serum that Arrowsmith had helped develop. What is more important that the serum gets into the hands (or rather, into the veins) of as many dying people as possible? Or conduct research with greater scientific rigor that could lead to greater benefits in the long term? You can stream Arrowsmith on Tubi and Prime Video .
Record (2007)
In this excellent horror film from Spain, reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman are on a seemingly sleepy assignment covering the night shift of one of Barcelona’s local fire stations. However, the zombie hell breaks loose when a call about an elderly woman locked in her apartment reveals that they are all trapped in a quarantine building in which people are being infected, one by one, by a mysterious pathogen. There are clever nods to contact tracing and a few fun twists on actual science (maybe don’t do science experiments and definitely don’t do demonic things in your penthouse apartment, thank you), but the atmosphere here is mostly howling horror, as well as paranoia: They’ve all been locked up by the authorities, and it’s unclear whether someone from the outside is helping or just waiting for them to die. After COVID, it feels like the pandemic has been squeezed into one building. The American remake ( “Quarantine” ), in which it is the CDC that locks everyone up, is also not bad. You can stream Rec on Tubi or rent it from Prime Video .
Normal Heart (2014)
Larry Kramer adapted his own largely autobiographical play for this New York-set drama chronicling the rise of the city’s HIV/AIDS crisis between 1981 and 1984. Mark Ruffalo plays Ned Weeks, Kramer’s alter ego, who helps a sick friend during a Fire Island birthday party only to return to New York to discover that several dozen gay men have been diagnosed with a “rare cancer.” The film captures the immediacy of those early days, as well as the medical and public relations battles that were fought to bring attention to a disease that politicians and the mainstream media didn’t care about. Even after decades of social and medical advances, queerphobia is still widespread and funding for HIV/AIDS is at rock bottom, making these characters’ rage feel frustratingly immediate. You can stream The Normal Heart on Max or rent it from Prime Video .
Containment (2015)
In an outdated council flat in Weston, artist Mark (Lee Ross) awakens to find himself locked in his flat with no way out. There is no electricity, and the only information comes through an intercom, presumably provided by the men in hazmat suits patrolling the building outside. The scenario is a bit like Lord of the Flies , but more unsettling is the sense that in the event of a disaster, the worst thing may well be the lack of reliable and reliable information. You can stream Containment on Prime Video and Tubi.
It Comes at Night (2017)
A family hunkers down in their home as a plague ravages the planet in this very slow-paced psychological thriller that sees the group gradually succumb to paranoia and terror, clinging to increasingly specialized methods of preventing infection. Ultimately, the enemies here are isolation and paranoia, a reminder that the worst consequences of disaster and trauma are often the suffering we inflict on ourselves and our loved ones. You can rent It Comes at Night from Prime Video .
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
Science, as in real life, is usually a source of hope in films about disease outbreaks, but not always. Here, a well-intentioned scientist working on a cure for Alzheimer’s disease accidentally creates a race of super-intelligent apes and sends them on a mission to conquer the planet (come to think of it, maybe the point here is: stop animal testing). Spreading like an infection, poor people quickly retreat from the new threat. The apes, led by Andy Serkis’s chimpanzee Caesar, really couldn’t do much worse as rulers of the Earth, so I salute our ape overlords. Feels hopeful. You can stream Rise of the Planet of the Apes on Max or rent it on Prime Video .
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Unsurprisingly, Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece lacks any scientific help. With lush and lavish detail, we are transported to a medieval village at the height of the Black Death, following returning knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) as he faces off against the personification of Death (Bengt Ekerot) in a chess game for his life. The characters react to Death’s greed in different and very human ways: Block is thoughtful but defiant, his squire is practical and down-to-earth, flagellates weave themselves as penance, a woman is nearly burned at the stake as a witch, and a young couple awaits the birth of a child, holding on to hope amid suffering. Equal parts dark and beautiful, Bergman’s film explores a sick world in which neither God nor science comes to the rescue, but perhaps, if we’re lucky, there will be people who will walk through it with us. You can stream The Seventh Seal on Max and The Criterion, or rent it on Prime Video .