The Stand
Author: Stephen King
First Published: 1978

The grand-daddy of all virus novels, this features one that actually produces SARS-like symptoms. Named Captain Trips-in honour of Grateful Dead founder Jerry Garcia aka Captain Trips of San Francisco-the virus proceeds to destroy 99.44 per cent of the world's population setting the stage for a classic good versus evil battle. Good wins-one of the downsides of most Stephen King books-but not before 1,000 pages have passed. It isn't Ray Bradbury, but one of King's better works (just for kicks, the coolest King book is Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption; the best, Thinner, which doesn't have a happy ending; and the best-written, Talisman-but maybe co-author Peter Straub has something to do with that).

12 Monkeys
Director: Terry Gilliam 1996

Fine, this isn't a virus-virus movie, but I guess I would have done just about anything to feature it here. Sociopath Bruce Willis 'volunteers' to be sent back from the 21st century to 1996 to obtain an original strain of a virus that has decimated humanity (watch the tense). He gets sent back to 1990, ends up in a mental asylum, falls in love with a doctor Madeline Stowe and encounters a madman (Brad Pitt) who has some sort of link to uber-terrorist group Twelve Monkeys, which is responsible for the release of the virus. Phew! Willis' best and well nigh Gilliam's too.

Outbreak
Director: Wolfgang Petersen 1995

Essentially, a catch the monkey-with-a-killer-virus movie, Outbreak benefited from a great cast (Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Rene Russo, Kevin Spacey, Cuba Gooding Junior, Donald Sutherland, and Patrick Dempsey), the 1995 Ebola panic, and Richard Preston's non-fiction work of the same year, The Hot Zone, which deals with an Ebola outbreak among monkeys in a Washington lab (read it if you can nab a copy).

The Andromeda Strain
Author: Michael Crichton
First Published: 1969

Perhaps crichton's finest work, this has all the ingredients that have by now become staples of virus-conspiracies: an alien virus, a government conspiracy, and a race against an imagined deadline. Crichton wrote books with an eye on the big screen and The Andromeda Strain was made into a motion pic in 1971 (Director: Robert Wise). The science may sound a little obsolete but the movie is still eminently watchable.

28 Days Later
Director: Danny Boyle 2002

Written by Alex garland (the Beach) and directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, The Beach), this is the newest virus-movie on the block. It's very very British and very very low-budget. It is also shot exclusively in digital format. The picturisation is deliberately stark and the cast unknown, but the movie, despite a campy lord-of-the-flies kind of last part works. The gist: animal rights activists break into a lab where some chained chimpanzees are watching pictures of untold violence on the tube. A scientist warns them that the chimps are infected with rage, but the activists release them. Mayhem follows. 28 days later Jim, a bicycle courier who has been in an accident comes out of coma in a deserted hospital...