October 17, 2014
By Curtis M. Parvin, Avocado Movie Team
Ebola seems to be the flavor of the month now — for lack of a better and less disgusting turn of phrase — on many news channels in the United States. It seems it is all we are hearing about. But instead of turning to biased news sources, I suggest you take a second look at the horror film in order to process the media you consume every day. When you give the subgenre known as the zombie film another chance, I think you’ll be surprised what you find out about humanity. A movie like 28 Days Later… contains all the tension/desperation of a world in turmoil, if you can look past the gore and see the allegory at its moral center.
Now, you might be asking why I’m not analyzing the popular television series, The Walking Dead, which premiered its fifth season the other night. Personally, I believe that Danny Boyle’s self-contained 28 Days Later… is a much better subject for analysis than a TV show with too many characters and convoluted plot lines. TWD frankly has too much filler. Boyle keeps it simple with only a few characters and their basic need for survival.
28 Days Later..’s main character is Jim (Cillian Murphy from Batman Begins) who wakes up alone in a British hospital room. Confused, Jim walks out to explore the corridors, only to find that the entire building is trashed and completely vacant. He is gobsmacked and leaves the hospital to find a answer, except the streets of London are completely devoid of human life – save for a few desperate people he soon connects with.
Selena (Naomie Harris from Skyfall) quickly tells Jim about the devastation of the past month. A virus has escaped and spread throughout the U.K., wiping out most of the population and turning the rest into the “Infected” — snarling, blood-shot cannibals. She believes that staying alive is the ONLY thing that matters in this postapocalyptic world. As they find other survivors, our heroes realize that remaining human is more important than Selena originally thought.
28 Days Later… is more successful than most copycat zombie films because it is superior from a technical standpoint (Danny Boyle would go on to win an Academy Award for Slumdog Millionaire). He is aware of the power of the image and his choice of camera angles hooks us from the get-go. Extreme long shots of desolated streets make Jim seem cut off from his surroundings. In contrast, tight close ups of our heroes increase intimacy between them. There is also a sense of being trapped when the “Infected” attacks occur. These angles are captured by the low-buget, hand-held DV cameras, which make the action feel more like a documentary and therefore more realistic.
The technical aspects not only make 28 Days Later… feel very exciting, they also allow Boyle to communicate key themes to his audience. Zombie stories are worth telling because they are metaphors for the survival of the human race during times of great social imbalance. People who dismiss the horror genre should know that a zombie film like 28 Days Later… can be more sophisticated than the “torture porn” market of the Saw franchise, for example. Boyle’s film has risen to the level of social commentary. In the brief action prologue of 28 Days Later…, the virus called “Rage” accidentally gets out of a test lab and spreads like a forest fire. And we’re back to the recent media coverage of the Ebola virus.
If Ebola did become widespread, you wouldn’t have to fend off creatures with a machete or baseball bat, but citizens would be put in a fairly desperate situation. Zombie movies, at their highest level, question our morality and put our values on disturbing sliding scale. They ask tough questions about the greater good and our attachment to loved ones. In a hypothetical situation, could we kill our best friend or parent if that meant preventing the spread of the infection? In another situation, would we have the courage to prevent the violation of someone in the crosshairs of lustful, heavily armed men? We have to ask these questions in a world that continues to become more and more unstable. These scenarios are no doubt uncomfortable, but it is in this discomfort that we find real truth.
Fantasy stories like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… are in many ways a more truthful examination of human character than real news stories, which also include their own brand of fiction (see advertising and sponsorship of said programs/newspapers). Allegorical storytelling is often more popular than news broadcasts because of the message(s) we are receiving. News/politics divide us in order to make a prophet; filmmakers/artists create dreams and nightmares as a way to help us cope with the chaos of the rapidly-changing world.
We all dream.
We all learn from nightmares as a survival mechanism.
And we all want to — in the words of Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek — “live long and prosper”.
You can find a link to Curtis’ Twitter above. Here’s his IMDB page.
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