Why Disease Makes for Good Movies

(this post comes from Lily Reynolds)

Let’s face it: diseases in movies are exciting. In the real world, they are about as far from being entertaining as you can get but on the big screen, the more morbid and bizarre the disease that somebody is suffering from, from the better. Why else would films like Outbreak, I Am Legend and 28 Days Later have proven to be so popular? The question is, ‘What makes debilitating illnesses brilliant viewing when watching a film despite them being horrific to behold in real life?’

Medical company KwikMed claims that a possible reason for this is that diseases make the perfect villains. Human beings are fairly mundane as bad guys go. There are only so many variations of the ruthless gangster or evil megalomaniac that can be used in films but the possibilities involving diseases are endless. In ‘90s B-movie Carnosaur, there was even a virus that caused females who were infected to give birth to carnivorous tyrannosaurus rex that killed their carriers during birth. Gruesome as this fictional affliction might be, it is without doubt more entertaining than a bald guy with a patch over one eye sat stroking a cat whilst planning how he is going to attempt to take over the world.

We Just Like being Scared
Online women’s magazine SheKnows suggests that the reason that we like disease flicks so much is simply because we enjoy scaring the pants off ourselves. It makes sense that the type of person who washes his or her hands a thousand times a day and has nightmares about germs would see a film about developing an incurable lurgy as the perfect horror film. Perhaps this is why so many scary movies are based around mystery illnesses. If you think about it, zombie, vampire and werewolf films all center around the spreading of an infectious condition from one person to the next and play on mankind’s fear of getting ill. Movies like Contagion, which features a pandemic spreading throughout the country inducing panic in the public, are a hypochondriac’s ultimate horror films because they not only deal with an unknown illness but also show the consequences of its spread in minute detail. Director Steven Soderbergh has even acknowledged that the power of this film has been heightened by the reactions of the public to real life disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attacks.

Soderbergh’s forthcoming film Side Effects takes a novel approach to the disease movie by having the element of fear attached to the medication as opposed to the illness. It features a depressed woman taking anti-anxiety pills that have some frightening side effects and explores the concept that the cure can sometimes be worse than the actual disease. Again, this plays upon a common fear, this time that which is associated with taking medication, and taps into the public’s desire to be scared.

They Aren’t At All like Real Life
Some on-screen diseases are entertaining because they are so ridiculous. Whilst an ultra-realistic depiction of a terminal illness will be likely to have some viewers reaching for the remote control, the same definitely cannot be said of ‘MacGregor’s syndrome’, the fictional disease that both Alfred and Mr. Freeze’s wife suffer from in Batman and Robin. The name alone is hilarious because it is the type of thing that an unimaginative school pupil would think up when attempting to devise an illness to get out of class. This virus appears to be a degenerative condition with vague symptoms that have no effect whatsoever upon the sufferer’s physical appearance. It exists solely to give Arnie’s character a soft side as he searches for a cure for his true love’s laughably unrealistic and poorly thought out affliction.

The Gore Factor
Another reason that people like disease flicks is that moviegoers are drawn to blood and guts. Illnesses create an excuse for people’s skin falling off and internal organs suddenly bursting out of their chests. They are a vehicle for conveying gory scenes that hold a morbid fascination. Take Splinter for example, which features a disease that causes sufferers to become infected by a fungus that makes splinters jut out of their skin and manipulates their bodies once they are dead so that they tear other human beings apart and feast upon their blood. The same level of gore could be made possible by introducing a monster or a psychopathic human being but it wouldn't have had the same gross-out effect and wouldn't have been half as entertaining.

Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, we like watching a lot of things in movies that we don’t like seeing in real life. Would you like it if aliens invaded your city or a giant ape kidnapped your wife and climbed up the side of a skyscraper with her? Probably not but yet these scenarios still make for fun viewing in films. Diseases fall into the same category. They are fun to watch on the silver screen because they are gruesome and cause the viewer to think, ‘Oh my God, I hope I never develop carnosauritis!’ Either that or they are good for a laugh because they are so far removed from real life illnesses. On that note, I’m off to get my inoculation for MacGregor’s syndrome. After all, I wouldn't want to suffer from a debilitating condition like that.