The film certainly captured the early 2000s zeitgeist, but it’s also become even more poignant after a real pandemic. This attention to detail actually led to several shocking moments that directly mirrored the 9/11 attacks despite most of the movie having already been shot before the incident. Imagery like the rotting corpses piled up in churches, ominous graffiti and missing person fliers were inspired by records of real tragedies in places like Rwanda and Cambodia, with the director wanting to make the experience as true to life as possible without actually using footage from these real world horrors. Regardless, the horror of 28 Days Later goes far beyond the murderous infected, with Boyle pulling from real world fears when constructing the film’s visual vocabulary of apocalyptic terror. Garland, on the other hand, insists that it’s clearly a zombie flick despite any technical discrepancies due to the nature of the Rage virus. The director and screenwriter have taken opposite sides of the argument, with Boyle vehemently disagreeing with the zombie label and attempting to distance the film from the genre during interviews. While there’s no denying the effect that that 28 Days Later had on zombie media over the years, there’s still an ongoing debate about whether or not it’s an actual zombie flick. The film also marked the beginning of a generalized revival of zombies in media, leading the charge alongside the Resident Evil movies and paving the way for Romero himself to revisit the Dead franchise during the 2000s. From Left 4 Dead to Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, there’s no shortage of creators openly admitting to being inspired by Boyle and Garland’s nightmarish re-imagining of this classic monster. While this detail may not seem all that impressive after 20 years of athletic flesh-eaters, it’s only because of the sheer number of movies, games and TV shows directly influenced by Boyle’s film. This modernized take also led to the film’s ground-breaking introduction of running zombies in popular culture. The shambling ghouls of Romero and Dan O’Bannon were originally influenced by period-sensitive fears like the red scare and even the rise of nuclear power, so Garland decided to update the creatures by borrowing from more recent anxieties like terrorist attacks and disease outbreaks. Of course, you couldn’t just bring traditional zombies into the 21st century. Couple that sentiment with some inspiration from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and you get the basis for the story that would become 28 Days Later. The writer has explained that the game made him realize that the undead had been absent from mainstream media for quite a while, making him long for the days of Romero’s Dead trilogy. The film then chronicles the group’s attempts to survive and find meaning in this grim new world.Īppropriately enough, it was Capcom’s original Resident Evil that rekindled Garland’s love affair with zombies and led to his screenplay. Joining forces with Selena ( Naomie Harris) and Mark ( Noah Huntley), Jim learns that there’s been an outbreak of the highly contagious “Rage” virus, which led to the collapse of civilization. Now that the movie is celebrating two decades of terror and we’ve lived through the horrors of a real pandemic, I think it’s the perfect time to discuss how the film remains an influential classic even after so much media has borrowed from it.įor the unfortunate few who haven’t seen it, 28 Days Later stars Cillian Murphy as Jim, a young man who awakens from a coma and finds himself on the run from homicidal infected in a post-apocalyptic London. Not only does the film contain a hauntingly memorable portrayal of a lifeless England, but it also explores our need for human contact even in a world where violence can erupt in a mere heartbeat. Despite a certain melancholic beauty in solitude, the fear of being alone is both primal and common enough that most people have nightmares about it at one time or another, so it makes sense that it’s a recurring theme in the horror genre.Īnd when it comes to horrific depictions of solitude, I’d say that my absolute favorite would have to be Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s apocalyptic masterpiece, 28 Days Later. Sartre famously wrote that “hell is other people”, and while it can be easy to sympathize with that statement, I think there’s more than one kind of hell.
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