S1E49 / Lessons from the Zombie Apocalypse / Coltan Scrivner, David Schnieder, Robert Wonser

So for people who are having a really hard time with the pandemic for one reason or another, maybe they're very anxious or they're lonely, should clinical psychologists be prescribing horror films to them?

Prescribing Stephen King for the pandemic?

Welcome back to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health, and social impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. I'm your host, Dr. Celine Gounder. In the summer of 2009, the US military developed a special training plan to confront an unprecedented threat.

This document contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the meaning of the espionage laws. The transmission or revelation of information contained herein in any manner to an unauthorized person is prohibited by law.

This plan is now unclassified and was released to the public in 2011. Its name: CONPLAN 8888.

This plan fulfills fictional contingency planning guidance for U.S. Strategic Command to develop a comprehensive Level 3 plan to undertake military operations to preserve non-zombie humans from threats posed by a zombie horde.

Zombies. The military came up with a plan to protect the nation from zombies.

The objective of the plan is threefold. 1. Establish and maintain a vigilant defensive condition aimed at protecting humankind from zombies. 2. If necessary, conduct operations that will, if directed, eradicate zombie threats to human safety. 3. Aid civil authorities in maintaining law and order and restoring basic services during and after a zombie attack.

The plan covers pathogenic zombies, radiation zombies, space zombies, even chicken zombies. But this wasn't a joke. Zombies may not be real, but the military realized the response to a make-believe enemy would be the same as a real threat. The CDC also has a zombie simulation.

It makes it more interesting, right? Like, if you ask me, do I want to read the CDC's plan for how to prepare for a pandemic, I'm probably gonna say no. But if you ask me, do I want to read the CDC's plan for how to prevent zombies from taking over the world, I might say yes, right? And so it is a nice way of kind of getting people interested in information that you're trying to give them.

This is Colton Scrivener. He's a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.

I think the only thing I'm disappointed in in this is that somebody got to it before me, because I would love to have Department of Defense funding to, to come up with a plan to prevent a zombie outbreak.

Pandemics of all kinds, real or zombie, were on people's minds when the coronavirus reached the United States.

The movie Contagion, which, you know, was at that time like 9 years old, became one of the most watched movies in the US. So why? Why would people watch You know, why would you watch a movie about a pandemic when there's a real pandemic?

Colton was the lead author of an article that came out this summer. It asked why people were watching these movies all of a sudden and if it signaled something deeper. In this Halloween edition of Epidemic, we're going to talk to experts in epidemiology and the social sciences to see how zombie movies—yes, zombie movies—can help us understand the pandemic. Zombie and other horror movies can help us explain the fundamentals of epidemiology.

Vampires tend to have a really low R-naught, and that's compared to, say, zombies, where they have a really high R-naught, and one zombie can bite many, many people and infect them all.

They anticipate some of the real problems we're facing now.

We have this long history of seeking personal and individual solutions to public problems, to social problems. And I think the zombie films highlight that.

And if you're someone who likes zombie movies, there's a chance you're handling the pandemic better than most.

It's sort of like they dose themselves with self-exposure, like this exposure therapy with horror films.

Today on Epidemic: the coronavirus pandemic and zombies. Colton studies morbid curiosity.

I think when I tell people that I study morbid curiosity, at first they kind of laugh and think I'm joking. But fortunately at UChicago, they're pretty supportive of obscure research.

Believe it or not, there's not a lot of work done in this area. He's still trying to nail down a good definition.

It's sort of an internal motivation to learn about threatening phenomenon or situations in your environment that might be threatening.

Colton identified 4 categories of morbid curiosity: interpersonal violence.

So this means anything from, you know, the Romans going to the Colosseum, or if a street fight, you know, breaks out when you're walking down the street, everybody stops and kind of looks, right? Supernatural. So this would be sort of your typical ghost story or monster story. Body violation. And so this could be something like an interest in surgeries, or, you know, people post YouTube videos of surgeries and they get, you know, millions of views.

And the motives of dangerous people.

And so this sort of is just basically like true crime. So you're interested in learning about the minds of people who are dangerous around you. The unifying thread through each of these four facets is motivation to learn about dangerous phenomena or situations in your environment.

So when the pandemic happened, it presented Colton with a unique opportunity to study morbid curiosity on a grand scale. Back in March, one of his colleagues got a tweet asking, "Are horror fans doing better during the pandemic?" Colton and his colleagues had been thinking that maybe horror fans were better able to cope with real-world fears and anxiety, but no one had ever done any studies on it.

He and I talked about it thought, well, this is a really interesting question. It's something, you know, we've thought about. Let's, let's study it because now we have the opportunity to study this exact thing.

Colton and 3 colleagues put together a study to see if horror fans were more psychologically resilient during the pandemic. So what does it even mean to be psychologically resilient?

Yeah, so that's, that's a really good question because that's something that we had trouble with when we were designing the study because There are a lot of different kind of definitions of psychological resilience. Basically, the idea is there are two aspects to this long-drawn-out resilience. There's psychological distress, which you would want to be low on. So this would mean that if you're low on psychological distress, you're experiencing fewer symptoms of anxiety, of depression, sleeplessness, irritability. And then there's positive resilience, and positive resilience is sort of characterized by an ability to to enjoy life when things are rough, right? So you're able to find things you enjoy doing even if there's a pandemic, even if it's causing you a lot of grief.

They asked more than 300 people 3 sets of questions. The first questionnaire was designed to see how psychologically resilient respondents were during the pandemic. The second was a morbid curiosity survey. And the third was a survey for what kinds of movies they preferred.

So we asked some broad genre questions like horror, romance, and comedy, and then we asked some specific ones as well. So we took apocalyptic films, alien invasion films, and zombie films, and we lumped those together into something we called prepper genres. You know, the institutions that people rely on are no longer functioning like they normally would, and so we thought this sort of best captured what happens during a global pandemic.

But before we hear the results of the study, we're going to see how zombie movies can help explain the basics of epidemiology. The same things that make a zombie apocalypse a good training simulation for the military also make it useful for explaining concepts in science.

I watch movies that make me anxious about real things that, you know, I might encounter, and then it helps me think about how these things would work. So I like I like the disease— sort of disease-based horror films.

David Schneider is a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. When he first started teaching there, he created a class that used horror films to teach students about epidemiology.

It allows you to separate it and put it in a sandbox where it's really pretty safe to describe. And then the way the diseases are transmitted, they're usually artificial and not things that we have to worry about, you know, being bitten by a zombie or something like that.

Zombie bites are actually a really good way to explain a concept in epidemiology a lot of people have been hearing lately: the basic reproduction number of a virus, R naught.

Yeah, so R naught is the rate that an infected person is likely to pass on the disease to an uninfected person.

If the R of an infected person is less than 0, the rate of transmission falls. But if it's higher than 0, well, That means it can spread fast. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, for example, can have an R-naught as high as 3, smallpox 6, and measles 15. The R-naught is a characteristic of both the virus and of what we do to control it.

This shows up in different ways in movies. So you have vampires, which exist by sitting quietly in society at a level where they're basically undetected, and they will feed on humans, but they don't spawn new vampires very frequently because that would give them competition, and it would also make them more noticeable. So vampires tend to have a really low R naught, just enough to keep them going, but they aren't going to increase their numbers. And that's compared to, say, zombies, where they have a really high R naught, and one zombie can bite many, many people and infect them all.

The rage virus in 28 Days Later is a good example of this. The R-naught of that virus is so high, infection is instant. But if the virus spreads too fast and kills too many of its hosts, it dies out.

With that really high R-naught, it's going to destroy humanity and then the virus will, will disappear. So I would expect that over time, zombies would become less virulent.

They'd have a lower R-naught. Another twist on epidemiology in horror films is disease tolerance. The 1954 novel I Am Legend that inspired the film of the same name deals with this. Spoilers ahead, FYI. The novel is about a virus that wipes out most of humanity and turns the survivors into these vampire-zombie creatures. The last man on earth who's uninfected has been killing the monsters infected with the disease after he fails to develop a cure.

So he encounters a woman who appears not to have the disease and ends up falling in love with her. And it turns out this is a trap for him because he, he's been killing people who he thought had the disease, but some of them actually survive quite well as humans, and he's actually wiping out humanity. So these infected people end up setting a trap for him so they can kill him so that humanity survives. And we see this really strongly with COVID You know, there's some populations of people where COVID is a highly deadly disease, and there are other populations of people where it's really not.

Some people's immune systems do a better job at fending off COVID, but anyone with SARS-CoV-2 can spread the infection, even if they don't have symptoms. How's that for a horror movie? This is why social isolation is so important to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. And, by the way, survive a zombie apocalypse.

It's interesting when we look at, you know, who's successful in fending off zombies. It's people who are in highly cohesive groups that look out for each other, or it's people who are socially isolated. This is Robert Wanzer.

He's a sociologist at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California. Robert co-authored an article looking at how zombie films reflect the fears of the time when they were made.

And the fears change through time. So the fears of Cold War, the fears of, uh, space and, um, technology gone awry. Uh, in recent years with like the Resident Evil films, you get the rise of evil corporations. Another is income inequality.

In zombie movies and in real life, being able to socially isolate effectively comes down to a question of class. One of George Romero's later zombie movies, Land of the Dead, explores these class divides in an extreme way. In that movie, Dennis Hopper plays the leader of a militarized compound called Fiddler's Green, where an uber-wealthy elite live far removed from the zombie apocalypse outside.

He's able to keep his distance from, you know, the potential harm. And it's not just the zombie threat that's kept at bay. It's the poor who are kept out. And I mean, in the very real world too, we're seeing that who can afford to remain socially distant, whose jobs allow them to work from home, who can afford to have, you know, DoorDash and Grubhub and Instacart deliver their groceries, and then who has no choice but to be the person delivering those.

One thing zombie movies definitely don't reflect is trust in institutions, especially the government.

Part of what makes a movie interesting is bumpy rides. You know, nobody wants to watch a movie where things go smoothly. And the government's approach is flawless. And, you know, martial law doesn't have to be declared because everybody calmly waits at home with masks on and socially distant. And the U.S.

response to the pandemic has been anything but flawless. With little response from the federal government and some states, many communities and individuals were left on their own. Having to survive on your own is a common theme in zombie movies, and it usually doesn't encourage a a warm picture of your fellow human beings. The prepper films Colton Scrivener talked about in his study usually assume the worst about people. Hoarding food and toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic seemed right in line with this. But Robert pointed out that there's a lot that horror films got wrong about the pandemic.

Contrary to the every man for himself, we saw a lot of people come together. The problem, of course, is that it's not a systemic approach. You know, it relies on social capital. You know, do you have access to people who can help you? Are the people in your social network wealthy enough to donate to your GoFundMe? We have this long history of seeking personal and individual solutions to public problems, to social problems. And I think the zombie films highlight that.

Robert says we could see these zombie films as cautionary tales.

You know, I think the takeaway in those films of of what usually brings success is cooperation and lack of belligerence. You know, like, we don't assume the worst in everybody. The Walking Dead is famous for taking all the moral characters and having them be shown to be completely wrong. And, you know, the really terrible people are the ones who end up surviving. And while there is certainly precedent for that in real life, I think, you know, When you look at history and what leads to success, it's some sort of cooperation.

Robert has been watching a lot of these movies during the pandemic.

My wife and I watched the movie Contagion like 5 times since the pandemic started. And I always thought of that movie as a zombie movie minus the zombies.

I will confess I did go back and I watched Contagion. I went back and watched Outbreak. I watched World War Z and maybe one or two others at the beginning of the pandemic, but you said 5 times. What's the reason for watching that so many times in the midst of what we're dealing with right now?

Yeah. Um, and I'm guessing at 5, it was definitely more than 1. Uh, but if I had to pin it down, I'm sure there's something there. There's some reassurance in fictionalized accounts that are, you know, reflective of real life.

Colton Scribner says this is normal.

A lot of people say, you know, the reason that it helps me cope is because I watched the movie Contagion and I see that, you know, the virus in that had like a 30% mortality rate. And I just think, oh, well, COVID isn't as bad as that. So they see these examples of how bad things could be. And even through simulation, that might help them sort of overcome feelings of dread that they might have about some specific problem in their life.

Zombies or pandemic movies are a way to tap into the fear from the comfort of your couch. The results of Colton's study explain why.

Yeah, so there were four, I guess, main findings, or four sort of cornerstone findings. The first one was that horror fans were more likely to say that they were having fewer symptoms of psychological distress than non-horror fans. So they're experiencing, you know, less anxiety, fewer feelings of depression, fewer sleepless nights, things like that.

The study also found that people who were fans of the prepper films—movies like zombie pandemics and alien invasion—they said they felt less psychological distress, but they also felt more prepared for the pandemic.

People who watched even a few—it wasn't like you had to be a hardcore, you know, pandemic movie fan—but if you just watched a few of them, you felt significantly more prepared for the pandemic than people who had never watched any of them.

But the reason those respondents reported doing better during the pandemic wasn't because they had fewer signs of psychological distress.

Basically, people who were morbidly curious were able to find ways to enjoy their life during the pandemic. You know, again, even though it was terrible and it might be, you know, might have caused them to lose their job, or, you know, they're afraid that they might catch coronavirus, they're still able to find something interesting about it. People who are morbidly curious are not less afraid of violence. They're not less afraid of They're not less afraid of dangerous people. They're just more interested in it.

Colton says his own morbid curiosity has helped him deal with the stresses of the pandemic.

There are lots of aspects of COVID that are interesting to me. You know, the societal implications are interesting to me. The psychological implications are interesting to me. The virology is interesting to me. And so when I am inundated with COVID news, I'm usually able to find something about it that kind of piques my interest. And I think that's been really helpful.

So for people who are having a really hard time with the pandemic for one reason or another, maybe they're very anxious or they're lonely, should clinical psychologists be prescribing horror films to them?

Prescribing Stephen King for the pandemic? It's not the case that you just watch one horror film and now you're good to go for round 2 of COVID But rather that because you've exposed yourself to these sort of scary situations throughout time, you've developed better emotion regulation skills. And so when you're exposed to something in the real world that is scary or is anxiety-inducing, you're better able to deal with that.

There's a lot to be afraid of in the middle of a pandemic, but at least we know these movies are nothing to be afraid of, right? Epidemic is brought to you by Just Human Productions. We're funded in part by listeners like you. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. Today's episode was produced by Zack Dyer and me. Our music is by The Blue Dot Sessions. Our interns are Tabatha Gordillo, Annabelle Chen, and Brian Chen. Special thanks to Alan Pierre for reading excerpts of Con Plan 8888. If you enjoy the show, please tell a friend about it today. And if you haven't already done so, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find out about the show. You can learn more about this podcast, how to engage with us on social media, and how to support the podcast at epidemic.fm. That's epidemic epidemic.fm. Just Human Productions is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, so your donations to support our podcasts are tax deductible. Go to epidemic.fm to make a donation. We release Epidemic every Friday, but producing a podcast costs money. We've got to pay our staff, so please make a donation to help us keep this going. And check out our sister podcast, American Diagnosis. Diagnosis. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at americandiagnosis.fm. On American Diagnosis, we cover some of the biggest public health challenges affecting the nation today. In Season 1, we covered youth and mental health. In Season 2, the opioid overdose crisis. And in Season 3, gun violence in America. I'm Dr. Celine Gounder. Thanks for listening to Epidemic.