28 Days Later


Last Friday, Nella and I saw 28 Days Later directed by Danny Boyle.

This is one of the scariest movies I have ever seen. I see it marketed as a horror movie but that is just plain wrong. Actually horror is correct if you use the pre-splatter film definition of the term. 28 Days Later invokes dread and fear for our heroes. I even considered covering my eyes at one spot. It is all done with suggestive editing. There is hardly any gore (but there is enough to set the scene).

This is the mother of zombie movies. It is also a top flight thriller. Basically a quick incubating and highly infectious virus called Rage is unleashed on humankind. 28 Days after initial exposure, London (and England) is a ghost town. Our hero awakes from a coma to discover empty streets and and super-fast rage-infected zombies. That’s all you need to know without spoiling it. Make sure you sit through the end credits or you’ll miss something important.

Nella and I talked about this movie afterwards for at least an hour. That is how much the movie affected us.

It looks like it was shot on Digital Video and that makes the film even grittier and creepy. It’s like watching video footage of the disaster.

Watch it even if you don’t like horror movies.


4 responses to “28 Days Later”

  1. I don’t like horror movies. I tried to watch it on the flight back from LAX the other night, and didn’t get past the first 20 mins or so. Having already seen Finding Nemo a half dozen times I thought I’d try something different – but I couldn’t do it.

    I was in desperate need of sleep at that point anyway, so it’s not as if I was needing something to do.

    I do remember having a rather disturbed sleep – with some rather nasty dreams – one of the reasons I don’t feed my brain such material.

  2. … the topic of the film was kind of interesting though. I tend to be rather cynical when it comes to mans stupidity around biological agents, particularly viruses and such.

    I think it’s only a matter of time before we have a global catastrophe of this nature – SARS was just a taste, the real stuff is yet to come. An airborne virus, incubating in 2-4 days (enough time to infect many people), high mortality rate (not 100%, otherwise it will burn itself out), fast mutation (making it almost impossible to counteract), and this global village of ours will become a vastly different place.

    I’m in the process of visiting about 15 cities in 7 countries over a 4 month period. Imagine what damage I could do !

  3. It looks like it was shot on Digital Video and that makes the film even grittier and creepy. It’s like watching video footage of the disaster.

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