- The Covid- pandemic
came as a surprise to some,
but horror films have sounded
the alarm for decades.
- What "Contagion" did perfect
was to show us that the
deadliest infection is fear.
- It was an upsetting movie
when there was no pandemic.
And it was even more upsetting
during the pandemic.
[horn blaring]
- I remember when we sh*t
" Monkeys,"
and you'd use a "What if?"
- You won't think I'm crazy when
people start dying next month.
- You think it can't possibly
happen.
- No...!
- [screaming]
- When it comes to
an infected people movie,
probably my very favorite is
David Cronenberg's "Rabid."
- [screaming]
- The idea of sexually
transmitted diseases
and sex being the thing
that destroys you.
- [roaring]
- "[REC]," I think,
was genuinely terrifying.
- [screaming]
- It was just raw
and real and felt like,
oh, that could be happening
down the street, tomorrow.
- [screaming]
- That's the pernicious
element of a disease.
All the weapons of mankind
are helpless before it, you
know, you can't b*mb a disease.
- Oh, God!
- You can't see it, you don't
know where it is or when
it's present or how dangerous
it is or when it might strike.
But you have to be on guard
all of the time.
[eerie music]
[chainsaw whirring]
[dramatic music]
- Horror stories are built
around our fear of threats
we know exist, but can't stop...
and the threats
we don't know about
until it's too late.
Pathogens inspire
both kinds of fear.
At first we don't know
what's k*lling us,
then we realize an invisible
monster is on the loose,
and it's coming for everyone.
- [screaming]
- In horror, these diseases
often come wrapped
in a supernatural clothing.
But when COVID- brought
the world to a standstill,
many people sought out the films
that seemed closest to reality.
- At the top of the pandemic,
I was seeing
so many people online,
purposely watching pandemic
and zombie movies.
And that says something
about our psyche...
That when we are at
our lowest point,
we want to poke that.
- [screaming]
- "Outbreak," from ,
follows the trail
of an Ebola-like virus
brought to America
by a black market monkey.
- Sirs... Mr. Motaba.
- Help!
[glass shatters]
Oh, God!
[screaming]
- "Outbreak" is one of
the first of what you may call
semi-realistic plague films.
I wouldn't say entirely,
because it goes nuts
in the last half hour, but it's
essentially kind of
a look at how plague might
actually operate
in the modern world.
[rotors whirring]
And I think it was a really
underrated film because
that was the first time
a lot of moviegoers thought,
"Oh, yeah, this
actually could happen."
- [screeching]
- You had the monkey, you had
the sneezing in the theater.
- [coughing and sneezing]
- And you had these,
these visual expressions that
taught people, like, oh,
[bleep], it's actually dangerous
to be a human being
and have lungs
that can absorb bacteria
in a way that can destroy
our entire system.
- Don't tell me
when I need sleep, Casey,
I don't tell you
when you need sleep.
- For every person
who gets sick,
how many other people
are they likely to infect?
- I feel like "Contagion" really
brought that to the next level
and included a scientific aspect
of the storytelling that an
outbreak was really rudimentary.
- "Contagion" is the first movie
that made me aware
of how an epidemic spread.
And Scott Z. Burns' script
and the way it's ex*cuted
by Steven Soderbergh,
it's just right on the money.
- "Contagion" begins as a woman,
played by Gwyneth Paltrow,
returns home to Minnesota
after a business trip to China.
She's been infected with
a highly contagious
respiratory virus
that she unknowingly
spreads everywhere she goes.
As the number of deaths
exponentially rise,
it becomes a race against time
to figure out how to stop
the virus before
the human race is decimated.
[horn blaring]
- When I started the project,
my hope was that I could write
a movie that was,
in some ways,
a ' s-era disaster movie
where we had this big,
star-studded cast.
[ticking, expl*si*n]
But what I wanted to do was
sort of Trojan Horse that idea
and fill it with science.
- Somewhere in the world
the wrong pig
met up with the wrong bat.
- Have you ever seen anything
like this before?
- No.
- One of the great things about
the all-star cast
is that it made it really
easy for an audience to track
the overlapping stories.
You knew when you were with
Marion Cotillard,
you were in the World
Health Organization story.
You knew that when you were with
Kate Winslet,
you were in the CDC epidemiology
domestic policy story.
You knew that Laurence Fishburne
represented both
the CDC and government
and the intersection
of that, you know,
Matt Damon was all of us.
- Borrowing a page from
Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho"...
- Honey?
- "Contagion" throws its
audience off-balance by k*lling
one of its biggest stars in the
first minutes of the film.
- Let's get a line in her.
- I think one of
the best scenes in the movie,
and it's a brilliant piece
of acting,
but it's, like, incredibly sad
but very plausible,
is when Matt Damon
is in hospital
and is informed of
his wife's death.
- She failed to respond.
- Okay, and?
- Her heart stopped and,
unfortunately, she did die.
- Right.
- And he doesn't hear it,
he can't process it.
- Okay, so can I go talk to her?
- Mr. Emhoff, I'm sorry,
your wife is dead.
- [coughing]
- There's no doubt that
"Contagion" is a horror film,
but it's so artfully done,
it's so intelligent,
so well-written,
it has such an enormous
star cast that I think people
who dislike horror try to steal
it and say, oh, it's actually
a drama... it's a horror film.
[saw buzzing]
And the proof is when
they peel off
Gwyneth Paltrow's face,
open up the top her skull
and look inside
and there's nothing
but goop in there.
- My wife makes me take off
my clothes in the garage
and she leaves out a bucket
of warm water and some soap,
and then she douses everything
in hand sanitizer after I leave.
I mean,
she's overreacting, right?
- Not really.
- What I was hoping for was to
get to a place where reality
was scarier than, than fiction,
and so I was very interested
in what human beings
perceive as dangerous.
- What's that, fomites?
- It refers to
transmission from surfaces.
- As opposed to what really is.
- The average person
touches their face
two or three
thousand times a day.
- Two or three thousand times
a day?
- Three to five times
every waking minute.
- It turns out it tends
to be our, our, our habits
and our lack of willpower
that is probably
a greater existential thr*at.
- What's your temperature?
- . .
- Steven Soderbergh
peoples the film with, like,
very famous actors and says,
dead, alive, dead, alive,
dead, alive, dead, alive.
- I'm sorry I couldn't finish.
- Just because
Kate Winslet's a big name
doesn't mean
she's gonna make it.
It's a brilliant way to look
at it because you kind of think,
I'm gonna be okay,
my family's gonna be okay...
Oh, wait, my brother's dead?
How is that possible?
How can I be immune and him not?
- If the film seems prophetic,
it's because writer Scott Burns
consulted with virologists
and public policy makers
to work out how a novel pathogen
could come into the world,
and what would happen if it did.
- It was so prophetic,
it was so dead-on,
it didn't miss a single trick.
Everything that it imagined
happening happened,
with only a few tiny exceptions.
- Right now, our best defense
has been social distancing...
No hand shaking,
staying home when you're sick,
washing your hands frequently.
- It anticipated a lot of
the crazy conspiracy theories...
You've got Jude Law
selling Forsythia to suckers.
- What does Forsythia do?
- It's the cure.
[dramatic music]
- It think it's a really
brilliant film,
I'm not surprised that a lot of
people watched it, like,
either for the first time or,
like me, a second time around,
slack-jawed with horror, like,
oh, [bleep], here we go.
- When did we run out of
body bags?
- Two days ago.
[dramatic music]
- "Contagion" showed us humanity
at the brink of
a viral apocalypse.
What if we went over the edge,
and into the void?
[dramatic music]
- You've gotta think I'm
addicted, haven't you, Cole?
To that dying world?
- I just wanna do my part,
to get us back on top,
in charge of the planet.
- In , a romance
about a weaponized virus
wiping out humanity
came to the screen...
- Five billion people d*ed
in and .
- Terry Gilliam's
" Monkeys."
- Are you going to save us,
Mr. Cole?
- I can't save you... nobody can.
- " Monkeys" is based on
"La Jetée," by Chris Marker,
who was a French filmmaker, and
he took a really unique concept
of using stills...
Still images... to convey the arc
of a love story and a man's
witnessing his own death.
[dramatic music and clicking]
And " Monkeys" took that story
and made a feature film from it.
[dramatic music,
indistinct voice on PA]
- Bruce Willis plays James Cole,
a convict
in the virus-wrecked future.
- James Cole,
cleared from quarantine.
- Cole is sent back in time
to find the source of
the contagion.
[beep]
But he winds up
in a mental institution,
where he meets psychiatrist
Kathryn Railly,
played by Madeleine Stowe.
- What year is this?
- What year do you think it is?
- .
- That's the future, James.
Do you think you're living
in the future?
I was very familiar with Terry
and his sense of displacement
and disorientation
that permeated his movies,
and I was dying to work
with him.
There were some
challenging days,
and part of the challenge,
quite frankly,
was he was dealing with
a movie star in Bruce...
- This is it, James,
what you've been working for.
- Women will want to
get to know you.
- I don't want your women!
I want to get well!
- In the end, he became
very surprised with what Bruce
was doing, which was this
wonderful sort of pure,
childlike thing.
- People can't travel back
in time, "Whoop! Whoop!"
Uh-uh. Not here.
He was just very pure, and
that's perfect for the movie
because it's actually told from
a child's point of view.
[whirring]
- The scenes set in the past
were sh*t on location
in Philadelphia, which helps to
give the film its unique look.
- It was not a great time
for cities period,
but Philadelphia,
it was really rough.
He went to corners of the city
that filmmakers
were not going to.
You know, for him it was just,
you know, as an artist,
a great palette for him.
- Maybe the human race
deserves to be wiped out.
- Wiping out the human race?
That's a great idea.
- In his first Academy
Award-nominated performance,
Brad Pitt plays a mental patient
with mysterious ties
to the pandemic.
- Jeffrey?
- Mm-hmm.
- You're completely insane.
- He seems to be the engineer
of the apocalypse...
- No, I'm not.
- but that's
deliberate misdirection.
The real thr*at
is a rogue scientist
played by David Morse.
He plans to release a highly
infectious airborne pathogen
across the world.
- He was talking to me about
that scene, you know,
in the airport in " Monkeys."
- Do you mind
letting me have a look
at the contents
of your bag, please?
- Please.
Probably my favorite part
of it was the moment
going through security and
didn't want to open the vial,
I guess, or the bottle.
It doesn't... even...
have an odor.
- That's not necessary, sir.
- And just the realization
of what's going to happen
if they do that.
- Cole tries to stop him
and change history.
- No...!
- But the past can't be changed.
[g*nsh*t echoing]
- The story of the film
is that time is a circle,
and that things fold in
on themself and then
Bruce Willis' character is
haunted by a traumatic event
that he witnessed as a child,
and then at the end
of the movie we realize
that the traumatic event was
caused by him as an adult.
[dramatic music]
- It's a very smartly told
narrative because at the center
of it, you think, oh, that's
just the romance and you need
a romance in this type of story,
but really, that's what
the movie is about, is these
two human beings being human
and that is coming to an end
and that's worth saving.
- Without that love story,
how much does Coles'
journey really matter?
How much does the end of the
world really matter? [laughs]
Right, you know, I mean, we're
here for a reason, you know?
I like to think it's to
love each other, so...
- Infections based in reality
are frightening.
When you add a touch of
the supernatural,
they can be absolutely
terrifying.
- Who's chasing you?
- My mom.
My dad.
They're trying to k*ll me.
- Amen.
- Zombie infection films
take our fears of contagion
and give them teeth.
[growling and screaming]
- Two of the most original
and unforgettable twists
on the genre are
"Pontypool," from Canada.
- [retching]
- [screaming]
- ..and "[REC]" from Spain.
- "[REC]" is a masterpiece.
It really was the first
docu-style film
since "Blair Witch"
that I thought was, like,
legitimately terrifying.
- [screaming]
- "[REC]" is all found footage
through the lens
of this journalist
following just a regular,
good, old night at the job
with these firefighters.
Until they get this call
at this building.
But there's a woman that's in
a little bit of trouble...
Maybe she's sick...
And the moment
that the firefighter team gets
there, to this building,
everybody's already in panic.
- [screams]
- And then suddenly,
once the firefighters
and this journalist
go all the way in, man,
that's when all hell breaks
loose, that there's an infection
spreading really fast
in the building.
- [growling and shouting]
[grunting and shouting
in foreign language]
- "[REC]" scared the [bleep]
out of me.
I was just completely shocked,
captivated, appalled,
the moment when they walk
into that apartment and that
old woman in a nightgown comes
running at the camera.
[screaming, g*nshots]
It was just so shocking,
and we'd seen
a lot of found footage films
up to this point,
but this did
something different with it.
- [speaking Spanish]
- It had looked like we were
following real people.
No known actors or added score
or anything like that,
it was all use of diegetic
sounds, all of it.
[banging and screaming]
It's an incredible use of what's
actually on the frame
and enhancing those sounds...
The echo in the building,
when you hear at the top story,
"Whaaaap."
[thud, screaming]
And a firefighter
had just got thrown
off the top floor,
all the way down.
That echo and that use of
sound design
really makes an audience
feel like we're there.
[man speaking Spanish on PA]
- Found footage
became part of the horror,
it became part of really
using the camera
to show the isolation.
It uses it so well in the final
scene where we're hurting
for light, and so then we get
this limited view where she goes
into night vision and we are
experiencing the exact same
limited periphery
that the character is.
[rattling]
- That last scene,
when she's in that room
and there's something
in there with her and you
realize this is patient zero.
This is the thing
that started it,
whatever experiment led to
this person being infected,
that they've had it longer
than anyone
and that's what's
spreading it to everybody.
And it's just the scariest,
most awful looking thing,
it's just everyone's
worst nightmare.
- "[REC]" may be the most
terrifying zombie infection film
of recent times...
- [screaming]
- but "Pontypool"
is the most unusual.
- Grant, Grant, Grant...
- Stephen McHattie
plays a talk radio personality
in a small Canadian town...
- Pontypool, good morning.
You know, I want to talk to you
about something
that has been buggin' me.
- who slowly begins to
realize he's broadcasting
from the epicenter
of a rage zombie outbreak.
[static and man screaming]
- Pontypool's under quarantine.
Everybody has to stay inside
at all times.
- "Pontypool" is a really
fascinating and different
kind of infection
because it's not airborne,
there's no real way of
understanding the transmission
because it's just through
the spoken language.
- I'm going to go see
if Mr. Mazzy's missing...
[indistinct echoing]
missing, missing.
- Where you say a word and then
they keep saying that word
over and over and over again
and then it starts spreading
from person to person.
- Prah, prah,
prah, prah, prah...
- You say something, you're
unknowingly infecting them
with this virus
that's making them insane.
[shouting and banging]
- It is the ultimate
low-budget movie
in that you never leave
this radio studio.
And there's a massive infection
taking place outside the studio,
in the real world,
and other than
a handful of the infected,
you never really see them.
It's a movie as a radio play.
- People need to know,
we have to get this out.
- Well, it's your call,
Mr. Mazzy.
Let's just hope
what you're getting out there
isn't going to destroy
your world.
- When it came out
it seemed something very alien,
like how can a word
or a phrase be something
that could actually hurt you?
And now social media, of course,
has come such a long way since
that movie came out,
it's all about words,
it's so violent right now
that if you just say
the wrong thing to someone,
like, boom,
you know, all you do
is say one sentence and suddenly
you've got people rioting
in the capitol building.
So that's, I think "Pontypool,"
in that way,
is very ahead of its time.
- I am trying
to piss a few people off
because that's how it's done,
simple as that.
- Infections take many forms...
None more unnerving
than the sexual parasites
infesting the early films
of David Cronenberg.
[eerie music]
- Of all the infections
human beings can endure...
- [screaming]
- sexually transmitted diseases
induce the most squirms.
One trailblazing filmmaker,
David Cronenberg,
brought venereal horror
to the screen.
At the beginning
of his long career
he made two influential films
that traumatized a generation.
The first was "Shivers."
- Ew!
[screaming]
- "Shivers"...
Initially released in America
as "They Came From Within"...
Chronicles the spread
of genetically engineered
parasites
inside a high-rise
apartment building.
- Ooh!
- Oh!
- Ooh, good heavens.
- The parasites turn
mild-mannered Canadians
into crazed sex fiends.
- I'm hungry for love!
- A combination of aphrodisiac
and venereal disease, it will
hopefully turn the world
into one beautiful,
mindless orgy.
- Well, I think it sounds
a little crazy to me.
- Roger, I had a very disturbing
dream last night.
In this dream, I found myself
making love to a strange man.
- "Shivers"
or "They Came From Within"
is one of the absolute perfect
films from David Cronenberg,
and it's one of his first.
- [hissing]
- It's psychosexual,
it's twisted,
it brings in all of these
elements of body horror,
and it is beautifully
post- s.
[all shouting]
- That was a plague film
of its time
because that was
the sexual revolution,
that was when Baby Boomers were
suddenly waking up to the idea
that you can boink someone
that you weren't married to.
And that was a very big deal
to that generation,
so you had to have a plague that
could make you do something
as crazy as have sex
out of wedlock.
[all moaning]
- It culminates
in this completely abhorrent
orgy pool scene.
Somehow even though
you don't really see much,
it feels like you are
seeing everything.
- I think the end of "Shivers"
is really terrifying,
when they had that slow motion
sh*t of them in the pool
and her kissing him...
The music and everything...
Really disturbing.
[eerie music]
- Are these people victims?
Or have they been liberated
from the straightjacket
of their lonely
middle-class lives?
Cronenberg's subversive mission
is to make us question
our assumptions
about our true natures.
His next film, "Rabid,"
was a kind of sequel
to "Shivers."
Instead of confining the action
to one building,
he follows the spread
of a nasty new form
of rabies across Quebec.
[g*nshots]
The source of the contagion
is Rose,
played by Marilyn Chambers.
After an accident, Rose receives
experimental skin grafts
from a pioneering
plastic surgeon.
- [screaming]
- All right,
you hold it right there.
- The procedure
restores her body,
but gives her
a little something extra...
A blood-sucking stinger
under her armpit.
- [screaming]
- Anyone she feeds on will
become a bloodthirsty cannibal.
- [roaring]
- I remember watching it
and like, oh,
this is pretty good,
going along with it.
Like, wow, this is getting
a little rougher
than I was expecting.
But when
the operation scene happens
and the doctor takes
the nurse's finger
and cuts it off
with the scissors.
- [screaming]
- Oh, my God!
What am I watching?
- In "Rabid,"
what was scary about it
was to see how quickly
infections spread.
[shouting and screaming]
Even if you set off
a nuke on a city,
if you live outside the city,
you're gonna be okay.
But imagine setting off a nuke
that then makes more nukes.
- I'm in terrible trouble,
you gotta help me.
- Marilyn Chambers didn't even
know that she was Typhoid Mary
until it was too late...
That's what's so scary about
being a spreader... you don't
even know you're a spreader
until you've already spread.
[indistinct screaming on phone]
- I'm afraid!
- As the pandemic rages,
Rose falls victim
to one of the infected.
She becomes just another corpse
to be disposed of.
Plagues have ravaged mankind
for centuries.
- Pull!
- But there have always been
those who think
it could never happen to them.
[clanging]
- In the early s,
director/producer Roger Corman
made the jump from low-budget
black-and-white films
to the slightly-bigger-budgeted
color films
based on the gothic horror
of Edgar Allan Poe.
To help sell the pictures,
Corman brought in
veteran actor Vincent Price.
- [screaming]
- The Poe films made Price
a horror icon.
- Vincent Price
was wonderful to work with...
He was a highly intelligent,
educated man,
he'd graduated from Yale.
[dramatic music]
- The razor edge of death.
Thus the condition of man.
Bound on an island from which
he can never hope to escape.
- So he came with
great intelligence
and a classical training
as an actor.
- What is the meaning of this?
- Probably the very first
of the films,
"The Fall of
the House of Usher."
- How dare you admit anyone
into this house?
- I think it was one of
his best performances.
- Be done!
[thunder crashes]
- That and the first film
we sh*t in England,
which was
"Masque of the Red Death."
- The village is full of
the Red Death.
- The Red Death?
Prince Prospero,
I beg you, allow us haven!
I beg sanctuary!
- This is no church.
- "The Masque of the Red Death"
is, you know,
a terrific movie, I think,
it seems to be the pinnacle
of the Edgar Allan Poe series
that Roger Corman did
because he was in England
and he had access to more time
and a bit more money.
- He'd been very influenced,
shall we say,
by "The Seventh Seal," which was
a huge art house hit at the time
which, you know,
Ingmar Bergman film,
where you had Death
in a black cloak.
[both speaking foreign language]
- Very symbolic, all about
the Plague, you know,
during the medieval era.
And so he kind of found a way
to filter that
into the Edgar Allan Poe story.
- [screaming]
- Prince Prospero, who's this
very cruel nobleman who invites
his friends up to his castle
because there's the Red Death,
this plague that's ravaging the
countryside and so they figure,
oh, we'll just cloister
ourselves away and party down
and, you know, when it's all
done and the smoke clears
we'll go out and live our lives.
- But because of me, through
my mediation with my master,
the Lord of Flies,
you... all of you...
Unworthy though you may be,
will be safe from the Red Death.
- He sh*t in beautiful
Technicolor, and that's one of
the most amazing aspects
of the movie, actually,
the cinematography by Nicolas
Roeg... it's just stunning.
The camera's constantly moving
one way or another.
There's a lot of very wide sh*ts
because those sets
allow a lot of scope.
It's just... it's stunning,
it's a really,
really beautiful movie.
And then, of course,
there's Vincent Price, who was,
you know, giving percent
as Prince Prospero
and delightfully cruel
and delightfully hate-able.
- You're a madman!
- And yet I will live
and you will die.
- He played a man of evil,
but there were shadings
of tenderness within him towards
a young girl that he had
taken from the plague-stricken
countryside.
- I do not want to hurt you,
my dear.
Can't you understand?
I want to help save your soul
so you can join me
in the glories of Hell.
- No! Never!
- While the outside world is
ravaged by a plague of the body,
Prospero's castle is infected
by a plague of the spirit.
- Demon lover, of all those
who wish to live
in your eternal light,
transcribe the final mark.
- This infection isn't
inflicted on its victims...
It's chosen by them.
The orgy of corruption,
cruelty, and depravity
reaches its zenith at
Prospero's masquerade ball,
where everything is permitted,
except wearing the color red.
- The one percent
locks themselves up
in the castle and parties,
thinking that, you know,
they're never gonna let
anybody infected in.
And then, of course,
the Grim Reaper gets in.
There's no escape,
is what I got out of that.
- I would like to see your face.
- There is no face of death
until the moment
of your own death.
- Death is the great leveler.
You can be famous, you can
be rich, you could be powerful...
But one thing you're not
going to escape,
and it's an experience
that's common to everybody
who has ever lived
and who ever will live.
- Let me see your face.
[thunder crashes]
- Your hell, Prince Prospero,
and the moment of your death.
- It's the one common
nod of humanity.
[dramatic music]
- The human race is barely able
to cope with disease on Earth.
Would we stand a chance against
something not of this Earth?
[eerie music]
- When you think of
alien invaders,
you might think of this.
[laser zapping]
[dramatic music]
But what if the invader
was a virus from space,
something we have
no immunity against?
That's the premise
of "The Andromeda Strain."
Based on the novel
by Michael Crichton,
it's the story of a space probe
that crash lands
in a small town, bringing back
a pathogen that rapidly kills
. percent
of the population,
turning their blood to dust.
- Powder.
- I'll be damned.
- Now an elite team of
scientists must find a cure
before the alien virus
spreads across the Earth.
- Never believed this could
really happen.
- Well, it has happened.
- The classic of that genre,
I think, the Big Mamou,
the one that everyone...
They're all judged by
is probably
"The Andromeda Strain."
- Uh, yeah, yes.
- If you're not talking about
just some weird zombie breakout
happening... you're talking
about, like, oh, a genuine
disease that it could happen and
you're trying to clamp it down,
that's the one that they all get
judged by, I think.
- I mean, I love "The Androm..."
What do you think...
What is it about?
It's such a simple movie and
it's so well done, and it just,
it's just the pace of that movie
just moves and moves.
[dramatic music]
- I fell in love with, with just
the notion of, you know,
the scene where they're,
like, examining the ship.
- What about the bits of green?
- And then you just see
the one little green speck
and you're like, wait, that one
little tiny speck of dust
caused all of this.
[softly]
- It's growing.
[dramatic music]
- Perhaps the strangest
infection ever put on film
is the adaptation
of the H.P. Lovecraft story,
"The Color Out of Space".
Nicolas Cage plays the patriarch
of an eccentric family
living in an
isolated country house.
[expl*si*n, screaming]
One night a meteorite
crashes into their yard,
bringing with it
an unearthly infection.
Teenaged daughter Lavinia is
the only member of the family
who quickly realizes the
meteorite is not what it seems.
- It's behind the lightning.
[thunder crashing]
- At first it's fascinating
because it's this
beautiful thing... there's that
dichotomy of it being this
gorgeous meteorite that lands
in their front yard and it's
kind of this amazing thing
that's otherworldly.
[eerie music]
And then gradually
you see that this is
a very malevolent entity.
- Whatever was in the meteorite
infects the land
and transforms the family...
First, their minds...
then, their bodies.
- It's like a virus... you can't
see it, you don't know
where it is or when it's present
or how dangerous it is
or when it might strike.
But you have to be on guard
all of the time.
- Look out!
[screaming]
- The worse things get,
the deeper the father
sinks into denial.
- Come on, dad, don't pretend
that you haven't noticed.
- Nothing has been [bleep]
this place up.
- Why are you so in denial?
- Okay, you know,
I've had it with your drama!
- The picture features
a classically
unhinged performance
by Nic Cage.
- [shouting]
- His performance is a stunner,
but in and around that
performance is a story
about a family's
shared sense of reality
being smashed into tinier
and tinier fragments
by an environmental poison
that has leaked into
their well water.
- Much of the film is seen from
the point of view of Ward,
a young scientist
who befriends the family.
- Jack, what are you up to?
- Playing with my friends.
- This de facto stand-in for
the infamously r*cist Lovecraft
is played by a person of color.
- I remember Nic
saying a few times
that he'd always wanted to do
a family drama and, for him,
that's what "Color" was.
- What do you mean you tried?
Do you have any idea how much
those animals cost us?
They are alpacas... alpacas.
- And so that's how
we entered it and I think
it's exactly that, it was
a dysfunctional family
in very bizarre circumstances,
and that's what really
gave it its kick.
- I can't get a dial tone.
- It becomes body horror,
which is basically
taking something as simple
and intrinsic to our experience
as humans as a mother's embrace
of their own child
and turning that into
something grotesque.
- [screaming]
[eerie music]
- Late in the picture
the llamas out in the garage
all become this one slimy
-headed grotesque
llama creature.
- [screaming, g*nsh*t]
- The teen girl is slicing
pentagrams into her flesh.
- The father loses his mind.
- We've been having a hard time,
you know?
- And Lavinia realizes she is
humanity's last line of defense
against the color out of space.
- It's so beautiful.
- It's a progressive spin
on Lovecraft's
relentlessly misanthropic tale.
- Lavinia isn't ruined
by the color, rather,
she's elevated by the color
and she kind of
reaches her true purpose
by willingly
and voluntarily merging
with the color
and sacrificing herself
so that the color returns
to its original source.
- Only Ward survives, slowly
emerging from the wreckage
into a colorless world.
- It came out right before,
you know, Covid...
hit and started impacting
the entire world.
It's absolutely relevant
to today
and I don't know what
the moral of the story is,
because we haven't, you know,
we haven't reached the
conclusion of this one yet.
What touched this place cannot
be quantified or understood
by human science.
And I don't really know
what the moral of the story
of "Color Out of Space"
is, either...
yeah, other than maybe be the
Black guy, for once. [laughs]
I'll take it.
It was just a color
out of space.
[rumbling]
- In the movies,
lethal contagions can come
from outer space,
escape from a lab,
or emerge from the rain forest,
leaving a trail of the dead
in their wake.
But as films
and real life have shown us,
the human race is resilient.
- Boy, I better get vaccinated.
- New threats will come,
but we can survive them...
or can we?
- [screaming]
03x02 - Infections
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Masters of horror -- icons and stars who define the genre -- join writer/produder/director Eli Roth to explore horror's biggest themes and reveal the inspirations and struggles behind its past and present.
Masters of horror -- icons and stars who define the genre -- join writer/produder/director Eli Roth to explore horror's biggest themes and reveal the inspirations and struggles behind its past and present.