The Hopeful Apocalypse: How ’28 Days Later’ Pioneered the 21st Century Zombie Movie
It’s amazing to think that the definitive post-9/11 horror film, the movie that first commented explicitly on how the world had changed and set the tone for the rest of the decade to come, was British. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, was absolutely a global event, but it was an American attack that spawned an American “war on terror.” So, even though the entire world was involved, I think that first nudge toward talking about it, that first glimpse of how it was going impact art moving forward, had to come from a country that did not experience it firsthand. After that, we got many, many American horror films that dealt with those post-9/11 fears either directly or through the general zeitgeist. Europe was absolutely drawn into the conflict as well, and the fears of terrorism, the horror of an utterly desensitized conflict and the shock of seeing human beings beheaded on the news absolutely influenced European filmmakers just as much as Americans. It had a particular influence on the unflinchingly violent New French Extremity films. But Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later was that first step. And, as is often true in horror, the first step is the most important, and is the step that still holds the most impact to this day.
To some degree, 28 Days Later almost feels like an American horror film made in Britain. Again, it was made in the direct aftermath of terrorist attack on America, but in addition to that, the films that influenced it were American. The movie is, in some ways, a melding of two George Romero films from the 1970s: Dawn of the Dead and The Crazies. I say Dawn of the Dead instead of Night of the Living Dead because Night was about a group of people who happened to find themselves at a farmhouse and became trapped there by circumstance. Dawn of the Dead was about a group of survivors trying to find their own place, somewhere they could call home, and the first half hour of the film is centered around that. The only difference between that and 28 Days Later is that in Dawn of the Dead, the survivors famously find their new home in a shopping mall, whereas in 28 Days Later, that search for home, and peace, and comfort takes up the entirety of the film.
Then there’s The Crazies. A lesser known Romero effort at the time, The Crazies dealt with a quarantined town dealing with the outbreak of a virus that induces rage. That’s a fairly obvious parallel. So obvious, in fact, that 28 Days Later could almost be seen as a sequel to or soft reboot of that film. Having said that, this is absolutely it’s own film, and there are major differences, the biggest of which is scope. Instead of a quarantined town, we’re dealing with a lost nation, and we’re not witnessing the descent, we’re witnessing the aftermath. The brilliance of Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s outbreak story, hence the title, is that we discover everything alongside our protagonist, Jim. He wakes up in the hospital and the entire world has left him behind and he is forced to catch up. It’s not long before he finds out what happened: that society has been completely overtaken by rage.
The infection is almost instantaneous. You have just enough time to know what’s coming before you’re completely gone, forever. These are not the living dead, these people are still alive, full of adrenaline, literally fast and furious. Because they’re not dead, many people refuse to qualify this as a zombie movie, but I’ve never been concerned about that. What we now universally consider as a “zombie” is something we attribute to Night of the Living Dead, a movie that never once used the word because it was not the word for that kind of thing.
A zombie at the time was pretty universally attributed to voodoo. In horror, it was someone who had been resurrected via some kind of spell to carry out the ill will of person who raised it. There was usually just one, there was no plague, and they did not eat flesh. Romero’s movie used the word “ghoul” (and even then, barely) because that actually was the correct word for a corpse that ate flesh. Ever since the word zombie became completely redefined for Romero’s living dead, it’s been malleable. The fact remains that the zombie genre had been dead, at least at the box office, for about a decade before 28 Days Later hit theaters. The success of this film led to a genuine zombie revival, from Shaun of the Dead, to Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, to Romero’s Land of the Dead, all the way down to The Walking Dead.
People remember this as a grim and gritty, dour, downbeat, even nihilistic film when it’s not that at all. What I love most about 28 Days Later is that as much as it is post-apocalyptic, it is also deeply heartfelt, funny, and romantic. That’s the whole point. This is a movie about holding onto your humanity when everyone around you has lost theirs. That idea carries us through every single scene. Jim is taken in by Selena and Mark, the first uninfected people he sees, and while Mark tries to explain to Jim what’s happened, Selena wants nothing to do with him, she’s already completely shut off from her emotions. She kills Mark when he becomes infected and tells Jim that if it happens to him, she’ll kill him in a heartbeat.
Due to the very nature of waking up in the middle of all this, it takes a while for the reality of everything to set in for Jim. He has a hopeful attitude that Selena despises at first, and as they get to know each other, they balance one another out. Jim helps Selena lower some walls, but Selena in turn teaches him that in this world there are walls that need to stay up, because you simply cannot exist and do the things you need to do to get by without them.
It all comes to a head in the third act, which even though it features the least amount of infected, feels the most purely Romero section of the entire movie. Jim, Selena and their young companion Hannah find themselves at a fortified mansion under military command. This place is well-guarded, heavily armed, and at first glance seems perfect. Of course, it’s too good to be true, because these people have completely gone mad, not so much with power, but from the complete lack of control and order that has resulted from the societal breakdown of the past month.
They know from the moment the three civilians arrive that they are planning to kill Jim and keep the two women, one of whom is actually just a young girl, for themselves. The broadcast they put out that led our survivors to them was simply to lure women. They are pure predators who do nothing but kill civilians for their supplies and chain up the infected and shoot them for fun. These soldiers are not infected, but they are reduced to humanity’s most horrific traits, and those traits, particularly in the case of Major West, are the only things that they are. They’re the entirety of their being.
The sequence in which Jim breaks back into the house to rescue Selena and Hannah is so memorable in part because it is accompanied by what’s become on of the most notable pieces of film music of the 21st century. But it’s such a perfect track because it is the single most crucial score for that moment. This whole scene is Jim pushed to his breaking point. He’s held back, been hesitant, the whole film, hasn’t truly gotten his hands dirty, and now is the time to let it all out, to give into that rage and violence and completely let go if he wants to save them.
That’s what happens to the score as well. It’s actually been sweet for a good chunk of the movie, and even this track, “In the House, in a Heartbeat” starts off like that. It starts off sweet, and it carries the same melody throughout, but it keeps getting more and more frantic until it devolves into pure, frenzied chaos. It even almost sounds like an escalating heartbeat, Jim’s pulse quickening as he does horrible things in order to keep the people he cares about safe.
All of this chaotic violence peaks when Jim kills Corporal Mitchell, gouging out his eyes with such intensity that Selena believes Jim to be infected and is about to kill him, but hesitates long enough to realize that it is still him. That moment, him telling her “that was longer than a heartbeat,” is more than just a tender, cute callback, it’s the point of the entire film. They have taken just enough from one another. She hesitated after all, just for a moment, and in that moment was able to hold onto her love, to even learn how much she cared for another person by realizing what she would have lost if she hadn’t hesitated, and also proving to herself the tangible value of hope. Jim manages to become a killer, fully give in to that primal sense of destruction, even become bloodthirsty, but give in just enough that he can still fully come back from it. By the end, they have both learned to live in this world, if not to outright accept it, but they have not let it change them. They have not let it make monsters out of them. That’s as happy an ending as anyone can ask for.
All of this ties into that immediate, conscious or subconscious reactionary post-9/11 sensibility, of where we could possibly be headed in the wake of such violence, with tensions, even domestically, at such an all-time high that people were right to wonder if society could possibly survive that much of a pure outpouring of rage, especially because I still don’t know if it did. 28 Days Later allowed an outlet for that. The look of the film even encapsulates that.
It’s a movie that honestly kind of looks like ass. It’s shot on handheld mini-DV digital cameras, but that allows for an authentic look that is impossible to replicate, like something you would literally see unfolding on the news. Danny Boyle put those cultural fears on the screen in the most authentic way possible, but also in a cathartic way. It was a fictional scenario that, in its heightened approach, said, “If it does get this bad, here’s what to do about it.” Less as a doomsday presser’s guide, and more in an unexpected reminder that things can be okay, even if they societally, won’t. It’s a film that reminds us that no amount of inhumanity around you should ever change who you are, and only when that happens is all hope truly lost. I can’t imagine a more timely or resonant message than that.
