The Prefix ‘Pan’ (as in Pandemic) on the other hand emphasises not the local, but the trans-national. The Global. Derived from the ancient Greek term ‘πᾶν’‘ meaning the whole, the universal, the ‘Pandemic’ by its very definition, spans and connects localities with a trans-communal, trans-national event.

It is this trans-national identity, and its progress across borders in the accelerated ‘real-time’ of the age of global mobility, that gives Covid-19 its terrifyingly ‘modern’ identity. The wider Coronavirus family was first identified in the 1930s as a respiratory infection in chickens, with its human variant identified in 1964 by Dr June Almeida in St Thomas’s Hospital, London. Successive variants of human Coronavirus have threatened to emerge as the modern successor to the deadly ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic of 1918, especially within the new millennium, with SARS (2003), HKU1(2005) and MERS(2012) all, for brief moments looking like long predicted globally transformative epidemics.

The above clip from CGTN (China Global Television Network) America (Feb 7th, 2020) compares Covid-19 with two other post-millennial outbreaks of human Coronavirus. Both SARS and MERS presented as far more lethal, killing much higher percentages of those infected. In a sense, this may explain some of the initial slowness in recognising the full of threat of Covid-19, with some commentators dismissing it as not much worse than ‘flu’. Covid-19 has however emerged as infinitely more dangerous than flu and infinitely more infectious than its more brutal Coronavirus cousins, jumping rapidly between hosts and due to its long incubation period, leaving enough of them sufficiently mobile to spread itself further.

It was therefore Covid-19 that was to most effectively piggy-back on the hypermobility of global transport networks to, in the space of a few short months become ‘pandemic’ in scale. Although it may be stretching the point to claim that global progress of the Covid-19 can be blamed on the hyper-efficient distributive networks of ‘Just in Time Capitalism’ (Moody), the hypermodern tools of ‘genetic fingerprinting’ potentially allow scientists to track the geographic progress of the virus. In a University of Cambridge research article entitled ‘Covid-19: genetic network analysis provides ‘snapshot’ of pandemic origins’, we read that:

The nature of the virus as globally ‘insurgent’ has formed a key aspect of governmental, national and regional responses to its spread. The closing of borders and freezing of transportation hubs has proceeded instep with the characterisation of a threat originating from beyond the frontier, but in the case of Covid-19, the threat has quickly transmuted to being local. In the UK, calls to step away from shared social space and into the insulated refuge of ones own living space has been presented as an imperative. A noble shared narrative characterising the idea of ‘social distancing’ and ‘lockdown’ as a communally responsible course of action has progressively swung into place, finessing its terminology and selecting its heroic figures.

This has been presented as shared project of shielding the collective resource of the NHS and its brave workforce from full exposure to the ravages of an alien yet intimate enemy, and we have been invited to play our active part in this crusade. All we need to do is ‘stay at home’ and barricade our doors against a germ ravaged world beyond, stepping out rarely and carefully. But remembering to engage in a once weekly ritual ‘clap for the carers’ at 8pm every Thursday evening.

This shared narrative is a positive one, and its shared rituals are noble. However, I would argue that it exists as a wholesome topping, combining bodily enrichment (the sense that your actions positively contribute to a collective effort) with a flavoursome sweetness that acts to mask a far more bitter bile bubbling beneath the surface.

The barricading of one’s doors is easily re-expressed as a deep fear of what lurks beyond. In this case, not just the virus, but the bodies and the emissions of the infected. However, it is important to understand that within this shared narrative, the actually infected, the hospitalised and the tragic lost are the subjects of our heartfelt sympathies, the true victims of this cruel pandemic. The horde against which we are encouraged to rail, are the sceptics who ignore the risks and congregate in the parks. They gather. They move through public space without good reason failing to observe the ‘two-meter rule’. They remain on the streets, running, sweating, sneezing, spitting. They refuse to cover their faces with surgical masks. This is the new ‘zombie’ class who have turned a deaf and dead ear to new religion of responsible social distancing.

These zombies of the new pandemic may not resemble the emaciated ‘undead other’ we have come to expect in our monster movies.. But to fit into our often-rehearsed fear of the contaminating other, they must be recast as the villains and become the first subject of our rising fear of strangers. Our paranoia. Our evolving xenophobia.

It is at this point that key tropes from the cinema of pandemic and apocalyptic post-pandemic become an interesting component of our research, and how our fears of the contaminated other rehearsed through cinema, shape our perception of the ‘Jet Black Future’.

The Apocalypse will be televised.