This is particularly on display during the film’s actual dream sequence as Jim sweats through an Ambien-laced nightmare. Not just content to toy around with the visuals, Boyle also heightens the atmosphere through editing, such as removing frames from a sequence to make the scene more jarring. Even as he encounters more and more people, his journey feels ready to sink into full dream logic at any moment. The sense that Jim might be trapped outside of reality never fully leaves. When Jim finally encounters other survivors, he pleads for an explanation, stopping short of asking if he’s dead, the look on his face revealing his fear that he has passed on into Hell. It takes familiar iconography like Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster and turns them into looming gravestones. But with the movie’s release, still in the shadow of 9/11, the fear of being alone in the face of tragedy was overwhelming. Now two years into COVID, such empty spaces are more familiar to us, especially from the early days of the pandemic. As Godspeed You! Black Emperor weave their song “East Hastings” into a panic attack crescendo, the audience is shown a city that despite being devoid of human life, is nearly pristine. The world he used to know is deserted and so he wanders London alone. After a quick introduction to the instigating infection, the movie brings us to its main protagonist, Jim (Cillian Murphy), nude and awakening on a hospital bed. The modus operandi is established early on in the movie’s most well known scene. Before its release, you didn’t expect a post-apocalyptic horror movie to look, sound, or even feel like this (except for maybe independent outliers like This Quiet Earth). But where horror films often use this tool to heighten tension or disgust, Boyle uses it to further peel away layers of realism, lining the visuals with the same feeling of a half-grasped dream.Ģ8 Days Later toys with audience sensory expectations. It might be one of the last modern horror movies to feel so, even despite the use of digital film. Like The Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and of course, Videodrome, 28 Days Later feels like an experience best left on a VHS player. Horror is the genre that benefits the most from analog flourishes, like grain from an overplayed tape or crackling in the soundmix. But the dip in video quality is also an important aesthetic choice, frequently lending the film a sense of grit and intimacy, similar to a CCTV feed. While the choice sacrificed video quality, it allowed for easy access to shooting around London in places that were only accessible for minutes at a time in order to accommodate heavy vehicle and foot traffic in the areas. Much of the film’s atmosphere can be attributed to Danny Boyle and his team’s use of digital video cameras. It’s as if in response to the horror of the apocalypse, reality has buckled in on itself, allowing dream logic to dictate this new existence. Alice in Wonderland and her red dress dissolve down a dark hall. Horses run untamed through the countryside. Flower fields dissolve into watercolor smudges. But what keeps 28 Days Later above ground as more than just a footnote in the revitalization of the genre are its dreamlike aesthetics, nightmare or benign. It’s a discussion that will shamble on till the heat death of our star. Upon its release and in the two decades since, you can’t approach an online mention of the film without encountering some argument over technicalities of what constitutes a “zombie” movie. It’s nightmarish stuff, especially for the young and unexpecting. Throughout the journey across a desolate England, arms are severed and blood is vomited by the gallon as the infected howl in agony and fury. My first time watching Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later on VHS late at night while home alone felt like a kick in the teeth. However, it’s the 2002 outbreak that has stayed chasing after me all these years. This just so happened to also be the era of the zombie resurgence, with the slacker nerds of Shaun of the Dead and the mean punk spirit of the Dawn of the Dead remake, both movies I love for different reasons. Starting in middle school, I took greater and greater risks to smuggle new experiences home from the library in the form of Stephen King as well as more varied horror movies. As I grew older I also grew more unsatisfied with this arrangement. Movies were only allowed if it was clearly a man in a monster suit. No fiction books and certainly no video games. Growing up, horror was a carefully curated genre in my house.
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