Highbrow horror show
London — London
There are plenty of fierce battles in the new thriller “28 Days Later.†Not all of them took place in front of the cameras.
A terrifying story of a violence-inducing virus run amok, the new film from “Trainspotting†director Danny Boyle is the product of a spirited debate over the movie’s soul. Is “28 Days Later†a mainstream scary movie? Or a highbrow art film that happens to overflow with zombies? If Boyle and his collaborators have made their decisions correctly, the answer could be that the film ends up being both things at the same time.
Acclaimed directors like Boyle historically shun the artistic ghetto of genre movies. But the 46-year-old Brit defies easy categorization. He refused to interrupt filming a low-budget family film called “Millions†in Liverpool to come to the United States to meet with Harrison Ford. And Boyle’s last movie was a Leonardo DiCaprio movie that many people didn’t want to see -- “The Beach.â€
“I don’t like complaining about it; it’s what made me able to buy this house,†Boyle says in a comfortable home in a newly hip London neighborhood. “In many ways, ‘The Beach’ was a fantastic opportunity. But we just got bogged down in the scale of it and the politics of it.â€
Shot on digital video and made for about half the $20 million that DiCaprio collected for “The Beach,†“28 Days Later†is possibly the summer’s most disturbing movie. Thanks to both the SARS outbreak (which occurred after the film was completed) and increasingly worrisome headlines about genetic testing and animal rights, its story is frighteningly topical. While many movies of its style require continual leaps of logic, “28 Days Later†tries to remain grounded in world events. Like good science fiction, its premise is rooted in science fact.
In keeping with Boyle’s early films such as “Shallow Grave†and “Trainspotting,†the film also has a dark, gritty edge and is filled with allegories about modern life. As with the best genre films, it delivers a stream of heartstopping shocks, without resorting to cheap tricks.
Released to strong business in England last November and debuting domestically Friday, “28 Days Later†begins inside the Cambridge Primate Research Center, where animal rights activists uncover chimps undergoing gruesome experiments. Moments before they free the primates, the raiders are urgently warned by a technician that the animals are infected with a terrible disorder and must not be loosed. The admonition is ignored, and one of the contagious chimps immediately sets upon his liberators, and the viscera start to fly.
The movie then jumps ahead 28 days, where a bicycle messenger named Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens from an accident-induced coma in a hospital bed. At first, it looks like any HMO-affiliated clinic: There aren’t any nurses around. But there aren’t any doctors around, either. Or other patients. Jim wanders the streets of London, which are wholly abandoned too. Old newspaper headlines report an evacuation. Jim stumbles into a church that is filled with bodies. Everyone appears to be dead. Well, not everyone ....
The monkeys’ disease has raced throughout the human population, transmitted by a single blood drop. The rage virus, as it’s called, has killed almost everybody in Britain and perhaps spread overseas. Those who are infected and have not yet perished become bloodthirsty (and blood-spewing) beasts. Jim quickly joins up with several people who are not yet ill, and the ragtag group makes its way toward a future whose only certainty is much more gory mayhem.
Those who witnessed “Trainspotting’s†famous, drug-fueled dive by Ewan McGregor into Scotland’s filthiest toilet, will not be surprised by the level of visual shocks in “28 Days Later.â€
“I love all that,†says Boyle, who hurt his knee directing “Millions†and had to direct that movie from a wheelchair for three days. “I find it’s really easy to do,†he says, limping around his home. “It’s much more difficult being positive and optimistic.â€
Redefining a genre
In its formation, “28 Days Later†was inspired by seemingly schizophrenic ideas. Screenwriter Alex Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald were more inclined to make a zombie movie in the spirit of director George Romero (“Day of the Deadâ€) and novelist John Wyndham (“The Day of the Triffidsâ€). Boyle leaned toward a parable about paranoia, consumerism and rage that, if anything, referenced not earlier horror movies but the photography of Andreas Gursky.
“Alex and Andrew initially wanted it to be a genre film,†says Boyle. “And our battles were constantly about my trying to drag it away from them. My big thing about a genre piece is they tend not to be emotionally involving. You’re just waiting for people to die. Whereas I wanted you to feel for this kid, Jim.â€
All the same, some scenes in Garland’s script are straight lifts from some of the horror films he admired as a teen -- a visit to a deserted grocery store comes from “Dawn of the Dead.â€
“I always liked post-apocalyptic movies,†says Garland, who also wrote the novel “The Beach†but was not involved in the making of that film. The shopping scene “was an homage, or steal, or whatever the correct word is. You get the reference if you know [the earlier movie], but if you don’t get the reference, it won’t stop you.
“I start with genre,†Garland says. “Danny begins as far away from genre as he possibly can. At the beginning, we would really be knocking heads.â€
Those arguments -- particularly over the film’s gothic final act -- helped produce a movie that aims to be far more thoughtful than the typical fright fest and takes several surprising turns. Even as the film attempts to honor the conventions of horror, “28 Days Later†often ignores them. People wander into dark rooms. They make too much noise, like yelling “Hello?†all the time. They change car tires in abandoned tunnels.
Yet besides a car alarm, there are none of the false jolts that fill most contemporary American scary movies. Unlike the foot-dragging monsters that have inhabited scores of horror films from “Frankenstein†to “Friday the 13th,†the zombies in Boyle’s film charge at a Marshall Faulk clip. (He even cast top amateur athletes as the “infected,†as the ravenous zombies are known.)
Where other filmmakers might have their heroes enjoy a camp-out in any random park, Boyle sets his “28 Days Later†sleepover in the ruins of Waverly Abbey, a 12th century British abbey, which reinforces the movie’s themes about civilization’s end.
The film’s conclusion presented the chief storytelling hurdle. “It’s impossible to end apocalypse movies because the beginning is the ending,†Boyle says. “So where do you go?†The filmmakers toyed with no fewer than four possible conclusions and actually filmed two. The endings were rejected for cost, logic and, finally, tone: As it once ended, the film was just too bleak.
Will artistry attract?
The challenges were not limited to moviemaking. It remains to be seen if the cineastes who embraced “Shallow Grave†and “Trainspotting†will dip their toes into such bloody waters.
“The worry with doing a film like this is that there are lots of people that won’t come see anything that has even a whiff of being a zombie movie,†Boyle says.
Boyle hopes the film’s artistry will help attract the kind of moviegoers whose idea of a good scare is seeing that the concession stand has run out of soy milk lattes.
The film’s signature sequences show Jim wandering around some of London’s most famous landmarks devoid of any human life. To capture those haunting images, Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (“The Celebrationâ€) would start work at dawn, often on Sundays, running as many as 12 digital cameras at once.
The filmmakers hired attractive young women to stand at the side of the road and stop truck drivers along highways, so that Boyle could capture fully abandoned roadways. (The Brits don’t readily block off public spaces for film shooting, as they do in America.) The script originally called for all forms of life to have been wiped out, but London’s many pigeons were not interested in staying out of camera range.
It’s natural to see the film as a parable about AIDS, Ebola fever, mad-cow disease or out-of-control science. Yet Boyle thinks “28 Days Later†is finally a movie about rage. In fact, Boyle says one of the biggest influences on the film was the crafty British criminal Kenneth Noye, who was involved in the theft of 3 tons of gold ingots and killed an undercover police officer. Noye served little jail time for the two crimes and kept the gold hidden. He was a free man -- until another motorist cut him off in a traffic circle.
“He got out of his car, got a knife and killed this guy. In front of his girlfriend. And the police finally had him,†Boyle says. Noye was sentenced to life. “I used to tell that story to everybody who played an infected in the movie: It’s that moment right there, where you just forget everything.
“The whole point of the film is that it’s called an infection, but the reality is that rage is part of our nature,†Boyle says. “Science thinks it can take the bad out and leave a better human. And in fact you just leave an incomplete human.â€
Only good movies
Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
