Movies allow us to live out our worst nightmares, and short of nuclear war (which I have written about in another article) an outbreak of virulent illness that has the potential to become pandemic or already is pandemic is certainly up there with the worst disasters to affect mankind. So we can enact our fantasies on the screen and cross our fingers that it will never happen to us. But it already has if you look back in history and study the Great Plague or the terrible flu of 1918 that killed 50 million people. Recent scares such as the Bird Flu and SARS have made the threat of global pandemics more salient than ever. There is also the threat of biological terrorism. Plus the fact that there was another outbreak of Ebola as late as 2012 in Africa. Movie lurgies are more fearful than ever... here's 10 movie-based diseases, though - none of which you'd ever want to catch...
10. Carriers (2009)
I watched Carriers the other night and I found it to be an effective little scary disease movie. The action takes place after the decimation of the worldwide population following a terrible infectious virus pandemic. A group of four young people have been spared the virus and they are heading to Turtle Beach to chill out until the pandemic is over. On the road they meet a man and his seriously sick young daughter. They try to ignore them but their car breaks down and they need the man's wheels to get to the beach. Of course they one by one get infected. They learn that a scientist working on a vaccine has failed and is about to kill himself and a load of infected children. The story does not have horror elements and is quite slow and restrained in its depiction of a post-apocalypse world. It is terribly sad - showing the awfully hard decisions we have to make in such a world and also the human tragedy that will occur amongst the living. As per usual in the apocalyptic world, it is not survivors joining together to help each other, there is hostility, violence and every man for himself. I guess that this movie is an inverted version of the article title. It is better to die from the virus rather than survive in an empty, lonely, barren world.