28 Days Later: Zombies or People?

This gruesome apocalyptic film takes place in an abandoned England and is filled with horrific scenes of death, murder, and violence. Directed by Danny Boyle (Sunshine, The Beach), this film is full of thematic elements and cinematography that one would expect from Boyle. Non-stereotypical characters, grotesque images, and idealistic camera shots place the viewer in the movie and its horror. For England, society has ceased to exist, which is exactly how someone would view the apocalypse. An end of the world catastrophe surely contains no civil people, if any people at all. The characters are all strange in their own ways and allow the viewer to connect with either one or all of them. However, it is not the characters of 28 Days Later that captured the attention of critics, but the so-called zombies that plague the film.

Boyle stylistically opens up this film with an explanation to the events that will transpire. A blood-born pathogen called “rage” has been created by scientists and injected into several apes for testing purposes. When three activists try to free the animals, thinking they are under-going terrible mistreatment, they soon find out why they were hidden away from the world. Boyle uses this scene to portray a stereotype that some people may have towards activists; that, no matter what, their prime directive is to free an animal being locked up for testing purposes. Nonetheless, they soon find that they made the gravest of mistakes by interfering with them. As an ape bites one of the activists, a scientist who walked in on the activists’ rescue attempt tries to kill the bitten activist, but fails as she attacks everyone present in the room while spreading this disease. At this point, while watching the woman “turn” from being a human to this creature filled with rage, the viewer cannot help but think that she is not a zombie. Rather, she is just a human being who has been infected with a terrible disease.

For an apocalyptic film, 28 Days Later introduces the cause of the apocalypse almost too fast for the viewer to catch and store away for later use. Instead of seeing the evacuation and the first true effects of Rage on millions of people, Boyle throws his audiences into the character's shoes as they are forced to play "survival of the fittest" against these raging machines full of a disease that mimics pure hatred. After the first scene, the viewer has no idea what is going on and focuses for a minute on the details of an eerily abandoned London. However, Boyle does not leave us in the dark longer than we have to, and we are quickly introduced to the "zombies" that critics claim are loads of horrific fun.

When trying to disassociate the infected people in this film from the zombies the viewer was expecting, consider the differences between the two. Zombies are the walking/living dead who eat brains, walk haphazardly, and are extremely unintelligent. The infected people in 28 Days Later possess none of these qualities. They are living, breathing humans who happen to be contaminated by a disease born from science. They are extremely intelligent and posses the same capabilities as humans do when it comes to rational thinking. They are incredibly fast and have the ability to appear out of nowhere. Instead of dying, they develop into these infected people who, when the blood of an infected person enters an orifice of their body, turn into a person filled with no emotions besides rage. Considering all of this, should the infected people be regarded as zombies?

While it is true that the infected people eat other people, it could simply be that they do this because their bodies no longer recognize a need for credible food sources and find the hunt appealing. In a scene where an infected soldier is trying to kill another soldier, the infected one does not bite him. Instead, he attacks the soldier, pins him down, and then proceeds to vomit excess amounts of blood onto the soldier. Safely assuming that the soldier did not intend to consume any of the blood being thrown up onto him, he does happen to get infected by it entering into his body. So, do the infected only think about eating flesh and brains as zombies do? Or are they simply acting out as an enraged person would when no other rational thought can enter their minds?

It is important to keep in mind that the most prominent distinction between zombies and the infected people in this film is one of their intelligences. In a scene where the four main survivors of the film attempt to leave London in order to seek the safety of a blockade, Selena (Naomie Harris), Jim, (Cillian Murphy), Frank (Brendan Gleeson), and Hannah (Megan Burns) have to drive through a dark tunnel. While driving over a huge pile of parked cars they get a flat tire and the infected people start running towards them. Boyle does a fantastic job of prolonging and intensifying this scene by constantly moving the camera from one person to the next and then to the approaching infected people to make the viewer squirm uncomfortably in their seat, wishing they would hurry up and fix the flat tire. Nevertheless, they all get away unharmed. However, that is not what captures the viewer’s attention, but rather how the infected react after Frank quickly puts the car in gear. They ran at them with surprising speed and agility, yet when the car began to move further away, the infected realized they were not going to catch them and halted their advance. If theses infected people are supposed to be zombies, then Boyle did a terrible job of portraying them as such. No zombie I have ever seen was either fast or clever.

The one thing that is constant in the viewer’s observation of the infected people is that they are violent. However, when we are introduced to the soldiers later on in the film, one cannot help but put the infected people in the same category as the soldiers. No matter how sick the infected people are, at least they have a reason for their violent actions. The soldiers’ violence towards Jim, Selena, and Hannah is inexcusable. It is crazy and foolish to think that humans can cease to be cruel even when the world is at an end. Their feigned kindness towards Hannah, Jim and Selena quickly turns to madness as they realize why the soldiers were so eager to help them. Two women prove to be extremely valuable to men who have been so “courageously” fighting off the infected. When Jim fully comprehends what the soldiers have in mind for the women, he tries to escape with them. Nevertheless, the soldiers seem to be one step ahead of them and catch them before they even leave the house. Jim is taken from the women and sent to be executed, where the true madness begins.

The final scenes of violence in this film are controversial. Jim turns into a madman as he sets free a soldier, Private Mailer (Marvin Campbell), who became infected and was imprisoned in a small courtyard. As Mailer realizes he is free, he looks at Jim with an almost “thank you” in his eyes and begins to tear through the house. Jim is non-existent for a few minutes as Boyle focuses on Mailer’s apparent revenge for being locked up and starved to death, infection or not. This scene proves to the viewer that the infected people are not only infected, but they are also people. When Jim finally makes his appearance, Selena is being taken away by the most vulgar soldier of them all, Corporal Mitchell (Ricci Harnett). Knowing that Selena and Jim have a growing affection for each other gives the reader insight as to why Jim went as mad as he did on the Corporal. While some may view Jim’s unexpected change from being a passive character to a stark-raving madman as absurd, others can see that Jim was in his right mind to have acted out the way he did. He acted out of love for Selena and for what Mitchell had threatened to do to her. However, Boyle went a little far with adding somewhat “blissful” music in the background as Jim violently kills Mitchell. Even with Jim’s new found violent side to his personality, the viewer can tell it won’t be permanent, therefore excluding any distinction between him, the soldiers, and the infected people.

As obviously different as the infected are to zombies, some people would not agree. Well-known film critics for “Rotten Tomatoes” and “The Internet Movie Database” include this film with others such as Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. However, the infected people are no more than humans who are acting out against others in rage. You will not be disappointed to find that these people are not zombies, but rather you will be amazed to find a horror film filled with gore and guts that does not have mindless zombies getting in the way of the action. It is very much like Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend when it comes to the creatures not truly being defined as zombies, but as people who have been infected by something man-made. The distinction between zombies and the infected people of 28 Days Later is so important because it distances itself from normal zombie movies. If every zombie-type movie was the same, would you want to see all of them?