Here is another interesting article, one that discusses both Albert Camus’s novel The Plague and Elia Kazan’s film Panic in the Streets. The essay’s author, J. Hoberman, writes:
Camus’s Plague and Kazan’s Panic are both set in port cities open to the world and feature dedicated medical protagonists who struggle against apathetic authorities. The Plague evokes the mood of a quarantined town whose citizens realize that “they had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment.” In Panic, Dr. Reed aside, the people of New Orleans have no such consciousness. Camus evokes a sense of solidarity: “once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all [were] in the same boat… No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny.” Kazan, following the exigencies of a Hollywood movie, plays to audience fears, which he allays by constructing an individual hero.
Hoberman uses as the epigraph for his article a passage from Camus’s novel:
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky… A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.
While the fantastic in literature often strives to make the unimaginable real, this passage suggests that we are also prone to take something horrifically real, like a pestilence or plague, and perceive it as something fantastic, “a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.”