In this South Korean film, a severely deadly strain of the virus H5N1 starts tearing through the city of Bundang, killing those who contract it within 36 hours. (You can’t just kill Gwyneth like that!) The movie is front-loaded with dread before turning into a chilling sociological study of what everyday people would do during a pretty realistic seeming pandemic. The disease disaster movie on everyone’s lips right now! Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is best known for the terrifying death of Gwyneth Paltrow very early on in the movie, which makes us all realize that the fictional disease spreading across Earth is super serious. The story centers on the CDC and military medical researchers charged with containing and treating the infected, and it has people bleeding out of orifices and that one extremely scary movie theater scene that made almost everyone currently between about 30 and 35 think they were going to catch a catastrophic illness in a movie theater. The movie that turned a micro-generation into hypochondriacs, Outbreak is about a fictional California town that is entirely quarantined when it becomes ground zero for an Ebola–like outbreak in the U.S. It might seem crazy, but as Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk writes, “this current pandemic crisis makes me terrified, and a story about exactly that same thing is one way to grapple with that fear.” In that spirit, Vulture has assembled a list of contagion movies you can watch to either ease your worries or willfully exacerbate them, broken down by category for ease of use:

While some viewers are coping by watching escapist fantasies and absurdist reality TV, others are turning to a more dystopian alternative: movies about pandemics. Confined to the relative comforts of our own homes, isolated individuals are turning to their streaming services for some iota of connection in a socially distanced world. The coronavirus has officially forced much of the world into voluntary or involuntary quarantine. This list has been periodically updated to include new titles. Photo: Overture Films/Kobal/Shutterstoc/Overture Films/Kobal/Shutterstoc

Pandemonium movie space