Nowhere to Run
28 Days Later and the all too timely resurgence of the zombie in popular culture
by Donna Bowman
One of the requisites in any revival of classic movie monsters is the addition of some new and updated twist to their traditional characteristics. A perfect example is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, which has been widely lauded for the innovation of speedy zombies. Instead of lumbering toward the living, the undead really throw it into gear.
But if that were all there was to it—the same zombies, now on wheels—28 Days Later would be zombie camp, like Dan O’Bannon’s beloved midnight movie classic Return of the Living Dead, in which half the humor derives from the monsters zipping across the frame like the peloton trailing the yellow jersey. Zombie movies comment on other zombie movies, without doubt; to some extent, they’re all footnotes to George Romero’s towering Living Dead trilogy. So to understand the motives of non-genre filmmakers like Danny Boyle and his novelist/screenwriter collaborator Alex Garland, we have to look deeper.
Zombies are something of a growth industry these days. Last year, Elite Entertainment released a definitive, authorized DVD edition of Night of the Living Dead (one of the most widely available and poorly preserved videos of the last quarter century, thanks to its public-domain status). The other two DVDs in Romero’s trilogy, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, are set to be released in the next eight months. Sam Raimi’s gleeful comedic take on the genre, Evil Dead II, also appeared in a deluxe edition in 2002, and its sequel Army of Darkness followed in March 2003. The latter features legions of skeleton warriors in a loving homage to Ray Harryhausen’s work in Jason and the Argonauts, which is also the direct ancestor of the cursed undead pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Some of the zeitgeist prompting a zombie revival is fairly evident. An invisible, insidious, infectious force turning our neighbors into agents of death? That can play as Communism in the ’50s, counterculture in the ’60s, consumerism in the ’70s, the military-industrial complex in the ’80s and (more literally) the emerging diseases of the ’90s. 28 Days Later marries our fear of epidemic outbreaks to the threats of secret military research facilities, coming up with a terrifying bioweapon that creates enraged, super-strong beings whose bodily fluids carry their zombie contagion.
But there’s another, more timely subtext to the recent zombie resurgence in pop culture. The Body Snatchers movies all asked, in various ways, how you can tell normality from insanity when nearly everyone is acting insane. The true horror in 28 Days Later isn’t speedy zombies; it’s the feeling that you are the last normal person as far as the eye can see. While you were asleep, somehow everyone you knew went nuts—and there’s no guarantee you’ll know yourself when you next wake up again.
That scenario has a familiar ring to Americans and Britons who feel as though they’ve gone through the political looking-glass in the last year or so: Conservatives spend tax money like it’s water, while liberals unquestioningly line up to support a preemptive attack against a foe whose enormous stockpile of weapons has yet to be found. A Labor party prime minister finds himself speechifying about the destiny of the British to save the world, and the Tories spout isolationist rhetoric. At work, in the newspapers, on the television, at church—everyone seems to be defending propositions they mocked two years ago, with no apparent awareness of the contradiction. The search for a truth-teller becomes a matter of survival, yet in an Orwellian twist, the logic of survival dictates believing that black is white and 2+2=5.
The real foundation for the new wave of zombie pictures is another George Romero film, The Crazies (1973), also about a disease that’s gotten loose from a lab and drives ordinary folks mad. The Crazies follows a small band of renegades trying to escape a military quarantine, pursued by mobs of guardsmen in white biohazard suits and masks. Of course, it’s the faceless, identically garbed proto-storm troopers who are the real zombies of the film, an army of once human creatures whose motivations and thought processes are skewed just enough to be unrecognizable. There are always more of them, and they never stop coming.
In a chilling scene, one of the scientists researching a vaccine for the madness makes a breakthrough, only to be caught in a crowd of the infected and insane, unable to distinguish himself to his indifferent bosses. Here, and in 28 Days Later, we see that fear of the zombie is twofold: I will become one, or I won’t be able to prove that I’m not one. A party label, an ideological position, a religious conviction, a moral code—none of it reliably communicates who we are anymore, not when the zombies have usurped the ideals we thought were ours and twisted them to odd, inhuman ends. It doesn’t matter whether I am a zombie, or whether others simply believe that I am one. Either way, nothing that I thought I knew about the world works anymore.
There’s no use running. The zombies are here, and they’re a helluva lot faster than we are.
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