![]() ![]() It arrived off the back of The Beach, Boyle’s first major Hollywood film that, despite its $50 million backing, flopped at the box office. With a modest budget of $8 million, not many could have predicted the hit that 28 Days Later would become. It’s what you eat, how you drive, where you sleep.” You put yourself in a position to try and stay alive. “When I was younger, there was a show on BBC called Survivor, and it was about how you survive in Britain after a virus has killed everybody. “When I read the first version, it just felt scary,” he says. There were none of the car stunts or elaborate explosions (bar one petrol station) that decorated Hollywood thrillers, leading Macdonald to brand it a “Ken Loach zombie film”. An apocalypse set in London immediately felt closer to home. Boyle even hired retired athletes as actors to emphasise their frightening agility.īut what really sold the script for Macdonald was its unnerving realism. Unlike the lumbering creatures that trudged through Romero’s horror classics, these zombies could run and catch up with you. These zombies would be alive, not dead, their monstrousness derived from the “Rage” virus (symptoms like haemorrhaging, red eyes and coughing up blood were lifted from Ebola, which had just had one of its deadliest outbreaks in Uganda). Garland took inspiration from the last golden age of zombie films in the 1980s, especially George Romero’s Dead trilogy, but with some crucial differences. If they ran fast – God, that’s terrifying.” “I remember watching Dawn of the Dead with Alex in my flat, and he was a big gamer, so he was playing Resident Evil, but they were slow. It’s going to be London, it’s going to be daylight, and it’s going to be really scary because they run fast,’” recalls Macdonald. “He said, ‘I’ve got an idea for a zombie film. It was in a Pizza Express on London’s Charlotte Street that Garland shared his budding storyline with the producer. Macdonald encouraged Garland’s aspiration to swap novels for screenwriting, and over a series of meetings the pair hashed out what his first film might look like. And whichever camp you fall in, it certainly started out as a zombie flick.Īlex Garland got his introduction to film when Boyle adapted his book, The Beach, which is also how he met producer Andrew Macdonald. Yet, undeniably, even by not trying to make a zombie film, 28 Days Later inadvertently changed how we imagine zombies, gaining a cult status in the horror canon that remains strong on its 20th anniversary this month. Danny was just trying to make the best film he could and, for me, it was more of an apocalyptic road movie.” Nuclear weapons are still here, but that paranoia is not the same.”Īccording to composer John Murphy, Boyle initially described the project to him as “a zombie home movie”, but “after that first call I don’t think we ever called it a zombie film again. It’s not that people will die, it’s the fear and uncertainty of what radiation will do to the survivors. “Looking at those 1970s films, they came out of nuclear paranoia. “You cannot make a zombie movie today,” he told Time Out London. Part of the reason why 28 Days Later so effectively reimagined the genre lies in the debate that still confounds critics: does it even count as a zombie film? Director Danny Boyle has spent the best part of two decades arguing the negative. Zombies entered the popular consciousness so much that it became a given, for adolescent millennials at least, that if you asked your friend about their “zombie plan”, they would have a detailed escape route mapped out in the event of a zombie apocalypse. ![]() ![]() Books capitalised on the trend, most famously Max Brooks’s The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) and World War Z (2006). Then came Steve Miner’s Day of the Dead (2008), the campy parody Zombieland (2009), and the television series The Walking Dead (2010). Zack Snyder launched his remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004. The release of 28 Days Later in 2002 sparked a decade defined by its obsession with the undead. The man, evidently, has slept through something big, but what? Is London now a nuclear exclusion zone? Was the city evacuated? Or worse? So is the next corridor, the hospital entrance and, chillingly, the streets outside. He’s lying naked on a hospital bed, hooked up to a web of tubes that presumably have kept him alive while he sleeps, though there’s no one around to explain what’s happened to him. Sunlight falls on a sleeping man’s face, and his eyelids flutter open. ![]()
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4/25/2023 08:29:30 am
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