Demon in the Freezer
animator, 2011–2016
Errol Morris's New York Times Op-Doc on the smallpox stockpiles that were never destroyed.
Covered in IndieWire Filmmaker Magazine
Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. Two laboratories kept samples, and Morris’s Op-Doc is about the decision to let them.
The film shows variola, which has none of the geometric regularity of the viruses of popular imagination. It is brick-shaped. The animation was matched to a scanning electron micrograph of the real virion.