Heh, just rewatched Outbreak last night, it’s pretty bad. Contagion is definitely the best sciencey movie of the genre that I’m aware of, the compressed timeline and Hollywood ending notwithstanding.
Concur, Doomsday, while not bad, definitely belongs in this group.
Not a film, but if I may I strongly recommend a book, Albert Camus’ The Plague (La Peste). I’ve read this novel when I was still a young man and I was shaken by it like never before by a book. This is not so much about the technical and medicinal aspects, but about how to behave reasonable and most of all humanely in a crisis. Should be assigned reading for everyone responsible for public health (including the politicians) in our current pandemic. But that’s of course wishful thinking.
Never heard of this movie, but now I must find it!
As a bad guy, no less.
It would’ve been perfect if Barbara Bel Geddes had played the part of an evil slut instead of her usual goody two-shoes, but you can’t have everything.
It was made into a (very bad and strongly not recommended, imo) film:
The Girl With All The Gifts (2016) is the best plague zombie movie since 28 Days Later IMO.
World War Z counts, doesn’t it?
Only Richard Widmark’s second movie, after Kiss of Death, plus Jack Palance as the heavy.
Mostel is one of his stooges.
Yeah, I looked up movie adaptions of the The Plague before posting and skimmed the imdb entry. But after reading a few reviews, it was obvious to not recommend that film. The novel really is a masterpiece and could have been material for Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles or Elia Kazan, someone of that caliber, but not for an international small budget co-production from 1992 by a no-name director.
Children of Men
No Blade of Grass
Virus (Fukkatsu no hi)
How about an entire TV series.
Survivors (1975)
Or the 2008 remake.
I’m not sure that it’s as huge a part of the movie as in the comic but Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.
Do the lepers in any version of BEN-HUR count?
Too bad no film was made of RATS, LICE, AND HISTORY.
Weren’t there plagues in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS?
The Ranker site lists Best Movies of Disease Outbreaks
Whew! I nearly missed AND THE BAND PLAYED ON.
Nosferatuhas plague being carried by rats on Count Orlok’s ship when he goes wife-huntin’.
This is exactly what I was going to say. Excellent, very entertaining and star-studded film, but also meticulous in its scientific verisimilitude. All the others are about as close to reality as Lord of the Rings.
Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction; narratively it’s not as good as the Camus but it’s still pretty interesting (with the usual caveat about 18th-century literary styles). And apparently there’s an award-winniing short filmbased on it, but I haven’t seen it.