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he is the big star, and they spend so much time with the guy who is clearly the good guy. ... Aspects of it feel like noir, but I’ve come to really think of noir as having the hardcore aspect of the ‘villains’ being the protagonists ... where the audience is asked to empathize with the bad guys. There’s a moral ambiguity there that the audience is asked to deal with, but in Panic there really is no moral ambiguity. Palance is the bad guy — like this cancer running loose.” Muller noted that The Killer Who Stalked New York, a film released shortly after Panic in the Streets, follows the same theme by having a femme fatale played by Evelyn Keyes inadvertently carry a smallpox plague into New York City. “She goes along with her lover’s scheme to smuggle jewels in, and she does it for love, and he contacts smallpox and dies, and she is left carrying the contagion into the city and becomes the focal point of a huge manhunt. To me that seems pretty noir.” In the wake of these films, other movies worked to scare audiences by suggesting that various diseases could easily be spread, striking people down with invisible deadliness, including The Satan Bug (1965), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Outbreak (1995), and Contagion (2011). Then, of course, there are any number of zombie movies in which people turn into the living dead because of some unknown disease. “Plague is all around,” Althouse said. “There are a handful of these cases in the U.S. every year, but modern antibiotics can treat it. You go to the doctor and treat it right away, so the likelihood of it spreading is pretty low.” But still, can some sort of disease turn us into cannibalistic human monsters like in those zombie movies? Althouse is dubious. “You know, I haven’t seen a ton of those movies, but my friends watch them, and they ask me, ‘What are the chances of some virus turning us all into zombies?’ I tell them there are viruses that change our behavior — rabies, for instance, makes you froth and become aggressive and bite people — but we’re not likely to become zombies.” ◀
details ▼ Panic in the Streets, introduced by epidemiologist Ben Althouse, part of the Santa Fe Institute and the Center for Contemporary Arts’ Science on Screen series ▼ 7 p.m. Monday, March 31 ▼ Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail ▼ $10; 505-982-1338
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