The Plague (film)

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The Plague
Directed by	Hal Masonberg
Written by	Hal Masonberg Teal Minton
Starring	James Van Der Beek Ivana Milicevic
Release date(s)	2006
Running time	88 min.
Country	U.S.A.
Language	English
IMDb profile

The Plague (also known as Clive Barker's The Plague) is a 2006 horror film directed by Hal Masonberg and written by Hal Masonberg and Teal Minton; it was also co-produced by Clive Barker. The Region 1 DVD was released September 5, 2006. In addition to this release, there is also an unreleased cut of the film known as The Plague: Writer's & Director's Cut.

[edit] Plot

Simultaneously one day all of the world's children under the age of nine fall into a catatonic state. For the next ten years, every child who is born, is born in a state of catatonia. During this state the children experience siezures twice a day and seem to develop super human strength. After ten years, all the children wake up, hellbent on killing all adults. Things get even worse when the adults realize the children have a sort of collective brain—what one learns, they all learn. The children get smarter by the hour, first they dismantle the engines in almost every car and set up road blocks to stop the adults from escaping. Then they learn how to use firearms. The children also take the souls of the ones they kill as a part of deliverance. The adults must find a way to stop them before it's too late. In the end Jean Raynor is the only one left alive, the children leave her alone, she smiles and goes back into a house.

The story is somewhat similar to the 1960 British film Village of the Damned.

A prominent recurring image in the film is a dogeared copy of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. The plot of the film adopts ideas and structure from Steinbeck's novel, beginning with the release of Tom Russel from prison, returning to a home immersed in intolerable misery, stumbling from disaster to disaster, and culminating in a kind of hope for redemption that may some day compensate for the horror that has gone before.