Epidemic Films to Die For

Tom Zaniello is Professor Emeritus at Northern Kentucky University, USA. He has been active as a film programmer for the Hill Center in Washington DC and for the London and North West (Liverpool) Labour Film Festivals. His publications include California’s Lamson Murder Mystery (2016), the story of the wrongful conviction of a Hollywood screenwriter for murder, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films about Labor, 2nd ed. (2003), and The Cinema of Globalization (2007).

Part I: Introduction: The First Thousand Years
1. Black Bishop Takes White Knight
2. The Heroic Doctors of the Pre-Apocalypse
3. Panic in the Streets: Hollywood in the Polio Years
Part II: Public Events, Private Suffering
4. HIV/AIDS: The Person is Not the Disease
5. The Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020-22
6. The Politics of Death: Race, Class, and Caste
Part III: Traditional Epidemic Vectors
7. A Diabolical Abecedary of Viruses
8. Plagues... Black, Red, Yellow, and White
9. Bacteria in Lingua Latina
10. Fungi Nightmares, Pollen Poisoning, and Other Botanical Horrors
11. Creepy Crawlers and Other Things that Get Under Your Skin
Part IV: Evolution and Mutation
12. HGT (Horizontal Gene Transfer) and the Human Mouse
13. Zombies R Us
Part V: The Deviants
14. Imaginary and Idiopathic Viruses: As If There Weren’t Enough Real Ones
15. Sex with the Midwich Cuckoos
Part VI: Genre Blues
16. Facing Reality: Role-Playing Disasters and Epidemics
17. Epidemic Cinema Then and Now (The NFT)

Epidemic Cinema Database
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index