What a difference a few years makes. If an alien were to arrive on Earth today, it would take them a while to figure out that a deadly disease had terrorized the entire planet for 2020 and most of 2021. Despite being a society obsessed with grievance over the wrongs perpetrated against us in the past, this is one unpleasant subject that we've decided to try our best to forget about. Like the villain at the end of a slasher movie, Covid-19 is still out there and people still get sick from it although it's now treated as something like pneumonia - it sucks to get it, but it won't kill most people (except you really don't want to end up with "long covid," a wrinkle that we still don't seem to know anything about).
That impulse to throw what may be the defining event of the decade down the memory hole is a response to severe trauma, but history shows that this never really works. 1950s America tried its hardest to forget the horrors of World War II, but it still emerged in the infamous (and brilliant) comics like "Tales from the Crypt" and "The Vault of Horror." In that tradition, we've already seen some horror films addressing what we all just went through, some arriving much sooner than expected. They can yield a lot of insight about how we're reckoning with all that's happened, so Halloween is a good time to look at them.
The movies in this short list are the ones that address the plague directly and have it as part of the story, rather than horror films with stories that can serve as metaphors for it like When Evil Lurks or Halloween Ends. And just to clarify early on, I know that "pandemic" is the scientifically appropriate word to describe what happened, but it's also antiseptic and doesn't capture the horror of it all in the way that "plague" does, so that's what I'll be using.
Host (2020) and Dashcam (2022)
Any discussion of horror addressing the Covid era has to start with Rob Savage, who coordinated a team of quarantined friends to create the found footage film Host only months into the plague.
This ghost story debuted on streaming in July 2020 and is depicted entirely as a videochat meeting, an example of the “screenlife” subgenre codified by Unfriended. Bored during the quarantine, a group of friends decide to conduct an online seance. One of them isn’t very respectful of the forces being dealt with and wouldn’t you know it, some evil entity begins terrorizing them. The limitations involved are apparent but it's hard not to be amazed at how quickly they turned this around and were able to work together so well despite never gathering in person.
Savage outdid himself with his next film, the bananas adventure of an obnoxious right-wing insult comic (Annie Hardy) who visits an old friend (Amar Chadha-Patel) in the UK at the height of the plague. She’s also a streamer and the whole film is told through her channel, including her encounter with an elderly woman who seems to be infected by…something. Through all the pandemonium, insipid and bigoted messages pour in from her viewers. It seems Hardy was playing herself and is a genuine anti-vaccine nut, which led to tedious "discourse" about whether it's acceptable for someone like that to appear in a movie. I have no clue whether Hardy realized she was being made of, but it's pretty sad that so many viewers can't discern a movie's point of view without the director stepping into frame and saying "this is bad." This is a hilarious, scathing depiction of the madness of 2020s America but in the end, it’s mostly background for a traditional (although very well-executed) found footage monster movie.
Safer at Home (2021)
Another screenlife film that takes place a few years into the future, but in this case the danger of Covid remained as intense as it was in 2020. A group of quarantined friends gather on a video conference to try and recreate their Las Vegas trips of the past, complete with drugs. But the merriment leads to disaster after tensions emerge and a startling accident changes everything. An ambulance might have been useful but is quickly dismissed by the characters for dubious reasons. The best scenes are able to evoke the despair of living under the cloud of a deadly plague, but even three years later, it's already dated. It borrows a lot from Unfriended except the clever writing, asking viewers to suspend quite a bit of disbelief up until the final unintentionally hilarious twist.
Machination (2022)
We covered this one in the Horror Around the World series, but it's so good that we might as well talk about it again. Most of the movies on this list use the plague as an interesting backdrop for a ghost story or some other supernatural tale, but this Maltese film goes straight for the horror of isolation and mental illness. It was an anxious time for all of us, but I think we all knew at least one person for whom it was the absolute worst possible scenario. Someone already prone to intense nervousness who would be so shaken by the onset of Covid that they might never believe it was safe to go outside again. Maria (Steffi Thake) is an extreme germophobe afraid to set foot outside once the disease starts to spread, leaving her alone in a small house with her demons. It’s far too realistic for comfort as Thake’s intense performance can convince a viewer that they are really watching someone lose their mind.
There's one scene in particular that I just love. Maria wakes up late one morning and has two messages on her phone. The first is from her annoying boss wondering why she hasn't been eager to resume work in dangerous conditions. The second is from her conspiracy theorist brother rambling about how evil the vaccines are. It's the last straw and she smashes her phone, severing the final connection to the outside world. I think most of us wanted to do the same at least once during that whole ordeal.
Sick (2022)
Kevin Williamson retooled his famous Scream screenplay for the quarantine era. Perhaps that’s an oversimplification - the self-referential humor is absent but there are still plenty of scenes involving masked men with knives. At the height of quarantine, Parker (Gideon Aldon) and her best friend Miri (Beth Million) hunker down in an isolated lake house only to encounter some uninvited guests. There were a lot of intriguing directions a premise like this could go in but the movie doesn’t seem very interested in that and is surprisingly tedious. I did wonder if this was just a completely generic slasher until Covid presented an opportunity to give it a unique twist, but a reason for it emerges towards the end as it plays a key role in a late reveal.
The Harbinger (2022)
This one comes to closer than any of the others to capturing the pure existential terror of life under Covid. At the height of the lockdown, the desperate Mavis (Emily Davis) begs her childhood friend Monique (Gabby Beans) to break quarantine protocol and come to her aid. What Monique discovers is that Mavis is being plagued by terrible nightmares that make her nearly impossible to wake up, sometimes going on for days, and that this is something of a bizarre contagion itself.
A nightmare that won’t end is as appropriate a summation of that era as you're ever likely to find. It's themes run very deep, sometimes at risk of overpowering the movie at large. The dream demon wearing a plague doctor mask can represent Covid itself, mental illness, the disinformation that flourished during that time, the societal indifference to mass death, and who knows what else. It’s not a perfect movie, but future scholars researching the early 2020s will find a wealth of material to analyze.
So that's all for now, but I wouldn't be surprised if more films come along that react in some way to what we all went through during Covid. I have a hunch it may drift more towards metaphor rather than more direct depictions, so perhaps at some point I should go through a few of those too. Happy Halloween!
