With the advent of chemical and biological warfare came a whole new way for us to wipe each other out without even touching a gun. The fear of mass infection a pandemic has been around for centuries, since the Black Death devastated Europe for a century in the Middle Ages, killing an estimated 75 million people (a third of whom died in the first six years). Now that we had invented ways to replicate that nightmare, fiction began to catch up with and overtake fact. The viruses in the Resident Evil and 28 Days Later movies are man made, as is the one in I Am Legend and the previous adaptation of the same story, The Omega Man. In 12 Monkeys, terrorists release a virus that makes the planets surface uninhabitable. While the notion of an horrendous virus with appalling effects spreading through the worlds population is a terrifying one, and a good fit for thrillers based around paranoia and claustrophobia, it also lends itself well to a simple reset button ending: almost all apocalypse stories based on an unstoppable disease or biological weapon revolve around finding a cure, through which the world can swiftly be completely returned to normal. This tends to lend itself well to narratives with a focus like that of a morality play: the object is not actually to tell a story about the end of the world, but to run an end of the world style simulation that allows the film to tell the story of how people react in that situation. As such, the viral apocalypse is one of the least terrifying of them all, simply because the effects can be so easily reversed by a scientific McGuffin or deus ex machina development at the last minute.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
