Living during a pandemic makes watching movies featuring pandemics particularly weird. Yet, there’s also something, well, comforting for some of us. After all, if you plugged into Netflix a few weeks ago, you might have noticed that Outbreak (1995) was one of the top viewed films. I have to think that people were watching for reasons other than morbid curiosity. And when I put out a call to pick a movie from my DVD collection for me to watch and discuss, a number of people gravitated immediately to 28 Days Later (2002) because of its relevance to the now.
28 Days Later is easily one of my favorite films, horror genre or otherwise. For those who haven’t seen it, the film opens with a group of animal rights activists (Animal Liberation Front without the name) raiding a government animal testing facility, which results in the spread of a deadly virus called “rage.” Flash forward to Jim (Cillian Murphy) some 28 days later, who wakes up from a coma to find himself in an empty hospital and no knowledge of what is going on. We learn pretty quickly that the rage virus has overtaken the UK, leading to mass infections, mass evacuations, quarantine, and the eventual breakdown of society. Jim is rescued from certain death by Selena (Naomie Harris) and her ill-fated friend, Mark (Noah Huntley), and together (sans Mark) they meet up with Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns), who encourage them to drive north to a supposed safe zone lead by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston; a.k.a. the Doctor). Naturally, things aren’t as they seem there… Not one bit.
As I mentioned, re-watching this film in the middle of a pandemic has added some interesting dimensions of comfort and terror. These simultaneously (and contradictorily) operate through two components:
- The setting is a “worst case scenario,” which is always worse than wherever we happen to be in the now.
- The story is deeply “human.”
To the first, it goes without saying that most zombie apocalypse films, of which 28 Days Later is a more “scientific” variation, almost always give us the absolutely worst possible outcome. Either our main characters wake up to zombies destroying the world OR the story places us smack in the aftermath of the initial infection. 28 Days Later is a bit of both: Jim literally wakes up from a coma after the UK has been totally ruined by the rage virus.
28 Days Later brilliantly captures this outcome not with images of pure terror — although it has those moments, too — but with images of silence. Enormous sections of London that are normally teaming with people are completely empty except for debris. Imagine a city of (then) 7.35 million people without people in its streets. 28 Days Later avoids the typical seas of the undead for a simpler touch, one that feels more alienating and terrifying than something like Resident Evil (after the first one), in which images of the undead crushing against walls or wandering the streets is all too common. The emptiness is more horrifying than its opposite, I submit, because it suggests abandonment, absence, nothingness: it is a reminder of just how bad things can get that once bustling metropolises could become mere graveyards of our architectural creations. When zombies do show up, it’s as if they materialize from the city like ghosts, haunting the very spaces of civilization we probably take for granted. Those are far more terrifying scenes of zombie destruction than any zombie sea can muster.
The worst case scenario of 28 Days Later is a reminder of just how far we could really fall from where we are now — setting aside that COVID-19 isn’t an actual zombie virus. In fact, the virus itself offers much of the same contradictory comfort and terror. It is highly infectious (like COVID-19), it can be transmitted through anyone who is infected (and, as 28 Weeks Later shows, even through carriers, just like COVID-19), and its arrival triggers a catastrophic breakdown in society (sort of like COVID-19). Only all of these things are infinitely more horrifying and devastating. The rage virus can be transmitted by bites or through contact with an infected’s blood, which results in some truly horrifying moments when infected people begin vomiting blood on the uninfected, thereby infecting them. The breakdown society is more pronounced, too — empty streets, mostly empty buildings, and no power. All of these things are many steps removed from where we are now, and that gives someone like me a bit of critical distance from reality to enjoy the imaginary in a way that I cannot enjoy the real world.
To the second, 28 Days Later, in a lot of ways, is a familiar story. A zombie apocalypse destroys civilization and a group of survivors try to find a safe place to wait the crisis out. You can rinse and repeat this with nearly any post-apocalypse story. What makes a film like this unique, however, is the way it explores that familiar trope. 28 Days Later does so by implying a found family narrative and centralizing the human costs of disaster, both in its affect on the ability of people to trust one another and in the serious breaches in civil behavior that arise. This film is much more interested in the personal, human-level impacts than it is the societal ones, and that makes for a story that only revels in intensity and action when that contributes directly to the story (and really only at three points). For the most part, 28 Days Later is about what it means to be “people” in crisis. A lot of us now know what it’s like to ponder that idea.
Much of this can be rested on Danny Boyle’s (of Trainspotting (1996) fame) direction. While Megan Burns spends most of the film feeling like someone high on Valium (a reference to something Hannah actually takes in the film), the urgency and humanity in the remaining cast’s performances is notable. Gleeson’s Frank is soft, loving, and brooding, every bit the father figure trying to hold things together for his daughter. Murphy’s Jim perfectly encapsulates the world “before” with all its naivete and quaint morality, all in juxtaposition to Harris’ frenetic and brutal Selena, who operates solely on the new rules of survival. Focusing on these characters amidst brilliant cinematographic silence lets the audience indulge in both the fantasy of brutal realism and abstracted hope. We believe Frank and Jim’s hopefulness even as we empathize with Selena’s environment-tested sense of hopelessness. For Selena, hope is rested in the now, in what we can do to survive and keep going; for Frank and Jim, hope is the future, in what we can reach for to bring back some kind of normality.
In re-watching this film, I came back to this sense of hope in the narrative — a hope that is incomplete and ultimately broken before being renewed again. Hope is cyclical, phasing in and out as we measure reality against our dreams. And if these characters can find hope in total disaster, in crushed dreams, perhaps the endless hopelessness and helplessness I find myself living in is not nearly as bad as it seems. Of course, 28 Days Later is a fiction, but it reflects (or re-reflects) back the driving force in being human: the need to reach forward for something to hold on to tempered by just the right dose of realism.
That this film shows us these ideas in both its human-level tale of everyday people surviving, building family, and protecting their micro community from misogynistic fascists (watch the movie…) and in its willingness to show that not all people will build stable communities in crisis if left unchecked lends 28 Days Later an added degree of credibility and prescience in our time. For that reason, I don’t anticipate this film falling out of my list of favorites. It just has too much to say to be discarded to the cinematic dustbin.
If you’ve never seen it, give it a watch. It’s worth every minute.
