Andrés Emil González
When Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma near the beginning of Danny Boyle’s classic zombie film, 28 Days Later (2002), he does so wholly alone. This is not so surprising in a film and, indeed, a whole subgenre of horror fixated on the idea of societal breakdown and the survival of the individual in its aftermath, but it is a choice worth reexamining in light of Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland’s return to the franchise with 2025’s 28 Years Later. For starters, the social world that was toppled by a handful of animal rights activists at the start of the first film is firmly back at the outset of this third and most recent entry, albeit in a particularly monstrous form. This time, when 28 Years protagonist Spike sets off on his perilous journey, his social world is not nearly as empty as the streets of London that Jim walked upon his return to life. As the film does, we might ask: what happened in between? If the story of the 28 Days Later series turns on this question with respect to quarantined Britain and Ireland, it also poses a broader question about zombie narratives in the twenty-first century, and particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. What does actually happen to society when it faces a global viral threat?
In his awakening, Jim is all but literally reborn into a world devoid not just of millions of its previous inhabitants, but also of a particular kind of sociality, which the film makes a point to represent in its very first scenes. Against the protests of a terrified scientist, a group of animal liberation activists free a chimpanzee infected with an unknown virus, beginning the spread of the zombie plague. If the choices of the activists doom England, they nevertheless stem from a radical gesture of sociality. Will we risk harm and punishment for those completely unlike us? The spread of the zombie virus across the British Isles appears as a brutally cynical retort: look what happens when you do. Consequently, when Jim does reenter a world of human connection, his guiding light is not a return to the social, but to the private sphere of the family. The first group Jim joins, which conspicuously does not resemble the nuclear family, falls apart almost immediately, culminating with groupmate Selena’s killing of a man named Mark as soon as she suspects him of being infected. When Jim asks Selena how long she had known Mark, she responds, “five or six days.” In this new world, the individual is the only rational scale on which to think and plan.
Salvation for Jim comes in the form of the family, as he and Selena first take on the roles of elder siblings of and eventually, adoptive parents to young Hannah after her father is killed, returning Jim to the three-member nuclear family whose loss he had mourned so bitterly upon waking and learning of his parents’ joint suicide. The end of the film finds Jim, Selena and Hannah living a seemingly happy life in a stone cottage, signaling passing fighter planes and awaiting rescue. Here, Jim’s journey from the heart of London back to the countryside, back to the true private life is brought to a (not entirely convincing) close.
Final scene of 28 Days Later
Already discernible in Boyle’s film, zombie media in the new millennium also returns to one of the genre’s great infatuations: logistics. As early as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), fuel, food supplies, and —of course— guns, are the great source of narrative movement and gripping suspense. We all seem to want to know, would we survive? Do we have what it takes? Perhaps we need, as Max Brooks suggests, a Zombie Survival Guide (2003), or, as shows like The Walking Dead suggest, some of us are only too ready to adapt to this new, hyper-isolating world.
The Reapers, from The Walking Dead
Brooks’ work in particular, from the Zombie Survival Guide to his best-seller, World War Z (2006), sits at the intersection between sci-fi horror and a relatively friendly kind of survivalism. Brooks’ novels are certainly fascinated with families or individuals who face down apocalypse on their own, from a Wisconsin family who barely make it through a brutal Canadian winter, to a Japanese “otaku” forced to unplug from his shut-in lifestyle and survive in an overrun Tokyo. But Brooks also takes the birds-eye view, imagining the kinds of political formations that would arise in response to global calamity. In the United States, Brooks presents a triumphant return of New Deal liberalism, bolstered once again by a wartime industrial economy, while his prognostications for Russia involve the rise of a theocratic regime bent on restoring the geographic boundaries of the Soviet Union.
At all levels, what we see is, more than a dreadful vision of the future, a fervently desired fantasy of renewal. This is, of course, nothing new in the realm of apocalypse narratives; religious predictions of coming end-times draw fervent believers throughout history despite the world’s irritating persistence. But the classic zombie apocalypse fantasy is not one of rapture, but remaining. The social world is pared down to its barest elements, a fact most reflected in the skills that mark one as powerful or valuable. Perhaps we would wield a crossbow to hunt animals and zombies like Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead, or find the best place to camp out like the protagonists of Dawn of the Dead. Even at the scale of society, works like World War Z imagine a societal reorientation in which masses of white-collar workers are reclassified as “possessing no valued vocation,” and hi-tech weapons of war are scrapped in favor of “lobos” or lobotimizers, a modified trench shovel. In short, the zombie apocalypse asks us whether we can still call up the old pioneer spirit of self-reliance, ingenuity, and competition when decadent modernity is stripped away.
Like so many other things, this fantasy is interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. No one living had experienced an event on such a global scale. As others have noted, the overlay of sentiments, policy and material reality make a chronology of the period frustratingly difficult, but I am interested in the very earliest days, when the nature of the pandemic was barely understood. When we think about the effects of COVID, many people (at least those connected to reality) will lament that it “broke people’s brains,” eroded trust in science and government, and bolstered the creeping advance of fascism in politics and culture, as all of a sudden, social media users were bombarded with content about “trad wives,” the “manosphere,” and the return of eugenics, to say nothing of anti-vaccine conspiracies. But when we look back to the first days of official emergency, we can glimpse what I would think of as a kind of illuminating fear. We can see it in the nightly cheers for front-line workers, but also in the massive mobilization of the American federal government, even under Donald Trump, from school and business closures in even the reddest states, to the unprecedented stimulus checks and one of the miracles of modern science and global logistics: the development of an effective vaccine within a year of the virus’ origins.
The global catastrophe arrived, and what traits were we asked to exercise? Not self-reliance, not physical strength, but collective action, self-abnegation, and care for others that we could not see and did not know. The “front line” consisted of nurses, cashiers, janitors, and teachers. And at the individual level, people did socially distance, they did wear masks. Why? Fundamentally, because they were told that it would save other people’s lives. Strange as it may seem, when faced with existential danger, the most powerful, the cruelest, the most self-centered people and institutions trembled, and instinctively joined in the fight for the preservation of society as such, even if only for a few weeks. I would submit that the intensity of the backlash is partly self-directed, as rugged individualists kick themselves for having wavered in their convictions. But such is the power of horror.
Jaime leads Spike out to hunt zombies
The society we see in 28 Years Later would seem to share some of the backlash’s neuroses. Despite its resemblance to small towns of yore, Spike’s birthplace contains a high-strung, anti-social collection of people, still smarting from the indignity of having been so deeply vulnerable. Not least in this cohort is Spike’s father, Jaime, who recoils from the unknown illness that Spike’s mother suffers, and relishes Spike’s initiation into a ritualized version of the individualist culture of zombie survivalism. This mentality also produces a fear of knowledge that keeps the villagers away from Ralph Fiennes’ seemingly mad doctor, and from seeing the birth of a social life in the zombie world that evolves in parallel to their own. Just as 28 Days Later began with an almost abominable act of sociality between humans and infected apes, 28 Years Later imagines the unimaginable for the zombie apocalypse fantasy: a caring touch between a human woman (Spike’s mother) and a zombie woman who has, somehow, become pregnant and is in the throes of labor. After decades of attempts to make zombies more unsettling by making them faster, making them talk, or turning zombism into a viral plague, Boyle and Garland succeed by attributing to zombies that most uncomfortable and irritating of human traits: sociality.
Check out the trailer for 28 Years Later, which is now streaming:
Andrés Emil González is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown University. His current research focuses on experiments with narrative form in contemporary horror of the Americas. His scholarly work can be found in Studies in the Fantastic and forthcoming in Genre. He has previously written for Horror Homeroom on ‘Give Us a Sign: On the Possibility of Non-Diegetic Ghosts‘ and writes about horror on “The ghost seer” Substack.
