Warning: This video contains a graphic content. Containment begins on TV2 on April 20, just hours after it debuts in the US.

Warning: The video in this story contains a graphic content.

When most of us watch The Walking Dead or a movie like 28 Days Later, we don't actually worry about catching a zombie plague.

The Strain doesn't make us fear a vampire virus.

Supplied New TV horror Containment adheres closely to real-life disease protocols.

But in the real world, Ebola may be rearing its head again, and we're told that mosquito-borne Zika is even scarier than previously thought. Who knows what new catastrophic contagion could be right around the corner?

That makes Containment, horror drama of a particularly personal kind.

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Supplied Containment - a horror where the monster is an illness.

People die gruesomely in Containment, adapted from a Belgian series by Julie Plec, co-creator of The Vampire Diaries. The action starts well into the outbreak, then flashes back to brief, happier days when people could still shake hands and a sneeze didn't mean quick progression to bleeding from the eyes and nose, collapse and agonizing death.

Those in jeopardy include the obligatory busload of schoolchildren, a young pregnant woman, an immigrant family from Syria, and doctors and nurses at the hospital treating the first victims.

The government steps in to "help", but the only solution is ordering containment, closing a chunk of Atlanta off from the rest of the city to stop the spread of the quick-incubating disease. "Only 48 hours," the people in the quarantine zone are told. "I know it's an inconvenience, but trust me, it will be worth it," police insist. As if.

The point, Plec says, is to examine human behaviour in the wake of a crisis, not simply to scare us.

"The stuff I like to do is always grounded in really simple but honest and deep themes of love and family and friendship," Plec says.

"To be able to drop that into an environment that's extremely chaotic and terrifying, it's just it's a different way of exploring a genre. It's a horror genre where the monster is an illness, is a virus."

While she was writing, life echoed art.

"About the time I was finishing my first draft, the Ebola outbreak happened, and suddenly, it was exactly the cultural conversation," she says. "You are seeing what you are trying to portray as what could happen in a very real-world situation, and then you turn on the news, and it's happening in the real world."

At that point, she says, "You feel this obligation to not aggrandize it and not exploit it", avoiding an "icky, ripped-from-the-headlines (treatment), which of course is never the intention".

Icky, though, Containment certainly is. In just the first two episodes, there is enough blood and body fluid to make the strongest stomach turn.

Writers "worked really hard to be grounded" in medical realities, executive producer Chris Ord says. "We had a representative from the CDC helping us" with questions of 'this would happen or not happen'. By putting in those rules ... you don't have to rely on supernatural or anything like that."

Containment adheres closely to real-life disease protocols, Plec says.

"We talked to the Georgia Department of Public Health (and) were schooled very quickly in the hierarchy of how things need to happen, that it begins at a local level before it becomes the state, that the CDC doesn't immediately come in. They come in later to take jurisdiction."

Politics is always in play, Plec says.

"There's a lot of ways to ruffle feathers and to get people very upset if you make assumptions. I said, 'Well, when does the World Health Organization come in?' They were like, 'That's the worst question you could have ever asked us. We are offended deeply'. So it's a whole world of politics and hierarchy."

On set, actors learned they were infected when they showed up for the day, the producers say.

The makeup department "essentially created, like, five stages of the disease, different looks for all five stages", Ord says. "We as writers could say, 'This person is going to be at Stage 2 or Stage 4', or 'They are about to die at Stage 5'. Having that structure in place made everything stay consistent and really adhere to how the disease would affect people."

The graphic symptoms also make Containment as chilling for viewers as any recent series, and those with sensitive constitutions may well find it too graphic.

Filming even left the cast shaken.

"Sneezes are, like, a fear," says Kristen Gutoskie, who plays teacher Katie Frank, quarantined along with her whole class, including her young son. "I was on the plane, reading a pilot on the way to Atlanta, and this guy kept sneezing beside me. And I just I could not sit still."

Even on set, "When someone off camera sneezed, we just panicked," says George Young, who plays a doctor. "I think a lot of people who watch this show will start to think of those day-to-day things, actually question those day-to-day things, shaking hands."

And avoid airports. "Airports," Plec says, "are the worst."

Executive producer Matt Corman says he can no longer take disease concerns lightly.

"Often, when you have a medical fear and you talk to a professional, they say, 'Well, that's unfounded. People read the Internet too much'. But in talking to the infectious disease specialists and the epidemiologists, they said, 'This absolutely could happen. It's something we are very nervous about, and the possibility of an Ebola-type outbreak sort of leaping over to America is something that keeps us up at night all the time'. So I've definitely bought some more Purell."

But the intent of Containment, Plec says, is to make viewers both contemplate how Americans react to a crisis and also ponder their own potential response.

"My goal is that (the audience) will recognize the scripted drama component of the show, but also ask themselves the question that we asked ourselves when we made it, which is 'What would I do if this happened to me?' ... 'What would I do if my loved one was infected?' 'What would I do if I was stuck on the wrong side of that wall?'"

"It's actually a very stimulating exercise to be able to sit around and discuss."

Containment may even prove to be a public service, says Claudia Black, who plays the government official trying to enforce the quarantine.

"We've heard from the showrunners from the original series (in Belgium) that it's actually helping the public," she says. "They are a very virus-prepared city now."

TNS

Containment 9.30pm, Wednesdays, TV2. It is also available on TVNZ on Demand