PLAGUE - OFFICIAL SCREENER from Matt Simpson on Vimeo.

It looks much campier then Eli Roth's original, which could be either a bad or a good thing, depending on whether it actually ends up being funny. The first film managed to balance horror and hilarity pretty well, so here's hoping.. Either way it's nice to see Rider Strong again. Cabin Fever 2 will be out on DVD and Blu-Ray February 16, 2010.

[via Shock Til You Drop]

Between 1630 and 1631, the plague killed one third of Venice's population, wiping out 50,000 people out of a population of 150,000 in just one year. The panicked population, trying to stop the disease from spreading, often blamed female "vampires" for infecting the living. It was believed that people who chewed or bit their shrouds might be vampires (a dead body might appear to be chewing its shroud if it had post-mortem motor movements, which is fairly common; or bloody fluid released from the mouth after death might make it seem as if the shroud had been soiled by vampire nastiness).

To stop these "vampires," grave diggers would sort through bodies in mass graves and try to find ones who had bitten their shrouds and then shove a brick in their mouths to stop the threat. Yesterday researchers on an island near Venice announced they'd excavated a mass grave and found possibly the earliest example on record of a "vampire" who'd been buried with a brick in her mouth.

via The Hindu

Photo via Matteo Borrini and National Geographic

Over at Morbid Anatomy, Joanna Ebenstein says she uncovered this striking image on the Christie's auction website - it was sold a couple of years ago. The text that goes with the auction gives you some background on the odd life of its crafter:

Although his artistic career was extremely short-lived, Gaetano Zumbo was arguably one of the finest wax modellers active in the second half of the 17th century. Born to noble parents in Syracuse, Sicily, he took up art after a long period of self-criticism and self-tuition. He made his debut as an artist in Bologna in 1691 and was soon after taken into the service of Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. By 1695 Zumbo left Florence for Bologna, and then went on to Genoa where he entered into partnership with Guillaume Desnoues, a French surgeon, for whom he made exact models in coloured wax of the human anatomy to assist medical studies. His collaboration with Desnoues was, again, short-lived and by 1700 he had moved to Paris and obtained a royal privilege for the manufacture of anatomical preparations in coloured wax. He died in Paris in 1701.

Apparently one of Zumbo's biggest fans was the Marquis de Sade. Which makes sense when you consider that Zumbo loved to sculpt hot naked people, as well as the sick and decomposing.

via Morbid Anatomy

Because Marburg has such a short incubation period, it's unlikely last year's exposures could lead to an outbreak. Anyone exposed to the virus would most likely have gotten sick last year when the patient was treated.

via Seattle Times

Evolution is a very complex phenomenon, affected by millions of variables and difficult to control precisely. At the purely mechanical level, however, we understand it quite well. The Rice research examined how viruses and bacteria mutate by exchanging genes and gene sets. Then they came up with a formula for several key factors: recombination rate, mutation rate and fitness function. If you know any two of the factors for a given organism, you can figure out the third. That means you can create a drug that will manipulate one of the factors and create a very specific outcome.

One such outcome is called lethal mutagenesis. Using a designer drug, you increase the mutation rate so fast that the population undergoes what bioengineers call a "phase change" (they liken their formula in many ways to thermodynamics, hence the reference to phases of matter). Rice professor Michael Deem described the ultimate result:

"If the mutation, recombination or horizontal gene transfer rates are too high, the system delocalizes and gets spread all over sequence space."

I have no idea what that means, but I'm sure it isn't good news for the virus. It also makes for great sci-fi dialogue.

Handsome Smuggler: Watch your horizontal transfer rate, kid. You don't want to delocalize the system.
Adventuresome Farm Boy: Why not?
Handsome Smuggler: Then we'll end up spread all over sequence space.
Adventuresome Farm Boy: I made out with my sister.

Image by: hans s.

Forced evolution: Can we mutate viruses to death? [EurekAlert!]

First of all, you'll want to begin with some plague classics: George Romero's 1973 plague-makes-you-a-murderin-freak flick The Crazies (soon to be a remake), or the 1971 version of I Am Legend called Omega Man, with Charlton Heston battling people whose disease makes them hippies in whiteface.

You might want to leaven your diet of plague with a couple of books: Kathleen Ann Goonan's nanopunk classic Queen City Jazz is about a nano-plague that converts people into zombie-esque creatures who are all obsessed with playing out the plot of Huckleberry Finn. You think I'm joking but I'm not. Goonan is a rewardingly weird writer, whose ideas will infect you and make you feel strange for days after. And of course you'll need to read Max Brooks' World War Z, a modern classic in the YAZPM genre. It's the first faux documentary novel about a zombie outbreak, told as a series of interviews with survivors.

Once you've digested those, you can move on to more recent YAZPM movies, starting with 28 Days Later. This flick is one of the best plague zombie movies of all time, full of grody goodness and exemplifying the "fast zombie" sub-sub-genre. If you want more ultra-violence and less plague, you can try The Signal, about an outbreak of murderous violence sparked by a maddening TV and mobile phone signal that scrambles people's perceptions. There is much limb-munching and occasional (intentional) humor. And if you need more YAZPM humor after that, you absolutely must see Zombie Strippers. It's got Jenna Jameson as a zombie, infecting all the guys who come to watch her strip — and a lot of the girls who work for her too.

And, obviously, check out REC, the Spanish YAZPM movie on which Quarantine is based. Its frenetic YouTube camera style is scary and intense.

The remake was batted around over that last few years and passed off by director Brad Anderson. But now it's been been picked up by Breck Eisner and today Overture Films announced it would be backing the pic — whose themes fit nicely with today's bioterror fears.

The 1973 Trixie is actually a nasty virus that accidentally gets unleashed on middle America. The virus makes people insane with rage and riots break out all over and the Army is called in, and that's when everything really goes to hell. Sounds very 28 Days Later.

Overture CEO Chirs McGurk explained the reason that they were interested in this endeavor because they were looking for horror that was smart. The script was penned by Ray Wright and Scott Kosar and Romero will watch over as executive producer.

[Variety]

The clips look great, and Danny Glover can almost pull off that ridiculous eye patch. I'm excited to watch Moore take charge when she reveals that she's the only one in the quarantine who can see — I'd follow Moore into any post-apocalyptic future. Blindness hits theaters September 26, 2008.

Nothing:Mark Ruffalo checks out a patient with the first case of the "milky white" blindness.

Bathroom Problems:
Uh oh, looks likes the good doctor has a bad case of blindness himself.

Meet The Crazy King Of The Ward:

I Won't Forget Your Face:

According to UPI:

The department also assessed the possibility of a terrorist attack releasing pathogens from the lab — which will work on the most infectious animal diseases, like Foot and Mouth; and on those most deadly to humans, like the Hendra and Nipah viruses. The overall risk assessment for a release at the five mainland sites was "moderate" because of "the potential easy spread of a disease through livestock or wildlife" nearby, the statement said.

DHS is currently considering five possible sites in the mainland United States. They'd better hope nobody in those towns has read The Hot Zone or seen 28 Days Later.

New Report on Bio-War Lab Danger [UPI via Space War]

Millions of humans are infected with Leptospirosis every year, and the new strain could be spreading without detection. If new strains are transmitted beyond the relatively isolated jungle area where they were found, a catastrophic global pandemic could result.

There is no vaccine for humans, and treatment usually requires multiple antibiotics. Joseph Vinetz, M.D. was studying Leptospirosis in the Amazon region of Peru on behalf of the UC San Diego Division of Infectious Diseases when he discovered several humans and rats carrying the new strain. Dr. Vinetz fears that Leptospira licerasiae may have infected hundreds of humans in the remote region. Photo by: CDC.

New Species Of Infectious Disease Found In Amazon. [Science Daily]

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Wild animals are the most likely bearers of the next plague — 60% of epidemics are from "zoonoses," diseases that jump from animals to humans living in close proximity. The more that human populations spread into previously-uninhabited areas, the more likely we are to rub up against some viruses that the local fauna are resistant to, while we are not.

According to the Earth Institute at Columbia University:

In the new study, researchers from four institutions analyzed 335 emerging diseases from 1940 to 2004, then converted the results into maps correlated with human population density, population changes, latitude, rainfall and wildlife biodiversity. They showed that disease emergences have roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years. Some 60% of the diseases traveled from animals to humans (such diseases are called zoonoses) and the majority of those came from wild creatures. With data corrected for lesser surveillance done in poorer countries, "hot spots" jump out in areas spanning sub-Saharan Africa, India and China; smaller spots appear in Europe, and North and South America.

"We are crowding wildlife into ever-smaller areas, and human population is increasing," said coauthor Marc Levy, a global-change expert at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), an affiliate of Columbia University's Earth Institute. "The meeting of these two things is a recipe for something crossing over." The main sources are mammals. Some pathogens may be picked up by hunting or accidental contact; others, such as Malaysia's Nipah virus, go from wildlife to livestock, then to people. Humans have evolved no resistance to zoonoses, so the diseases can be extraordinarily lethal.

Scientists Make First Map of Emerging Disease Hotspots [Earth Institute]

I Am Legend concept art from Warner Bros.

So much of the look of I Am Legend was outdoors. How much of that was designed in advance?

We illustrated it or key-framed it. It was an illustration of the area that we were dressing. We conceptualized how much we could visually do practically, and how it was going to be augmented in the computer.

Some of the concept art sketches look very painterly, especially the evacuation scenes.

Some of the early concepts were ... entirely created as an illustration, and then as we found the practical location, we took a picture of the location and augmented the location, and added what we needed to add to it. And altered the sky and added a grainier texture to the look.

Did you watch Omega Man?

A little bit. There was the original, with Vincent Price, and then Omega Man. It was kind of a take on both of them. But also the director Francis Lawrence wanted to make it feel like it was three years later, but it was not an apocalyptic environment. But nature takes over.

Some of the original concept art looks really bombed out. There are buildings that are just skeletons of metal.

As I came on... it was [decided] not to look so apocalyptic. It was kind of a mixture, [with] a hint of what happened in the midst of the chaos, and then nature taking over. It's been three years since the virus and the town has been blocked out. So rather than having it like Omega Man, with the streets littered with trash and stuff... things are biodegradable. Nature takes over, cleans and moves things around.

Parts of it are quite idyllic and beautiful. What was the reason for deciding to make it look less post-apocalyptic?

Not to look like all the others, and also it's a combination of rather than being him in this post-apocalyptic world, it's the natural world taking over. Nature's evolving.

Did you have anything to do with designing the mutants?

A little bit. Originally the concept was to do it live action, and there was a lot of pre-concept work done early on. And then as it didn't quite play out [as] they wanted it to. It became part of the digital world. So I was involved in some of the meetings [about] how to make the creatures or monsters still human, but a little more defined in its body structure and a little more elongated.

Did the original production designer leave because of the decision to make the film look less post-apocalyptic?

Oh no. No, not at all. It just had to do with personal family stuff.

So what are you working on now?

I'm working on Fast And The Furious 4.