I’ll start by saying that this is one of my all-time favorite zombie films. It’s smart, gritty, and absolutely godawful terrifying. And, technically, it’s not a zombie film, at least, if we define zombie as an “embodied revenant who resurrects after death to harm or eat the living.” That’s a pretty solid definition of “zombie” (though it’s one I’ll critique in a forthcoming book project that I hope to be announcing in the next several months), at least from the vantage point of Anglo-American cinematic culture. And by that definition, the monsters in 28 Days Later aren’t zombies, because technically, they’re were never dead. They’re just sick. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The film opens with radical activists breaking into a research facility where biological research is taking place on caged chimpanzees. The chimpanzees are being forced to watch upsetting newsfeeds—bombings, violence against civilians, fires, other kinds of abuse—while being monitored for neurological activity. The activists are horrified by the Clockwork Orange-style torture of the primates, and they interrogate a doctor on the staff who tells them that the chimps must be caged, because they’ve been “infected” with “rage,” and that “the infection is contagious, it’s in their blood and saliva!” Evidently, these scientists have engineered a horrific bioweapon—one cured and perfected by exposure to violence—in the chimps, that makes them into horrific, yet perfect little autonomous bioweapons. Insensible to the panicked warnings screamed by the scientist, the activists release a chimp, who promptly rips into the neck of a female activist. Almost instantaneously, this woman transforms into a yellow-eyed rage monster.
Now, at this point, zombie purists will claim that these rage-monsters are not, in fact zombies. Nor even technically are they undead. The rage monsters are still living, highly infected people; they are people whose entire biophysiology has been irrevocably hijacked and completely colonized by a viral organism. But for two reasons, we’re going to treat this film as a major player in the art of the undead. First, the tropes and ideas laid down by this film and the franchise it spawned—Alex Garland and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later became 28 Weeks Later, 28 Years later, and eventually Nia DaCosta’s amazing 28 Years Later: Bone Temple—have been so utterly influential to the 21st century zombie genre as it’s continued to evolve in Anglo-American cinematic culture, that it’s hard to overstate.
Second, Garland and Boyle specifically conceived of this film as a riposte to and—if you’ll pardon the phrasing—revivification of the zombie genre. They felt that the usual tropes of zombie art were tired and played out, and they wanted to bring some life back into the genre, and were inspired by Romero’s Dead original trilogy, as well as by the film Omega Man. They wanted their zombies to be fast, aggressive, monstrous, and still living. Garland and Boyle wanted to revivify the zombie genre by making it about an infection that, while it didn’t decisively kill the infected, nevertheless left their humanity so compromised that they really couldn’t properly be thought of as human anymore. But, as we’ll see, in keeping with the precedent set down in Romero’s films, the infected in this film, however terrifying, largely serve to highlight the ongoing monstrosity of the fully “human” survivors.
So, the world is destroyed by the rage virus. 28 days later, a man—Jim (Cillian Murphy)—wakes up from a coma in a hospital. (Yes, this is where the creators of The Walking Dead got that idea for Rick’s resurrection from his own coma, after the zombocalypse had decimated the US.) Jim has no idea what’s going on, namely, that the world is destroyed by the rage virus, and that humanity has been converted into rapacious, murderous, raging animals. All he knows, at first, is that the hospital is empty, and trashed. He ventures out, to discover that the entire city is abandoned and trashed. He finds a kiosk papered over with desperate notes and drawings about missing family members; the iconography here is strongly reminiscent of the 9/11 drawings and postings that were all over New York in the wake of 9/11, despite this film being set in the UK. The wasted, garbage-strewn city also reminds me of New York in the immediate wake of 9/11, when people were too afraid to go outside, or even of the days of COVID lockdown, when people weren’t allowed to go outside.
Jim finds two other survivors—uninfected people named Mark and Selena. Together, the three go to Jim’s family home and find his parents have committed suicide, rather than face the plague. Jim is ravaged by grief and loss; Mark shares that he, too, lost his entire family. Everyone has. Everyone. This is a crucial moment in the plot, because it frontloads one of the key bequests of this film to later undead art: the genre is shifting to be less about existential loneliness, as was the case in Matheson’s novel and the cinematic reboots of it, and more human grief, loss, despair, and mourning. Putting a cap on those ideas, Mark dies almost immediately after his heart-to-heart with Jim.
After Mark’s death, Jim and Selena (Naomie Harris) then pair up with a father-daughter surviving pair, named Frank and Hannah. The four of them head for a military outpost they believe to be near Manchester. When they arrive, the father, Frank (Brendan Gleeson), becomes infected, and is killed by the army. Jim, Selena, and Hannah go with the army to their fortress. It’s a tightly run ship, well-armed, and stocked with food. But we quickly get the correct impression that these surviving soldiers are planning to use Selena and Hannah as sex slaves. Or, more precisely, reproductive slaves: as their leader puts it, “women mean a future.” All those surviving soldiers, it appeared, had been on the brink of suicide at the thought that there would be no future for humanity, in the wake of the rage. But their leader “promised them women” to keep them from despair. And the surviving soldiers are hungry to bring that promise to fruition; one of them keeps harping on how Selena is black, and that makes him extra eager to have her, possess her, and rape her.
Jim is confined to a cellar with the only soldier who protests the sex/reproduction enslavement plan. While down there, Jim hears that this other soldier—Sargent Farrell (Stuart McQuarrie)—believes that the rest of the world is fine, but that the UK has been “quarantined” and left to die, to burn out the virus. He believes there is a future, and that it hinges on securing international aid and rescue. Soon after, having narrowly avoided being executed by the insane, rapist, abusive soldiers, Jim sees that Farrell was right: there’s a plane flying in a straight line, directly overhead. There is hope. There is an outside of the contagion. Somewhere, there is order, regularity, safety. The rage virus is, so far, contained. There is a reason to keep fighting, to keep surviving. Jim manages to unleash a trapped infected on the soldiers, realizing that the humans are a far greater, more insidious, and more malicious threat than the infected to Selena and Hannah. This, again, is where we see some strong Romero influence coming in: it’s the humans, not the undead, in Romero films, who really destroy things beyond salvageability. The undead are bad, but it’s the cruelty, selfishness, abusiveness, and malignity of people that ultimately spells destruction for humanity. Precisely by weaponizing the infected against the abusive soldiers, Jim manages to save Selena and Hannah.
From 28 Days onward, almost every zombie horror film in the Anglo-American cinematic or televisual space in the 21st century has been conceptualized as a disease that goes pandemic. To be sure, the virogenetic undead trope had been set down fifty years earlier by Richard Matheson, and then massively popularized by the Resident Evil franchise of video games and eventually also films. But this particular film was such an immense cultural, critical, and financial success that it stood in a category by itself for a good period of time, and became the standard by which undead cinema would be judged. It’s defining criteria—apart from the virogenetic part—are these. First, the infected/zombies are fast, effective predators, and they are hungry. Second, the zombification of the world highlights the underlying predatoriness that lingers in humanity; we saw that in the soldiers in this film; we’ll see it in the roving bands of sadistic cults in later films of the franchise.
Third, as in Omega Man, there’s almost always one savior figure, almost always male, who saves other survivors and himself, and who does so by clinging to a basic idea of human decency, reciprocity, and—in particular—autonomy and safety for women and children. That it, the savior figure will insist that, even if civilization is destroyed, basic human decency must be maintained. But in the 28 franchise, as in every subsequent zombie film that follows in its wake, that “last man” is generally a lot less revolting, narcissistic, and delusional than Robert Neville in Omega Man. And a lot less outright abusive of women than Robert Neville in I Am Legend. Fourth, the savior character here and henceforth (with one notable exception in World War Z of 2013) will be regular people—not elites, not geniuses, not wealthy people, not highly physically powerful people. They’ll be like Jim, who was a bike messenger before an accident left him in that coma, not like Robert Neville, the supergenius scientist. Survival hinges, then, not on superior training or know-how, nor on wealth, nor class, nor access to power. Instead, it hinges on a capacity for spontaneous strategy and a deep, overwhelming commitment to the idea that humanity itself is worth fighting for, because people are worth loving, mourning, and empathizing with. It also hinges on the idea that women, people of color, and children are autonomous, agential beings who should be taken seriously and welcomed into the fellowship of The Human.
I’ll end by noting that there’s a gorgeous, visual, extended homage to Blade Runner at the end of this film. Please recall (see my earlier post from this spring) that Blade Runner ends with the replicant Roy (Rutger Hauer), shirtless in a rainstorm, asserting his humanity to the well-armed mercenary Dekker (Harrison Ford), who’s desperate to kill him. Roy was unable to save his lover, but at least, in the film’s final act, he can assert the fullness of his own humanity, even as he dies. 28 Days Later ends in a protracted scene in which Jim, whose shirt has been torn off, runs around in a rainstorm, desperately fighting to save his lover (Selena) from an armed soldier. What he’s also fighting for, of course, in fighting to free her is his idea of what it means to be a human. Which is that you don’t treat other humans like objects for your own gain or pleasure. You treat them like people, and you fight for their autonomy and freedom. But where Roy dies asserting his own humanity, Jim survives by asserting not only his humanity, but that of Selena and Hannah as well. In the end, Jim, Selena, and Hannah are spotted by a roving rescue crew in a helicopter. We believe, indeed, that they will be saved, and will rejoin the rest of humanity, precisely because they fought so hard against those who would dehumanize them. Any of them.
And thus, 21st century zombie horror was born.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.