This is the movie that put the rage zombie on the cultural map. With the glut of horror movies that are always coming out, it wouldn’t be safe to say that 28 Days Later (2002) created the rage zombie – especially since so many horror movies fly under most people’s radar – but what is safe to say is that the rage zombie was finally a thing after 28.
You know what else was finally a thing after 28? Zombie blood vomit. Thank you, director Danny Boyle, and writer/producer Alex Garland. That was something we needed as a culture— Nay, as a species. Kudos.
Let’s just shove the debate out of the way up front: Yes, I will be using the term “rage zombie” despite the fact that 28‘s infected are not undead. The debate over calling rage zombies “zombies” is outside the purview of this here review. Sorry, purists. They may not be the dead risen, but in just about every other way, this is a zombie movie to the core.
Isolation
Many zombie movies open on an initially-docile scene interrupted by an “is-he-isn’t-he?” zombie who, as it turns out, is. Then all kinds of brain-eating hells break loose. It’s nice to see an infection origin story for once.
The origin plays to an eerily familiar fear, even over a decade later, that a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions will jump from another species, taking our unprepared immune systems by surprise. And as is par for the course in zombie movies, our best intentions lead us into disaster.
After we get our first salty taste of zombie blood vomit and rage, 28 takes an interesting turn for a zombie film, and it plays to the core anxiety of the narrative. Jim, played by Cillian Murphy, wakes up with no idea what has happened – the classic and useful “uninitiated protagonist” thing – and finds himself completely, agonizingly alone.
There is a kind of solitude that the modern world imposes on us. Even if you live in a crowded urban area, the rails of civilization and technology have led us into ever increasing isolation from one another, even as it supposedly brings disparate peoples together. We don’t know our neighbors, but we forge semi-anonymous friendships with strangers on the internet.
This vacancy chafes our nerves. It makes us edgy and paranoid. Meanwhile, our fiber-optic arteries into the information kingdom let us mainline the tragedies of the world. We’re all too aware of the monstrous acts that seemingly normal people are capable of. Sometimes it feels like we’re marinating in the hostility of the world, hostility both directed and directionless.
Comfort
There is a repeated motif in 28, where symbols of comfort are turned on their heads. When these things lack the emotional charge of respite, they almost automatically become their opposite. An empty hospital, a patient in discarded doctor’s scrubs, these things serve to remind us that there isn’t any help coming. The semi-invisible safety net of the modern world is simply gone.
Jim’s solitary walk around the dead-quiet London feels like it lasts forever, it makes us feel the stillness where we know there should be hustle and/or bustle. And Cillian Murphy does an impressive job of driving the point home. The scene actually only lasts about eight minutes, but eight minutes within the first 20 minutes of a movie is a lot of screen time to give to silence and emptiness. This is our establishing shot. This is our theme.
Being alone.
Jim then enters a church which, depending on who you are, could be another symbol of comfort. We can only assume he goes there out of some latent instinct – the same kind of instinct which caused him to pick up money and shove it into his grocery bag of forage – because he hasn’t yet realized that it no longer has any value. Not in this new world.
“Repent. The end is extremely fucking nigh,” says graffiti in black-paint, twenty feet tall.
Family
Being the fresh meat he is, Jim is in dire need of some saving after waking up what was left of the congregation. We meet Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley), who become Jim’s accidental family for a short time. This is another hallmark of the zombie movie, and it serves as the counterbalance to the theme of isolation.
Jim won’t have no for an answer, and insists that the three of them make their way to his parents’ house. The realization of their deaths drives Jim further toward his new group.
Throughout the film, the repeated motif of “the ad hoc family unit” will reinforce the feeling that people need each other.
Well, people need each other until they get some red in them. After unceremoniously hacking Mark to death with her machete, Selena casually mentions that it takes only ten to twenty seconds for Arthur Commonplace to become a zombie blood vomit machine. This is a stark opposition to the slow and emotional, drawn-out dithering of the more common zombie movie’s infection. With the rage zombie, you don’t have time to get weepy. You get real merciless in a hurry.
Selena cracks a sarcastic joke too gallows and meta to be funny in the context for the characters: it’s Alex Garland, winking at the audience. “Have you got any plans, Jim? Do you want us to find a cure and save the world or just fall in love and fuck? Plans are pointless. Staying alive’s as good as it gets.” Besides being a playful jab at movies in general, Garland is also drawing our attention to an argument he plans to prove false.
After joining up with Frank and Hannah – another obvious Family unit; hello, Papa Frank – the group embarks on “The Quest,” a common differentiator from the classic zombie film. Oftentimes, the classic zombie film becomes a “Siege” situation, because the shufflers lure you into a false sense of confidence. You think these slow, bumbling creatures can’t possibly get in, so you board up and hunker down. The rage zombie, though, is strong and fast, it can jump and climb. You have to get away from them, you can’t keep them out for long. So you embark, as Jim and Selena and Frank and Hannah do.
Relief
28 does an admirable job of scattering palate-cleanser scenes between the ones that make you squirm and jump. Like the classic “survivor fantasy” scene in the fully stocked grocery store.
The film seems to alternate between pleasant and terrifying, but as the movie moves forward, the pleasant scenes become fewer. It’s an almost unconscious escalation of tension for the audience. We’re pulled along because the story becomes more and more gripping, and we don’t quite notice that our earlier respites are no longer there.
Frank gets a large share of the spotlight in these pleasant moments. He gets plenty of “save the cat” moments, so to speak. We can’t help but fall in love with him as a joyful yet pragmatic father figure.
At one point he calls the group over to marvel at a small herd of horses – “Like a family” – galloping around the English countryside. He says, “They’re doing just fine.” A lovely moment, but one with a point on it – just a quick reminder: the world doesn’t need us.
Hope
The quest has reached its destination, but the military checkpoint is abandoned. Frank finally loses his temper, and pays for it in a big way. Fatigue-wrapped army men pop up and take him out just as he’s turning. It’s a wrenching moment, unfortunately undercut by Hannah’s less-than-impressive performance.
Despite the loss, there does seem to be some reason to celebrate. They found the army. Surely the men with big guns and sharp, strategic minds can keep them safe.
Of course not. Because it wouldn’t be a zombie movie without the realization that the uninfected humans are the most disturbing monsters in the film.
Once again, a thing that was supposed to be comforting becomes a source of misery when the military men finally reveal their true intentions.
For his basic human decency, Jim is sentenced to summary execution along with the only decent soldier among them. He escapes partly by his own cunning, and partly by a shred of decency in the squadron’s bumbling cook.
Adaptation
It is a brutal world, Jim finally realizes, and if he is going to save his womenfolk in distress, he’s going to have to shoot straight past “merciless.” We see him skulking around, dirty and bloody and shirtless, with a twinkle of something highly unpleasant in his eyes.
He frees the rage, both literally and symbolically, by releasing the infected which the army had chained up. It’s also representative of Jim’s resignation to the fact he needs to give himself over to his most primal, animalistic rage, and become more like the infected to kill the human monsters.
Even unto the point that, during his big showdown with the most despicable of the soldiers, Jim appears so much like a rage zombie that Serena almost hacks his head off.
Jim inflicts a sizable amount of violence on these men, both personally, and by proxy with the rage zombies he has let loose and/or created running amok around the manse. Not to say they didn’t deserve it, but it does force us into an interesting quandary as to Jim’s character.
We know he’s doing all of this for the right reason, but we can’t escape our inclination to question the humanity of anyone capable of this. We are, in any case, relieved that he succeeds. (And that he didn’t take a machete to the neck right after playing the big hero.)
Serena, Jim, and Hannah barely escape. And they’re together, and they’re “like a family.” Jim isn’t alone anymore. There’s our minus-to-plus story, our beginning-to-end change, and the driving theme of the movie resolves itself.
Presumably, Serena and Jim also fall in love and fuck.
The Rage Zombie
I think the rage zombie is worth examining both on its own terms, and in juxtaposition to the classic Romero shuffler.
First, the undead flesh-eater almost can’t be held accountable for its actions. It is a mindless thing. We have an intuitive sense that there is nothing left of the original person in that undead husk. And its desire to consume is primal and undeniable, it needs flesh. Your death and your pain are incidental to the flesh-eater’s desires. It seems to represent a cultural anxiety over disease, and over-consumption, and overpopulation.
Whereas the rage zombie doesn’t need you, not for something as primal as food, anyway. The rage zombie wants to hurt you, wants to create pain and harm, it wants to inflict its rage upon you. While it’s true that being eaten alive by a horde of flesh-eaters is nightmare-fuel in its own way, there is something almost more disturbing about the rage zombie. Secondary to that, we get the sense that the person is still in there somewhere, that the disease is merely executing on the most horribly dark parts of mind which were already present. They seem to be a manifestation of our anxieties over modern life, over the constant infliction of our own pain on others, over loss of mind, and loss of community.
I know that there are zombie purists out there who have a lot to say on the topic of, “Why rage zombies aren’t zombies, so there.” But I propose a different interpretation. The rage zombie is a zombie in all ways except being undead. (Zombie stories go way back, by the way. Well past Romero. Well past TV or film or radio. Not all zombies are flesh-eaters, so that does not fall into necessary criteria, as far as I’m concerned.)
Conclusion
28 Days Later is still an impressive film. If you care to look for them, there are layers deeper than being just an awesome zombie flick (which it also is). Besides feeling a little visually dated, it holds up as an example of a zombie movie done well.
It’s not hard to see why 28 Days Later had such a big impact on the world of the modern zombie. If you haven’t picked it up in a while, it’s definitely worth a revisit.