Danny Boyle has had an eclectic career with many different kinds of films; Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, Slumdog Millionaire and more, but arguably his most iconic project was 28 Days Later. This low-budget horror film released in 2002 was quickly recognised as a masterpiece of the genre and has been hugely influential in the years following. So much so that we then got 28 Weeks Later and now 28 Years Later.
Spoiler Warning – huge spoilers for 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later and 28 Years Later
Rage
In the first scene of the first film, it is stated that the infection is rage. In an effort to understand then deal with rage, anger and the bad impulses of humanity, scientists have “infected” monkeys with rage. As is the way with such things in films, the safety precautions of the lab are breached and the infection gets out. The Infected are humans who are driven purely by anger and malice, charging headlong at any people with a desire to destroy and/or infect. They cannot communicate and are incapable of carrying out anything but the most basic actions. This and their ability to infect others is what has prompted many to describe them as “zombies”. When Jim, the central character of 28 Days Later, awakens from a coma into this new horrible world, he is very confused (and scared). One of the first non-infected he meets is Selena, who advocates doing only what will help you survive. Their encounter with a group of British soldiers does not lead to a better life, nor does it improve their opinions on other survivors.
Duty
The opening scene of 28 Weeks Later is certainly the high-point of the film. A small group of survivors are taking refuge in a country house, including Don and his wife Alice. When their house is overrun, Don tries to get his wife to safety, while Alice focuses on saving a child. Alice runs upstairs and is cornered by the infected, closely followed by Don, who looks at the seemingly impossible situation and runs, abandoning his wife, whom he assumes – with good reason – will die or become infected, and it would have been virtually impossible to save her. Later, Don is reunited with his children to whom he tells a variation of that story in which he saw their mother die. But she didn’t die. Alice is immune to the infection, but is a carrier. She survived and was later found by the children. Obviously, this creates a rift between Don and his children as they question his version of events. Much of this film is about duty – Don’s duty to his wife, to his children. Doyle, an American sniper, has to choose between his duty to the army and not shooting uninfected children. It should be stated that Doyle’s choice of kindness to those children will lead to the deaths of far more people.
Love
28 Years Later has genuinely one of the most moving scenes I’ve seen in a long time. In 28 Years Later, a group of survivors on Holy Island carry on despite the devastation to the UK. The film revolves around Spike, a 12-year-old boy, who is being taken to the mainland for the first time with his father, in part to scavenge but also as a rite of passage. They make it back more or less successfully. We also learn that Spike’s mother, Ilsa, is seriously ill with an undiagnosed condition (undiagnosed as there are no doctors), and when Spike learns of a doctor on the mainland, he disobeys all the rules and takes his mother to the doctor. Let alone that the mainland is extremely dangerous, let alone it is just Spike and Isla, let alone that Spike learned of the doctor it is through a horror story of a crazed doctor who collected bodies and burned them.
It turns out Dr Kelson, as is his name, is not crazy. He is surprisingly normal and indeed is a medical doctor. He has spent the past 28 years building a memorial to the dead, burning their bodies, collecting their skulls, and adding them in a vast monument, not of terror, but as a mark of respect. He describes it as a memento mori, a Latin phrase meaning “remember you will die” – not as a horrific prophecy but to appreciate life as it is finite. The skulls are of both the infected and non-infected as he sees them all as equally human (many people in the world do not see it this way). When it comes to Isla without medical equipment, he makes a rudimentary diagnosis of a brain tumour and she does not have long to live. She chooses to die painlessly now, and Dr. Kelson begins the process of reducing her body down to the bones. He presents the skull to Spike and asks him to add it to the memorial with the words memento amora, “remember to love”.
This is a film series that has spent the vast majority of its time on rage-infected “zombies” vomiting blood onto people and beating them to death. But the defining moment of the third film is reminding the characters and the audience of the importance of loving other people, and this is a staggering, almost unbelievable achievement. It is a heartbreakingly beautiful scene. The death that brings this to us is not from the infected but a medical condition, something familiar to the audience. It may be sad, but it is not terrible. She is not alone. The towers of skulls are featured prominently in the posters for the film and certainly project them as a sign of death and horror, but in the film, they symbolise death and love.
There is perhaps another reason 28 Years Later had such an impact on me – the survivors are on Holy Island, in the north-east of England, where I am from. Normally, if you hear the accents from this area in a film, it is about striking miners. Spike refers to Isla “me mam” or “my mum” as much of England might say, and it is exceedingly rare to hear something like this in media.
But local resonance aside, Danny Boyle creating a zombie film with the audience coming away thinking about love is achieving the almost impossible. 28 Years Later Part 2 comes out next year.
