This stand-alone podcast is a short discussion of Ariel Schulman’s and Henry Joost’s 2016 epidemic horror film Viral. The film stars Analeigh Tipton (Warm Bodies), Sofia Black D’Elia (Project Almanac), and Travis Tope (The Town That Dreaded Sundown [2014]) and follows two sisters’ attempt to survive both the impending apocalypse and lethal military intervention. This podcast looks at how this specific kind of epidemic horror functions in the broader landscape of the genre, and what the possible significance is for specific types of disease vectors in cinema.

For more on bugs in horror, see my blog post here.
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References and Further Reading

Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Print.

Clarens, Carlos. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. New York: Putnam, 1979. Print.

Cornea, Christine. Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2007. Print.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York, NY: Routledge, 2015. Print.

Eliade, Mircea, and Ana Cartianu. Mystic Stories: The Sacred and the Profane. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1992. Print.

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. London: Hodder, 2012. Print. 117.

Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print.

Magistrale, Tony. Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Print.

Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Norton, 1993. Print.

Subissati, Andrea. When There’s No More Room in Hell: The Sociology of the Living Dead. Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP Lambert Academic, 2010. Print.

Waller, Gregory A., ed. American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. Chicago: U of Illinois, 1987. Print.

Yacowar, Maurice. “The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre” in Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Keith Barry Grant.. Austin, TX: U of Texas, 2003. Print. 281.

Image Credit:  Dimension Films © 2016
Duologue by Javolenus © copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: audiotechnica