Christina Animashaun/Vox; IMDB; Getty Images

From Contagion to World War Z to Palm Springs, what the artists who foresaw the pandemic are thinking now.

Plenty of art has and will be made about the era of Covid-19. But some artists seemingly saw this plague year coming long before it arrived. Their films and novels seemed to foreshadow what life over the past year would be like: Quarantine. Social distancing. Feeling like you want to sleep through it all. Feeling like you’re stuck in a time loop. The fear of infection. The spread of misinformation. The politicization of public health. And much, much more.

To mark the one-year anniversary of lockdowns in the US, and the American death toll having crossed half a million and counting, I talked to seven of those artists — “plague prophets,” as I came to think