Making a zombie movie realistic is the goal of 28 Weeks Later... and its predecessor 28 Days Later...  To accomplish this, the films diverge from the zombie standard of humans returning from the dead.  Instead these films create zombie-like humans after their infection with the genetically engineered Rage virus.  The infected humans are easier to kill than their cinematic Zombie predecessors but they are just as dangerous and just as effective in creating the fear and isolation common to the genre.

Both films pay homage to the zombie films of George A. Romero whose Night of the Living Dead (1968) catalysed the immense popularity of the genre.  In the original Night of the Living Dead, it was suggested that the dead were reanimated by radiation from outer space brought back by astronauts.  However, in Romero’s subsequent sequels Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005), no reason is given as to why dead humans are turning into zombies.  Numerous directors, inspired by Romero’s films, created their zombies via chemical exposure (such as in The Return of the Living Dead (1985)).  However, whether the cause is due to radiation or chemicals, the zombies in all these films are contagious; a bite from a zombie will turn a human into one.  Thus the zombie genre owes a debt to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in that they all tend to suggest that science will inevitably create monsters that will threaten human civilisation.

In Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later... the American Army occupies quarantined England after the Rage virus is believed to have died out as the last of the infected starved to death.  The army is beginning to resettle civilians in a safe zone while burning the rotting corpses of the infected.  The film centres on the effect this plague has had on a family.  The father Don (Robert Carlyle) had been waiting out the virus in a country cottage with his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) and they are both thankful they sent their children overseas on a school trip prior to the outbreak.  Inevitably, their hideout is attacked by the infected. Don escapes after he sees his wife attacked and assumes she is either killed or infected, and therefore beyond rescue.

When the army resettles England, Don is reunited with his children Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton).  The two children escape the safe zone and return to their family home to retrieve a photo of their mother, instead finding Alice alive and seemingly uninfected, although clearly traumatised.  The army returns them to the safe zone and an examination of Alice by scientist Scarlet (Rose Byrne) determines that she is, indeed, infected, although without any of the symptoms.  In fact, Alice and her children, with their genetic immunity, may hold the key to a cure or at least a way to immunise the surviving population.

Unaware that his wife is infected Don kisses her and, of course, contracts the virus, in turn spreading it  into the safe zone.  Much like the previous instalment 28 Days Later..., this sequel is deeply critical of army protocol; in this new film especially, it critiques the behaviour of an occupying force.  It is therefore not hard to make parallels between this film’s depictions of the trigger-happy US Army to the current occupying forces in Iraq.  In both films, the army becomes as much of a threat to the protagonists as are the infected.

28 Days Later... included scenes reminiscent of Romero’s xombie films (such as the famous supermarket scenes in Dawn of the Dead and the threat of rape from soldiers in Day of the Dead). 28 Weeks Later... also uses key motifs from Romero (such as the isolated farm house of Night of the Living Dead and the safe zone in Land of the Dead), but does not do so in a derivative fashion.  28 Weeks Later... brings a freshness to the genre by making the fear of the ‘other’ more plausible in the context of the ultimate breakdown of civilisation when humans prey upon one another for food.

Cannibalism is one of the greatest themes in horror, famous not only in zombie films, but also in the psychopath genre, perhaps most chillingly displayed in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which linked the horror motif of the isolated farm house to the legacy of the American Civil War. This conflict allegedly led many people to resort to cannibalism to survive.   Common zombie horror motifs such as a hand erupting from a grave, and again the isolated farm house under siege, were used in the recent Civil War film Cold Mountain, and their prevalence in American horror suggests that the terror of civil war remains firmly in the psyche.

As English films 28 Days Later... and 28 Weeks Later... borrow from these American themes of the fear of civil unrest and citizens turning on one another, but they also raise anxieties about biological warfare during this so-called ‘war on terror’.  While the military is dispatched elsewhere, the propaganda of the War on Terror ensures that fear of attacks at home are foremost in people’s minds.  The Rage virus makes literal the ‘fear of terror’.  The virus not only kills those it infects, but makes them a danger to anyone who is not infected.  It changes people’s personalities and behaviours to the extent that euthanasia of the infected is considered long before palliative care or a search for a cure.

Transmitted by bodily fluids, such as blood and saliva, the Rage virus is similar (although far more contagious) to the HIV virus.  While more deadly than HIV, attitudes to the Rage virus, such as the revulsion and ostracism of sufferers, does reflect the continuing stigmatisation of HIV-positive people.  In the context of the HIV virus, and the current paranoia over the swiftness with which a virus such as the bird flu may spread in a world where airplanes make each city only one day away from another, 28 Weeks Later... plays into many modern anxieties about the precarious nature of our health and our civilisation.

Many of Romero’s zombie films were interpreted as being critical of capitalism (Dawn of the Dead in particular) and Romero intended his recent Land of the Dead to be highly critical of the Bush administration.  Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later... detracts from the Romero tradition in many ways, not only in the attempt at realism but also in the way it destabilises the ‘us and them’ dynamic of the genre.  While, on occasion, a human who has turned into a zombie may continue to feature as a character their appearances are usually brief in most zombie films. Despite his infection in 28 Weeks Later..., Don remains a key character until the very end of the film, his actions propelling the plot from start to finish.  Becoming a zombie usually entails a loss of humanity and individuality; here, Don remains connected to his human life in a far greater way than the mimicking behaviours of the zombies in Romero’s Land of the Dead.  Fresnadillo has succeeded in creating a truly frightening film that develops a genre that seems to offer inexhaustible possibilities.


28 Weeks Later...
2007

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Screenwriters: Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Jesús Olmo, Enrique López Lavigne
Cinematographer: Enrique Chediak
Editor: Chris Gill
Original Music: John Murphy
Cast: Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle, Catherine McCormack, Imogen Poots, Mackintosh Muggleton