28 Days Later
by Danny Boyle
Horror films as a whole have a bad reputation; I’ve never understood this, because they’ve always been the things that have spellbound me since childhood. It is for this reason that I’ve become the harshest critic of horror movies that I know. Whereas others will let the majority of today’s horror output get away with artless depictions of graphic violence and torture, I remain the one pretentious aesthete among all my b-horror friends and the one deviant among my art-film friends. The route of this divide comes from one film that straddled the line between beauty and filth like nothing I had ever seen before. The tradition of art horror, specifically the potential of making a revisionist zombie movie as much Terrence Malick as George A. Romero, has since been the major driving force in much of my writing and viewing. The majority of my creative output in the years since 2002 has been the direct result of watching Danny Boyle’s sensational 28 Days Later.
Most legendary horror films are marked by their sucker-punch openings; this film boasts two. First we see eco-terrorists arriving at a lab performing experiment involving the exposure of monkeys to violent images; they want to set the animals free and get their wish. They do not believe the lab tech’s warning that the creatures have been infected with rage; would you? One of them is bitten, and then she vomits blood into her partner’s eyes, soon they’re all infected. We are forced into the future where a bicycle courier named Jim wakes alone in a hospital. Not only does it seem that he’s the only man in the building, he seems to be the only man left in all of London. When he meets the others, things take a turn for the worse. The only people he meets who don’t appear to have mentally deteriorated to the functionality of bloodthirsty zombies are the cynical Mark and Celina, who are much the worse for having survived the ordeal. It seems that the virus spread from those four people in the laboratory to perhaps the rest of the world. Jim has a lot to come to terms with; the death of his parents, the end of civilization, and the possibility that the only thing resembling help lies in a military unit stationed outside the ruins of Manchester.
28 Days Later was an unprecedented event in my life when it was released. I watched it once and then snuck back into the theatre and watched it again with my best friend. It typified everything that frightened me and that I would come to love in films. There were frightening images, character arcs that had been missing from most post-apocalyptic films, enthralling soundtrack, then-ground-breaking digital cinematography, break-neck editing together with breathtaking long takes, and it’s all driven by Danny Boyle’s hyper-hip direction.
First of the film’s many excellent qualities are the performances by the leads. Newcomers Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harries, as well as supporting players Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston are profoundly understated and believable as the last men on earth. Absent are one-dimensional action heroes that mark most films of the genre, present are the kind of people you might actually meet, neighbors, bicycle couriers, and the dim of wit. Jim, headstrong and full of empty bravado, flounders in crisis, eventually learning to put his pride away and behave for the common good, something crucial to his survival. Learning from error and changing for the better are not character traits you often find in horror films and to see the subtle change in Jim is flooring.
Equally as flooring was Jon Murphy’s score; an amalgam of haunting arpeggios and brooding, thunderous post-rock. Despite the brilliant use of outside sources (Godspeed! You Black Emperor’s "East Hastings" playing over the opening crawl through London may be the best use of non-diagetic music in a horror picture. Grandaddy’s casio-laden "AM 180" is both expertly used, but also part of Boyle’s tribute to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. His nod to Day of the Dead is present in his use of treacherous military force. It can be said the whole film is a nod to Night of the Living Dead and the timeless quality of his work). Murphy’s music provides heavy atmosphere, without which the film’s awesome conclusion would be utterly without power. The urgency of watching a shirtless, bloody Cillian Murphy running from room to room trying to recover Celina from the arms of the brutish soldiers, all the while being pursued by the sprinting undead was absolutely mesmerizing. This scene has influenced everything I’ve ever written.
The color scheme was as vivid as I’d ever seen; between Mark Digby’s art direction and Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography, audiences expecting a genre film were blindly led into a stunning hybrid. The footage of the endless flower gardens and windmills that flank Jim, Frank, Hannah, and Celina on their way to Manchester are as beautiful as the sea of deep green that surrounds the soldier’s commandeered mansion. The differences between the indoor and outdoor, the daytime and nighttime photography are staggering. Boyle has a very keen sense of how to disorient as in his opening and use of repeated montage editing. In one particularly effective scene, we see the London skyline in dusk and a sliver of something darker in the top of the screen. He pans upward and shows us Jim, Mark, And Celina resting in Jim’s living room. Not even a minute later, they are attacked. Just afterwards Celina sees a bitemark on Mark’s hand and cuts him down right in front of Jim. Though the sequence is beautiful, the dulled orange color scheme followed by the unannounced assault coated in red, masterfully accented by the editing and sound design, shows that the dusk, when man’s lights cannot protect any longer and the city becomes a dangerous place, is a time to be feared. It is man’s discoveries that have led to its demise. Like George A. Romero, Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland are interested in the many implications of a man-created disaster. As the many characters muse, the problem is strictly human and never leaves the realm of a human-dominated world. It also elaborates on the difference between positive ecological/humanistic thought and negative. As a counter to the windmills is the unreasonable behavior of the animal liberation cell. Construction and deconstruction in practice make all the difference and Dod Mantle’s camera paints the picture as well as Garland’s script. This kind of appreciation for nature and man’s futile eco-consciousness wrapped in an elegy for mankind isn’t the sort of somber wake-up call a young film fan gets handed everyday. It is the remarkably pragmatic nature of 28 Days Later that will allow it to live on for generations.
It is the descriptions of the after-civilization by each of the people Jim meets, and the immediate commoditization of any and all limited resources that raises this beyond the level of suburban horror that dominated cinema during the 80s and 90s. It is the boldness of a film that introduces us to it’s villain in a church, in the form of an undead priest and the words “Repent Now The End Is Extremely Fucking Nigh” scrawled in black on the wall that makes it’s peers seem inferior in ways never previously considered. One such way is the sheer practicality of this, a film about the end of the world. To put it bluntly 28 Days Later does everything right. With the absence of any higher power (government, religion), we have ordinary people trying desperately to save themselves with human nature as both their primary tool and undoing. Frank and Hannah, who have been surviving in an empty tenement building, have been collecting rainwater in dozens of brightly colored plastic buckets as the plumbing has long since stopped. Even little things like Jim lingering over the bulletin board near Churchill’s Corner where the pictures and ‘Have You Seen’s are posted haphazardly by the hundreds go a long way toward making this a complete portrait of a world-wide condition, even if we only see it’s affect on a stretch of about 300 miles worth of decimated land. Despite the small scale of the impact, the film is so well-handled, the performances so convincing, the 113 minutes of its running time so brilliantly colored and bursting with interesting sounds and figures, that there is never a doubt that the world is being irrevocably changed.
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