I Hate 28 Days Later for Killing Off Supernatural Zombies

fast, slow, who cares, I want my dark magic

The 28___Later franchise is being reborn this weekend with the release of 28 Years Later. I’ve seen the original film, 28 Days Later, three or four times, and I think it’s pretty good, although like a lot of movies that set the template for a genre I think its reputation is a little puffed up by its legacy. I find the whole “the real monster… is man” thing a little obvious and overdone, and the film often seems to be reveling in being dour. The shaky DV thing I can take or leave. But there’s no question that the film’s portrayal of both zombie horror and human cruelty have a lot of verve, and Cillian Murphy’s status as a star leaps off the screen. I’m not contrarian enough to question its enduring popularity or legacy.

But that legacy, that’s the problem. I have to try and force myself to not hate the movie because of its influence. The movie is fine. Its impact on the movies has proven for two decades to be a source of deep and irrational personal frustration.

You see, 28 Days Later has had a remarkable impact on the zombie films that came after it, to the degree that you really can set its release date in 2002 as a before-and-after style turning point for the genre. Its grimy aesthetic, bleak tone, and use of zombies as a device through which to portray human moral frailty have all been influential, for sure. But its impact has most obviously and consequentially been felt in its version of zombie-ism; the movie represents a clear break from most of its precursors, most notably the low-budget genre-starting classic Night of the Living Dead, which set the template back in 1968 and reigned unchallenged for years in its use of shuffling, low-speed dread. 28 Days Later changed the genre forever by giving us fast zombies. Perhaps the most indelible image from the movie lies in the moment protagonist Jim first encounters a group of zombies in a church; they give chase at blistering speed, shaky camera and low-resolution DV imagery combining with their rapid closing speed to really provoke the viewer. And viewers were really provoked! In part, again, because they had been conditioned to think of zombies as a slow-moving threat that kills with persistence and overwhelming numbers rather than individual threat. With that, the zombie genre was forever changed. Google around for a few minutes and you’ll find that we now live in the “fast zombie era.”

Yes, nowadays most zombie movies - and shows, which is interesting to say, given how weird the concept of a zombie show would have been in 2002 - feature fast zombies. I guess most people find the fear more visceral and immediate with a monster that can run you down in an instant. I’m also willing to bet that screenwriters find it easier to make fast zombies feel threatening, as slow zombie stories tend to rely on accumulation and slow-burn dread, a steady accumulation of close calls, which is harder to do than scaring people with jump scares. I personally find the dominance of fast zombies a bit of a shame, as there’s lots of genre movie baddies that shock with speed and few that frighten with patience. In terms of basic threat a 28 Days Later zombie isn’t much different from a velociraptor or the xenomorphs in Aliens. Of course, fast zombies would be fine as an exception, as a break or alternative from the traditional kind. But fast zombies very quickly overtook slow as the default type in our popular culture.

You’ll find that there is at least something of a constituency for what I’m saying, out there online; critics of fast zombies and slow zombie nostalgics like me exist and have put together something of a corpus on the topic. But while I’m not thrilled with the dominance of fast zombies, for me, that change is less important than another break from tradition in 28 Days Later, one I find much more pernicious: the rise of zombie-ism as virus and the death of zombie-ism as the product of black magic.

Indeed, 28 Days Later proved even more influential in its depiction of zombie-ism as the result of a virus rather than by supernatural means; these days, it’s difficult to find any depiction of zombies, in books or movies or video games, that do not take as a given that zombies are the product of a virus. (Never bacteria, for some reason.) There are variations, such as the fungus-based zombies in the Last of Us games and show, but these also proceed base on the same fundamental logic - that zombie-ism is, in fact, an infection, a pseudo-medical condition that spreads through contact. Indeed, there are now many zombie stories that refer to their monsters simply as “the infected.” Zombies aren’t an invasion, they’re an “outbreak,” and you save the day by developing a cure or a vaccine. In 28 Days Later the story starts with some animal rights activists trying to rescue chimpanzees from a medical research lab, where they have been infected with an experimental “rage virus.” In many modern zombie stories the focus lies in finding the cure, often by identifying and gaining the help of someone who has some form of natural immunity to the virus. Supernatural zombies, zombies as living corpses, the reanimated, brought back by evil magic - you almost never see it anymore. And I hate that!

Of course there have always been exceptions, and neither Night of the Living Dead nor 28 Days Later were the first to pioneer their versions of zombies; you can find fast zombies in older movies, and the Resident Evil video game franchise had gone heavy on zombie-ism as virus in its first entry, which was released six years prior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s film. Night of the Living Dead, for its part, has something of a hybrid origin in that its zombies are indeed corpses brought back to life, but there’s a quasi-scientific explanation in the unconfirmed suggestion that the cause is radiation from a space probe returning from Venus. It’s of course not universally the case that zombies have been fast and virus-laden for the past 22 years - the AMC TV show and onetime ratings juggernaut The Walking Dead was perhaps the most popular of all modern zombie media and from my vantage as a non-fan it appears that the zombies could be either fast or slow as the plot needed, although the crisis is definitely caused by a virus. (Get to the CDC!) There are exceptions to everything, I will grant.

Still, there’s no question that 28 Days Later sparked a revolution in the depiction of zombies, their speed and threat style, and there have been few exceptions since. And I really do miss old school zombies, magic zombies, zombie-ism as inherently supernatural rather than some strained version of “scientific.” Zombies are the dead, brought back to life! Human beings who are mindless and cannibalistic thanks to a virus aren’t dead and thus can’t be zombies. I mean, the name of the show is The Walking Dead, but since they are in fact just humans who have been infected with a virus, they aren’t dead at all! It drives me nuts. There are just fundamentally different thematic valences to supernatural stories, and they fit in better with generalist horror and (especially) with Halloween season than virus zombies. Indeed, I most often see supernatural zombies in more kid-oriented movies like Hocus Pocus or the extremely underrated ParaNorman.

This all has real plot consequences. For example, in the 28 movies and most that followed it, humans are in constant fear of being infected by the virus that causes zombie-ism, which can somehow come through incidental exposure. (Poor Brendan Gleeson.) But in a traditional zombie movie, you don’t “catch” zombie-ism. What happens is that the zombies kill you and the same supernatural process that brought the zombies back in the first place brings you back too and then you’re a zombie. Supernatural zombies are more likely to be exclusively brain-eaters, which helps (a little) with a basic plot inconsistency in the genre - zombies want to eat humans but have no interest in eating each other, which leads one to ask why a virus-zombie would be uninterested in zombie flesh and, more importantly, how you get new zombies if zombies eat humans. It all tends to be a little muddled, which is perhaps why in 28 Days Later the zombies tend to just sort of bang up against humans and spray bodily fluids on them.

Video game zombies are almost exclusively virus-style these days - Resident Evil, The Last of Us, Dying Light, Days Gone, Dead Space, Left4Dead, Dead Rising…. Virus-caused zombies, all, and all with at least some background noise about cures and vaccines etc. Interestingly enough, a couple of the only exceptions I can think of are my picks for the two best zombie games of all time, the incredibly addicting tower defense classic Plants vs. Zombies and the SNES-era LucasArts masterpiece Zombies Ate My Neighbors.¹

Funnily enough, one of my favorite zombie stories ever is the <10 minute Simpsons story “Dial Z for Zombie” from the 1992 edition of their annual Treehouse of Horror series. In it, Bart accidentally raises the dead with a spell from a book found in the occult section of his school library. The zombies kill people, the killed people come back as zombies, and they want to eat brains. Homer dispatches with them the right way, too, the old school way - with bullets to the brain. Homer can kill Zombie Shakespeare (and Zombie Washington and Zombie Einstein) because they were dead and came back as zombies through the power of black magic. The challenge is to get back to the spell book and cast the counter-spell, an occult solution to an occult problem. I can’t fully articulate why zombies as corpses brought back to life by black magic feel so different from virus zombies, to me, but I can tell you for sure that they do feel very different. It’s a whole other vibe. And the death of the supernatural zombie is made all the more aggravating thanks to the implied superiority of virus zombie stories - they are, supposedly, more “realistic.” To which I say, lol. lol lol lol. lmao, even.

Sadly, it’s hard to swim against the tide. In 2009, in the twentieth edition of Treehouse of Horror, the Simpsons again gave the world a zombie story - only this time, the zombie invasion was caused by a virus. I am a tragic, tragic man.

1. A masterpiece but a flawed one, due to one thoughtless design decision. There are no save points in the game, in common with its era, but there is a password system that allows you to skip ahead to various levels if you want to start later in the game. Unfortunately, this mechanic is rendered nearly useless, as a core part of the fun lies in steadily accumulating a variety of different weapons that have different effects on different enemies along with different attributes in terms of fire rate, damage, etc. Unfortunately, when you jump ahead via password, you have no weapons saved up, only the same squirt gun and soda cans you start with at the beginning of the game. Some levels are close to impossible to beat without the appropriate weapons, and the game has the traditional high degree of difficulty level that as the norm in the cartridge-based era of video games. Which makes it hard to enjoy if you aren’t “hardcore,” as I am not, although emulation with save states can help.