ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the most salient thematic, narrative and visual codes of the genre. It establishes how the epidemic genre is characterised by an ongoing struggle between a horizontal and a vertical axis of contagion, which is based on a binary opposition between the capricious spread of disease and its epidemiological control. This chapter explores how this axis is visually rendered in these texts through the use of a specific film language and iconography, especially through the meaningful juxtaposition of extreme close-ups and extreme long shots. Finally, the chapter proposes a classification of the genre into three types of narratives, each of them corresponding to a specific epidemiological stage: narratives of connectivity, of containment and of bodily and territorial conversion. The conventions delineated in this chapter do not intend to be definitive or concluding but serve as a useful initial approach to the genre.
