Watching ‘Contagion’ Can Soothe Coronavirus Anxiety—Here’s Why

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Contagion.

I would not have watched Contagion this week if it were not my job to watch Contagion this week. The reason it’s my job to watch Contagion this week is because so many of you are watching Contagion this week, despite it not being your job to watch Contagion this week. But while I don’t see the appeal, there are a few psychological theories as to why Contagion fanned the flames of my irrational fears, while for others it offers a soothing escape to the real-life horrors of coronavirus.

The 2011 film has been steadily climbing in the Amazon Prime and iTunes charts. As of today, it was No.8 on the iTunes movies chart, and in the No.6 spot on Amazon’s “Rent or Buy” trending movies carousel. Even Moonlight director Barry Jenkins has gotten on board with the trend, telling the New York Times, “I paid $12.99 to watch a 10-year-old movie. I’ve never done that before.”

The reason, of course, that so many people are watching this movie about the spread of a fictional deadly virus is that we’re all freaking out about the spread of a very real, definitely not fictional virus: COVID-19, more commonly referred to as coronavirus. And Contagion—which was directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by his frequent collaborator, Scott Z. Burns—is scarily accurate when it comes to parallels of 2020’s real-life health crisis. But my question for every person buying and renting this movie is: Why the heck do you want to watch all of your deepest anxieties about the worst-case-scenario of coronavirus play out on screen?

The movie opens with Gwyneth Paltrow coughing in an airport (she dies shortly after), walks through the public health officials attempt to contain the respiratory disease (which includes Kate Winslet chastising the public for touching their faces “two to three thousand times a day”), touches on the spread of misinformation via a conspiracy theory blogger (aka Jude Law in a terrible hat), eventually finds the entire country in quarantine (poor Matt Damon‘s daughter can’t kiss her boyfriend), and finally ends with a vaccination being slowly distributed via lottery. Oh, also, the disease originated in China.

I was straight-up not having a good time watching Contagion. Here are a few notes I took while watching it:

• “IT’S RESPIRATORY, OH GOD”
• “oh god, that infected guy is on the bus… OH GOD, HE’S TOUCHING EVERY POLE!”
• “dammit, I just touched my face again”
• “Oh, god, surely things won’t resort to riots, right? But someone got stabbed over the Popeyes sandwich, so maybe?”
• “If Jude Law doesn’t take that hat off, I will spit in his face and infect him.”

You get the idea. After I finished the movie, I bought a bunch of groceries, because I suddenly felt certain I would soon be under quarantine lockdown. I half-expected there to be a Contagion-style riot when I got to my local Key Food. There was not. People were acting normal.

Contagion is a good movie, but it also sparked panic I don’t need to be feeling right now. I know I’m low-risk. I may live in New York City, but I’m young, healthy, and I’m very privileged to work for a company that lets me work from home when I need to, which I took advantage of this week. If you’re an anxiety-prone person in a similar situation trying to choose what to watch right now: For the love god, do not watch Contagion. You don’t want to be the only weirdo buying ten packages of dried seaweed at the grocery store.

Based on my Twitter feed, some of you are with me. Others, I saw, disagreed, and felt watching Contagion actually calmed them down. There was a part me that gets why so many people are voluntarily watching this movie right now. Maybe there’s something to be said for watching a fictionalized version of our deepest anxieties play out via A-list movie stars. After all, if it’s happening to Gwenyth Paltrow and Matt Damon in a big-budget Hollywood film, that means it can’t be real, right?

And there have been studies done on why some people find relevant horror movies comforting. In a 2004 paper in the Journal of Media Psychology by Dr. Glenn Walters, which I accessed via an excerpt in Psychology Today, Walters referenced a psychological study done in 1994 in which college students were shown disturbing documentary videos of cows being stunned, killed, and butchered in slaughterhouses.

“Ninety percent of the students turned the video off before it reached the end. Even the majority of individuals who watched the tape in its entirety found the images disturbing,” wrote Walters. “Yet many of these same individuals would think nothing of paying money to attend the premiere of a new horror film with much more blood and gore.” Why? The researchers in that study theorized it was because the fictional nature of horror films gives viewers back a sense of control and psychological distance over a horrific situation.

“Most people who view horror movies understand that the filmed events are unreal, which furnishes them with psychological distance from the horror portrayed in the film,” wrote Walters, who went on to say that younger viewers who perceive horror films to be real are more negatively affected by scary movies than those who perceive them to be fiction.

It also potentially easier to understand what’s happening in the world right now through fictional celebrities explaining it, versus the massive influx of news articles, conflicting reports on Twitter, and 24 hour news channels providing minute by minute updates. Here, you can watch 106 minutes of Soderbergh created terror, and be done with it.

That said, why are so many of you enjoying Contagion while it sent me into a grocery-buying spiral? Maybe I just can’t bring myself to see the movie as the fiction that it is. Maybe my brain is still in that young, naive child phase. Maybe I just can’t distance myself from a movie that makes Gwyneth Paltrow the first celebrity to die. I mean, do we really think goop will protect her? That just feels right!

It’s hard to say. These are all just psychological theories, and psychological theories are difficult to test definitively. All I know is that I won’t be rewatching Contagion any time soon.

Where to watch Contagion