28 Days Later
Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Burns and Noah Huntle
Rated R for strong violence and gore, language and nudity.

Excuse a quick paragraph or three on horror theory. There’s been more written on horror then perhaps any other film genre. The reason is fairly simple. On the surface it doesn’t seem like films that repulse, disgust and horrify their audience should be particularly popular. As humans we tend to avoid activities which produce such effects. Yet, from Noseferatu to Psycho to Halloween, the horror film has proven to be one of the most consistently profitable types of movie you can make. So a bunch of people have spent a lot of paper and sabbatical time trying to reconcile this seemingly contradictory state of affairs. The majority of it all is outlandish, unlikely and often just plain stupid, citing Freudian desires to be raped and all kinds of strange notions of "otherness". It’s not worth getting into much further.

However, I would like to take a moment to lay out a simple, but I think useful, distinction to employ when thinking about how horror movies work. Basically, to my mind, there are two types of scares: the first person scare and the third person scare. The first person scare is the kind that actually gets you to jump out of your seat. It’s generally set up by the story, but the thing that actually gets you doesn’t have that much to do with the narrative of the film. It’s generally a loud noise, accompanied by a violent visual. Think of the lamb’s leg crashing against the windshield in Jurassic Park. Yes, it was the movie’s story that put you on edge, but what actually scared you in that instance was the silence followed by a loud jarring sound and the sight of the bloody leg. It’s a truly first person experience as the scare went directly through your senses.

The third person scare gets you via your attachments to the story’s characters. Michael Myers chases Jamie Lee Curtis and you feel a sort of suspenseful, horrified thrill. But you don’t fear for yourself. You know full well that you are safe, something that the first person scare gets you to forget for an instant. Instead you fear for the character. The vividness of the world the movie has presented has somehow forced you to, on some level, feel a real sympathy for a fictional being. Some of it has to do with the power of the photographed image and some with the fact when we a see a person in pain or danger, our reaction tends to bypass the rational and go straight to the emotional. Strong emotions seen in others trigger strong emotions in us, regardless of whether or not they really make sense.

So, the question at hand becomes what sort of scares is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later able to conjure? For the most part, it seems that recent horror films have settled for the occasional first person scare, their most horrifying moments being the glass smashing and the killer emerging suddenly out of the dark silence. The reason, of course, is that this sort of scare is pretty easy to create. Try it yourself. Next time your girlfriend or house mate or whatever is lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, walk into the room silently with a strobe light, turn it on and start screaming. Yeah, maybe the lamb’s leg in JP is doing a little more than that,
but principle is pretty much the same.

Much harder is to get an audience to actually care enough about a film’s characters that they see the characters as real enough to actually fear for them. To do this a film needs to create a world that feels real and complete, but also that has some sort of super killer in it. Additionally the characters need to react to this world in a way that makes sense to the viewer, but doesn’t involve them just shaking and wetting themselves. They need to take action, but the viewer can’t think that what they’re doing is completely ridiculous, or that its much less
likely they’ll react to the characters as though they’re real people worthy of real sympathy. It’s really a tough trick to pull, and it had been a long time since I’d seen a horror film that achieved it.

Until 28 Days Later, that is. It’s a legitimately scary post-apocalyptic film, full of both flaws and beautiful, horrifying moments. Essentially what Boyle has created is an art-zombie film, something that might sound weird but actually isn’t that unusual. Films light Night of the Living Dead and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre have shown that the low budget, art-house aesthetic can work very successfully with a horror narrative. So Boyle, along with the excellent cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, takes a shaky camera, shotgun approach to the story and comes up with a film that will be able to play in almost any theater. It’s scary enough to get by at the megaplex, and pretentious enough to play at the single screen theater down the street.

The story begins with a quick "how it all happened" scene and then cuts quickly to four weeks later. A man wakes up in a hospital to find himself the only living inhabitant. He walks around a desolate, empty London. Eventually he finds some people, but they’re zombies. And the action begins. It’s a survival story that borrows heavily from Night of the Living Dead, among other films, but it brings a fresh look and feel to the old genre. The film features striking visuals and, most importantly, actually succeeds in getting you to care for its characters and thereby is able to create some legitimate third person scares. It also has it’s share of loud bangs, which are some of the scariest in recent memory.

The story is, without a doubt, a bit hokey, but the film is so full of energy that it rarely distracts. Cillian Murphy delivers a complex, interesting performance as the film’s lead and costars Naomi Harris, Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns hold their own, successfully playing off of their surroundings. The film falters a bit towards its end, as it begins to under explain Murphy’s motivation and eventually succumbs to a strange sort of sentimentality. It’s far from a perfect movie, but it looks good and will give you a nice, well-earned scare. Why is that something we want? Another story for another day...

Rating 74%