The 58 Best Pandemic Movies to Binge in Quarantine – Vulture

Zombies. Parasites. Contagion. Oh my. Photo: Overture Films/Kobal/Shutterstoc/Overture Films/Kobal/Shutterstoc

The coronavirus poses a looming threat to many of us. Whether that means you are hoarding rice and canned beans, focusing on buying all the Purell left on Earth, or just trying not to touch your face, the possible pandemic of COVID-19 is affecting just about everyones lives in one way or another. So, if the stress of going outside is getting to be too much, or you are perhaps medically mandated not to leave your home for 14 days, Vulture has assembled an attempt at comfort: a list of contagion movies you can watch to either counterintuitively ease your fears or willfully exacerbate them. It is broken down by category for ease of use.

The movie that turned a micro-generation into hypochondriacs, Outbreak is about a fictional California town that is entirely quarantined when it becomes ground zero for an Ebolalike outbreak in the U.S. The story centers on the CDC and military medical researchers charged with containing and treating the infected, and it has people bleeding out of orifices and that one extremely scary movie theater scene that made almost everyone currently between about 30 and 35 think they were going to catch a catastrophic illness in a movie theater. (Available on Netflix.)

The disease disaster movie on everyones lips right now! Steven Soderberghs Contagion is best known for the terrifying death of Gwyneth Paltrow very early on in the movie, which makes us all realize that the fictional disease spreading across Earth is super serious. (You cant just kill Gwyneth like that!) The movie is front-loaded with dread before turning into a chilling sociological study of what everyday people would do during a pretty realistic seeming pandemic. (Available on Hulu.)

In this South Korean film, a severely deadly strain of the virus H5N1 starts tearing through the city of Bundang, killing those who contract it within 36 hours. The population of nearly 1 million are suddenly in danger of being wiped out en masse. (Available on iTunes or Prime.)

Sophia Loren, Martin Sheen, Ava Gardner, and Burt Lancaster are among the stars in this film about a European train that is attacked by Swedish terrorists (which you dont hear about every day!) and infected with a deadly pathogen. The train is also speeding toward an unstable bridge, but no one on board is being allowed off. (Available on Tubi, YouTube or Google Play.)

When a doctors mistake leads to dire consequences for a patient, a strange illness starts afflicting the medical staff who helped cover it up. This Japanese movie is a little bit more outlandish with its deaths, with the infected liquifying into a green goop, but its important to have a global perspective on outbreaks. (Available on Tubi and Vudu.)

This Indian film is based on the true events surrounding the 2018 Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala and the local communitys mobilization effort to stop the spread. (Available on Prime.)

If youre a sucker for found footage, try this movie about a quaint little town that turns into a breeding ground for a waterborne organism that takes control of the minds and bodies of its hosts. While not the best film ever created, theres something especially convincing about the recovered footage that will truly trick you into believing youve just watched a town burn itself down with madness. (Available on Hulu.)

The parasite in this South Korean film drives the infected to drown themselves, and when one mans family is infected, he has to do what he can to try and find a cure as the condition spreads across the nation and the government sends the afflicted into quarantine. (Available on iTunes and YouTube.)

Chris Pine, Piper Perabo, and Emily VanCamp star in this movie about a group of friends trying to outrun a pandemic who realize on their journey that the evils of man are just as threatening as any virus. (Available on Netflix.)

Heres another novel contagion take: An affliction called The Panic has swept across humanity, causing people to become so severely agoraphobic that they actually die if they are forced outside. Our hero, Marc, has been trapped in an office building, but sets out to find his girlfriend, and has to do so without ever actually setting foot beyond shelter. (Available on Hulu.)

The strength of Pontypool is its limited scope. While humanity is being brought to its knees by a rapidly spreading infection, we only experience the crisis through the perspective of an Ontario radio disc jockey who is receiving sporadic reports of the mayhem outside. (Available on iTunes and Shudder.)

Writer and director Danny Boyle changed the zombie genre forever with 28 Days Later, in which a handful of survivors come together a month after a mysterious virus has decimated theU.K. and try to survive long enough to be rescued. (Available on Hulu.)

You could watch a lot of of the Dead movies, but we recommend Romeros sequel to his formative zombie classic. The contagion has gone beyond the farmhouse of the first film, and its taking over the entire U.S. The story focuses on a group of survivors who make their way to a mall together, and its one of the best movies ever made about the deleterious effects of an unstoppable pandemic in its early stages.

This intimate contagion movie focuses almost entirely on one woman who is stranded in the Nevada desert right when a zombie infection starts to take hold. She has to wander into nothingness in the hopes of reaching safety, and along the way she is followed by one single shuffling zombie who becomes a sort of companion/reminder of her fragile mortality and the mistakes she has made in her life. (Available on iTunes or Prime.)

David Cronenberg is the master of body horror, and in this 1977 film, he focuses on a woman who develops a strange growth under her arm after a surgery that she uses to feed on human blood. When she pierces people with her stinger, they become blood-hungry, zombie-like monsters, and the medical facility where shes being cared for soon becomes a hunting ground. (Available on Tubi, Prime and iTunes.)

Train to Busan is one of the best of a lot of things: one of the best zombie movies ever, one of the best outbreak movies ever, one of the best action movies of the 21st century, and one of the best movies thats mostly set on a train. A businessman and his daughter board a train to Busan as an epidemic begins ripping through South Korea, and while the moving train is semi-safe from the crumbling world outside, everything goes to hell when the infection reaches the passengers. Its thrilling. Its moving. Its terrifying. Its tragic. (Available on Netflix.)

Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos star in this epic contagion movie that features maybe the largest mass of sprinting zombies ever put on screen. Pitt plays a former United Nations investigator who agrees to make his way through the infected landscape to find the source of the outbreak and hopefully a cure before everyone falls to the pandemic. (Available on Hulu.)

Virologist Will Smith lives in a hollowed-out Manhattan and fights vampiric monsters called Darkseekers after a modified measles virus, that was meant to cure cancer, kills 90 percent of humanity. When he meets a pair of immune humans, he is given renewed hope that he can make a cure. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

You could watch any old zombie outbreak movie during your contagion binge, but there was a small wave of movies during the mid-2010s that focused on the ennui of the end of the world more than the panicky horror of the outbreaks themselves. Cargo is one of them, and it stars Martin Freeman as a man in the Australian outback who ends up caring for a child that he must guide to survival. Its for your sad dad feelings. (Available on Netflix.)

Here Alone is another emo-zombie movie thats more about melancholy than it is the terrors of the blood thirsty undead. A woman lives in isolation after losing her daughter and husband and is buried under the guilt of surviving without them, but her life changes when she meets a teen girl and her stepdad. But can anyone ever really trust happiness in the postapocalypse? (Available on Netflix.)

If you want a slow-burn, haunting drama about just how bad and sad things would be after a sickness of some kind brought down society, It Comes At Night, which focuses on two families who come together in the wilderness, will definitely fill that need. (Available on Netflix.)

This is the original film adapted from Richard Mathesons novel I Am Legend, except, because its from 1964, it stars Vincent Price as the surviving scientist instead of Will Smith. Sort of similar energies between them. (Available on Prime.)

This is a zombie movie, yes, but more than that it is about the monotony of survival and the crushing weight of loneliness when youre the only person in a dead world, which is exactly what one man in this movie experiences after he goes to a house party and wakes up to the apocalypse in an apartment building. (Available on Prime.)

An army colonel played by Charlton Heston is the only known survivor of a biowarfare catalyzed plague, and he spends his nights hunting plague-infected mutants throughout desolate Los Angeles. Hes being hunted by the infected too, who blame science and technology for the downfall of man and see him as its embodiment. But since he saved himself with an experimental vaccine treatment, he might be able to cure others if he finds more healthy survivors. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

The Resident movies will provide hours of quarantine entertainment on their own, beginning with the humble first film in which we meet our heroine, Alice, and get acquainted with the T-virus that has obliterated humanity thanks to a break in containment at the evil Umbrella corporation. From there, the world gets bigger and wilder over the course of six movies, in which Milla Jovovich wipes out a lot of monsters and bad guys and mutant crows. (Available on Prime.)

This French-Canadian zombie movie is another artful zom-drama entry that really emphasizes the emotional toll of survival, and even includes a large, mysterious tower made of chairs that draws the zombies to it. For your thinkier art-house undead fans. (Available on Netflix.)

Terry Gilliam directed this sci-fi film about a man who is sent back in time from the year 2035 to stop a pandemic that will wipe out most of the worlds population and force the survivors to live underground, a disaster that will begin in 1996. (Available on Hulu.)

While the world is still largely overrun with zombies, called hungries, who were turned by a fungal infection, limited pockets of humanity still exist, and on a military base in England, scientists are studying children born of infected mothers human-hungry hybrids that may contain the key to unlocking a cure in their blood. When the base is overrun, though, a group of survivors are flung out into the landscape and their survival will dictate who inherits the Earth. (Available on Hulu.)

A mysterious illness prompted every woman in the world to miscarry in the early 2000s, and for nearly 20 years since that event which happened around the same time as a highly deadly flu pandemic no new children have been born. The world has descended into chaos, but if theres a hope for humanity, it might come in the form of a depressed Clive Owen, his activist ex-wife, Julianne Moore, and a young refugee woman. (Available on Hulu.)

This Irish horror-drama takes place in the aftermath of the infection period when a disease called the Maze Virus, that basically turned people into rage zombies, has largely been cured. However, reintegration of the formerly infected many of whom are still in captivity and heavily stigmatized by restrictionists is a hard process, and society must reconcile welcoming the survivors back when they may have murdered friends and loved ones while sick. The government is considering killing them all anyway to stave off a new wave of the disease, but infected rights advocates are pushing back. Theres a lot of metaphor, and also Ellen Page. (Available on Prime.)

The contagion in Daybreakers has turned most of the worlds population into vampires, and when the human population plummets, that means the new dominant race is short on food. Some of the undead are driven psychotic by hunger, and scientists are working tirelessly on developing synthetic blood to address the shortages. The movie centers on a hematologist (and vampire) played by Ethan Hawke, who makes a pair of human allies in the fight against vampirism. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

Scotland has been designated a quarantine area after an outbreak of the deadly Reaper virus prompted the government to force all the infected into containment and locked the gates behind them. Twenty-five years after the crisis, major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), who had to leave her mother in the hot zone as a child, is being sent back home to find a counteragent to the virus after infections start popping up in London. Survivors, however, have turned into maniacs and marauders, and Sinclair is going to have to kill her way through. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

In Maggie, a pandemic known as Necroambulism is just barely under government control, and society is limping its way back to life as the infected are put into quarantine. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a man whose daughter (Abigail Breslin) is bit, and he decides to care for her at home over the weeks it will take her to turn full undead cannibal. Its a zombie movie, but its also a family movie. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

A virus called The Flare has devastated humanity and forced survivors into small enclaves of civilization. Over the course of the the three Maze Runner films, youll meet your cast of young heroes trying to change the world, a massive shady conglomerate known as WCKD that seems to be at the center of everything bad that is happening, and youll go into the global wasteland known as The Scorch. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

Virus is a Japanese movie that goes where more contagion movies should: Antarctica. After an outbreak dubbed the Italian Flu wipes out most of the world, a group of survivors in the Antarctic are protected by the continents deeply cold climate where the disease cannot take hold. However, a looming Soviet incursion of the base and the threat of a nuclear missile launch make survival even more tricky than it already is while living at the frozen bottom of the world. (Available on Tubi and Prime.)

Based on the book by Michael Crichton, Strain focuses on a group of research scientists who are brought into the town of Piedmont, New Mexico, after a government satellite crashes there and kills almost all of the residents, thanks to a microscopic alien organism that the downed equipment brought to Earth. (Available on iTunes or Prime.)

The 1990s was the peak of teen horror, and The Faculty assembled a buzzy cast Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Salma Hayek, Clea DuVall, Jon Stewart, and more for this story of a standard American high school overrun by an alien invasion that turns humans into host drones. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

There have been multiple very good film versions of Body Snatchers, but we will most highly recommend the version starring Donald Sutherland as a San Francisco man who starts to suspect that people around him are acting strangely because of some sinister force, instead of just a benign illness. And oh, boy, is he right! Welcome your pod overlords. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

Did you like watching Donald Sutherland in the middle of an Earth takeover by alien parasites that can control peoples minds in Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Well, you can watch something similar happen in The Puppet Masters. Based on the book of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein, this time there is a government intervention to try and squash the infections, but will they be able to stop the extra terrestrials in time? (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

The first feature film from director James Gunn, Slither is set in a small town where everyone knows each other that is overrun by an alien plague. Its gross-out horror. Its a love story. Its Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks and Michael Rooker having a great time with friends. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

Zombie movies are always so bleak (which is fair), but Bodies imagines, What if they could still feel? Nicholas Hoult plays an undead guy named R who is tired of his tedious life of shambling around, but everything changes when he thinks hes fallen for a living girl (Teresa Palmer). R could be the key to saving the world, but theyre going to have to address that zombies versus humans civil war going on to figure it out. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

If you just cant watch another depressing zombie wasteland movie, switch over to Simon Pegg and Nick Frosts Shaun of the Dead, where a couple of slobs find themselves in the middle of the end of the world. (Available on Hulu.)

Anna is sweet little zom-comedy musical about a high school girl who just wants to get out of her small town, but has her plans railroaded by a zombie epidemic. It is also, however, a heartbreaking story of friendship and love and loss. So get ready to sing, but also to cry. (Available on Hulu.)

The Robert Rodriguez half of Quentin Tarantinos Grindhouse double bill is a B-movie brawl for all about a small Texas town that goes to hell when a biochemical weapon is accidentally let loose into the air and turns people into savage gooey monsters terrorizing the landscape. This is an exploitation movie, so of course a scrappy band of survivors has to hightail it out of town amidst explosions, bloody deaths, and an abundance of pulp dialogue. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

Eli Roths first big foray into extreme gore follows a group of 20-somethings on a cabin-in-the-woods trip where everyones plans for sexy time are interrupted by a flesh-eating disease. Lots of blood and Roths signature coarse humor. (Available on Netflix.)

Weve seen a lot of movies about pathogens turning all of humanity into blood-thirsty zombie creatures, but what if there was a disease that just made everyone go blind in one city? Thats what happens in the appropriately titled Blindness. Of course, some people react in abominable ways when they lose one of their senses, but its also kind of comforting to watch a movie where the infected arent bleeding from their eyes and ears and tearing through the world like maniacs. (Available on iTunes.)

Heres something different for you. In this 1970 film, a group of satanic hippies become cannibals after being fed meat pies with rabid dog blood in them. The people they feed on then become infected. Goddamn hippies! (Available on YouTube or Google Play.)

The original shooting title of this movie was The Orgy of The Blood Parasites, and its a shame they didnt keep that. After a scientist murders a teen girl and then himself, it is discovered that hes been doing experiments with deadly parasites that are now matriculating among the general population. Those who are infected become violent and sex-crazed, passing along the parasite like an STD. (Available on iTunes and Prime.)

Trench 11 is set during the last days of WWI, and is centered on a group of allied soldiers who are sent to investigate a secret German bunker that, they will discover, houses a grotesque secret that could turn the tide of the war. And yes, it involves hideous worm-like parasites that start bursting out of bodies. (Available on Prime or YouTube.)

The original Crazies was a George Romero movie released in 1973, but this remake from 2010 is actually better. Timothy Olyphant plays the sheriff of a small Iowa town where residents are being transformed into murderous psychos after a nearby plane crash unleashes a toxic virus, and the few uninfected who remain try to escape to safety. (Available on Tubi and Prime.)

This Spanish horror film about an apartment building that becomes an incubator for a viral infection that turns people into erratic homicidal monsters is one of the most tense contagion movies ever put on screen. Much of the film is shot in night vision, helping you to feel even more immersed in the horrors leaping from the shadows. The American remake Quarantine is, surprisingly, also extremely good. (Available on Prime or Shudder.)

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The 58 Best Pandemic Movies to Binge in Quarantine - Vulture

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero