What is DREAD

The present chapter looks at the way fear is depicted in Soderbergh's 2011 thriller Contagion and how the onlooker is dragged along into feeling the fear. Without using a studio to shoot the scenes, without insisting much on characters, employing hyperlink narrative (scenes change quickly, playing with geographical distant places and interweaving storylines between multiple characters) and using few words, the movie's main character is not the invisible virus but the fear it spreads into the characters, growing and turning into mass hysteria. The aim of this chapter is to analyse how narrative immersion works in Contagion through visual, auditory, and emotional elements, which are used by the director as vehicles for instilling fear in the audience.