Format: Streaming video from Fawesome on Fire!
We need to talk about Pathogen, the 2006 movie written and directed by Emily Hagens. There are plenty of zombie movies and plenty of movies directed by women. But how many movies, let alone zombie movies, are there directed by a 12-year-old girl? That’s the case with this one—a true product of a child’s ambition. That, if for no other reason, makes this worth seeing.
What this means, though, is that you shouldn’t really go into this with a lot of expectations of Pathogen being a masterpiece. It’s not. It is exactly what you expect in a lot of ways—it has virtually no budget and everyone involved in it is an amateur. This is evident from the opening moments through to the end. The zombies are just folks Emily knew, as are everyone else in the cast. The effects are going to happen off-camera because she didn’t have the budget to show much. Camera angles are spotty, line reads are wooden. And you know what? It doesn’t matter a bit.
This is a pretty straightforward zombie story, and Hagens clearly knows her Romero. Pathogen follows Romero zombie rules—slow, don’t just eat the brains, pass on their infection through any sort of bodily exchange of fluids. Don’t think sex (again, 12-year-old director). Think instead coughing and sneezing in addition to bites. Unlike Romero, though, we’re going to get a source for the plague.
The plague is a waterborne illness that originally came from a lab near Austin, TX that was working toward a cure for cancer. This bacteria is inadvertently released due to poor safety protocols; it’s clear from the opening that the lab knows exactly what they have—a bacteria that kills its hosts and then brings them back as ghouls. Naturally, the bacteria is released into the local water supply, and soon enough, Austin starts to be overrun with zombies.
As befits our writer/director, the bulk of this is going to be told from the point of view of Dannie (Rose Kent-McGlew), a 14-year-old who is suffering from recurrent nightmares. More and more people start to succumb to the bacteria, and Dannie and her friends Sam (Alec Herskowitz), Christine (Tiger Darrow), Cameron (Tony Vespe) and Stacy (Alex Schroder) look to fight their way to safety through an increasing horde of zombies.
If you want to look at this as a standard movie, there’s a lot lacking in Pathogen. People walk slowly and are pursued by zombies walking just behind them, with our main characters completely unaware. This doesn’t feel like anything more than Hagens learning how to create tension on screen. Many of the line reads are very wooden, and the film looks unpolished. The zombies themselves look like people clearly made up to look like zombies. If you want to nitpick, we can do so with this film from the opening to the closing credits. In fact, it’s a film that is probably too long for its already short running time. At 66 minutes, it feels longer than it needs to be, and it could have been a short pretty easily.
All of this is true and I don’t care about any of it. Pathogen isn’t a great movie and it’s not a movie I’m likely to watch again any time soon, but it’s still absolutely worth watching. Seriously—think about what you were doing when you were 12. I was still obsessing over Star Wars and working at my family’s ice cream parlor. I’m not even sure I liked girls that much at that point. And Emily Hagens was writing a movie (she evidently started writing it at 10) and filming it, getting it released several years before she could legally drive.
You know what Pathogen is? It’s the best argument against AI art that can be made. It’s imperfect and silly. It’s amateurish and without a budget. It’s cheap and shoddy. And it’s also something absolutely, wonderfully human, and because of that, it’s fantastic. Projects like Pathogen shouldn’t be laughed at; they should be celebrated and treasured.
Why to watch Pathogen: How often can you watch a movie legitimately made by a 12-year-old?
Why not to watch: It’s as amateur as you expect.
