Danny Boyle’s big hit that featured Cillian Murphy and had a script from the ‘Civil War’ director
It hasn’t been 28 years, but with more than two decades, we can affirm that ’28 days later’ is one of the most influential horror films of the 21st century. It may have its pluses and minuses as a whole, but a project that suddenly launched Danny Boyle as a director, Alex Garland as a screenwriter – and a more successful director than Boyle in ‘Civil War’ – and Cillian Murphy as an actor, much Before his Oscar for ‘Oppenheimer’, he has a place reserved among the important fictions of cinema and not just post-apocalyptic ones.
Probably without its success we would not know ‘The Last of Us’ or ‘The Walking Dead’, to give two examples among the countless productions that were able to get ahead thanks to it, perhaps even the resurgence of George A. Romero, whose previous work served as inspiration for the development of his idea. With the passage of time even its beginning, with the protagonist wandering through the abandoned center of Londonwhich has become a classic scene of the genre, no longer impresses us so much, after having seen the city (and the whole world) in a pandemic that, in some way, these fictions portrayed as a possible scenario.
In 2002 it was impressive to see the big empty city, but even more so when there were thousands of messages searching for missing people, which In those days they reminded us of the days after 9/11, but all those images were already there, in a synchronicity born of the times, which ranged from contemporary paranoia around diseases and viral infections, to the next survival terror with traces of the 70s that exploded at the beginning of the century.
The beginning of a new era of horror cinema
As ‘The Empire of Fear’ by Antonio José Navarro pointed out, “post-9/11 horror cinema is a story about a still unhealed wound that tries to reveal to us a reality that is not accessible in any other way.”, and it is in its digital aesthetics, its rabid enemies and its nihilistic grounds where we find an unprecedented palette in the horror films of the time, still following in the wake of teen slashers with little blood after ‘Scream’. This and ‘Alta Tensión’ brought new, unprecedented textures that would transform all the cinema that would come at that time.
It is true that the real blow to the table would come two years later, thanks to ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Dawn of the Dead’, which perfected what was proposed by Boyle and They turned the zombie into the key monster of the 21st century. The reasons not only appear due to a fear of contagion, but because in these new scenarios ““The entire society becomes a threat and there is no more order than the bullets that one carries in one’s belt.”according to Luis Pérez Ohanco, in his ‘The ideology of fear, American horror cinema 2001-2011’.
The problem is that Danny Boyle He has always maintained that he does not like the walking dead genre and that his was not a zombie movie., but infected, creating a dilemma that continues to divide to this day, since their running hordes of biters, who turn others into the same, are technically people infected with rabies and not undead corpses. But the thesis falls flat just like those directors who claim to have filmed a “psychological drama” for A24 and in reality everyone talks about their film because it is horror.
Zombies or infected?
Boyle is patient zero of elevated nonsense who doesn’t know that yes, he’s made a zombie movie, and In addition, Garland has given his categorical opinion confirming that “It’s a zombie movieregardless of any technical discrepancies that may or may not exist, these are zombies“However, his creatures were a far cry from the flesh-eaters of ‘Night of the Living Dead’, they were now fast and also strong, something that, according to Boyle, had a surprising inspiration in a couple of his who did ballet.
But Boyle didn’t invent fast-moving zombies either.we can find them in ‘The invasion of the atomic dead’ by Umberto Lenzi, and even also in another film by Romero like ‘The Crazies’, where it was also about infected people and has a plot of escape from the quarantine zone that curiously It would broadly follow ’28 Weeks Later’, however it is difficult to find statements from its creators that mention the director’s name.
Garland quotes ‘The day of the triffids‘, the novel by John Wyndham, or the film by Boris Sagal ‘The Last Man… Alive’, the two obvious references of the American apocalyptic zombie saga, however, ’28 Days Later’ is nothing more than a compression of his trilogy in a single film. The beginning in London is reminiscent of Wyndham, yes, but Murphy’s “hello” is identical to that of the introduction of ‘The Day of the Dead’, and even the introduction of the music is similar. The first bars are a clear summary of ‘Night of the Living Dead’. Special mention, by the way, to the red eyes fixed on those of ‘Do not desecrate the dream of the dead’, a Spanish classic of great success in the United Kingdom.
Inevitable inspiration
The frightened survivor who encounters another experienced black man, finds refuge with a father-daughter family (whose transformation is later reversed) and whose group then cuts to moments from ‘Zombie’ (1978) when they go to a gas station (curiously with a zombie child) or has his moment of solace in an empty supermarket in a musical montage where they loot things they don’t need. The ending is the clearest reflection of ‘The Day of the Dead’, with that threatening group of soldiers, also curiously with a zombie tied to a chain around his neck to “study him.””.
Nothing that doesn’t also confirm ‘Civil War’, which although it doesn’t have zombies even resembles ’28 Days Later’ in tone and follows the structure of ‘The Diary of the Dead’ until its identical ending or its coda with still photos with soldiers and a dead man, clearly replicating the snapshots of the “lynching” of the protagonist in ‘Night of the Living Dead’. Garland will now test how far he can go in his own universe in the upcoming ’28 Years Later’ trilogy, which will face the challenge of navigating two decades of surprising elements turned into clichés.
And the zombie genre is so exploited today that its new stories always leave a taste of Déjà vu, after so many hours of related content it is very difficult to find a fresh way, but perhaps the important thing is to return to credible characters, as Boyle and Garland achieved in ’28 days later’, whose inevitable trail continues the visionary power of its images and its bravery shot in digital when everything was 35mmfor this reason it maintains an indelible power in its approach to the debacle, so tangible that it caused panic, so real, that it maintained a sadness that arose from humanism, for everything that was to come.
In Espinof:
