by MATTHEW HAYS

The very idea that a new zombie movie might actually be scary is something that’s pretty unbelievable. After George A. Romero made his hilarious sequel to his ’68 classic Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, in ’79 (in which the zombies were turned into thoughtless consumers wandering through a giant mall) the zombie has basically been turned into a giant parody, eliciting more laughter than chills.

But with 28 Days Later, filmmaker Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have managed to change all that. Not knowing what to expect when I sat down to screen the film last week, I was bowled over by what I reckon to be the best horror film in over a decade. Disturbing, highly intelligent, referential to a legion of horror movies (but by no means dependent on those references), 28 Days Later is a horrifyingly bleak portrait of a Britain overrun by rabid zombies; the uninfected, it seems, have fled. And our hero, having awoken from a coma, is completely unaware if the rest of the world has also been infected. (Plot twists abound, so don’t let anyone ruin them for you - horror fans must rush to the cinema immediately and see this movie!)

On the phone from his Manchester flat, the director behind such hits as Trainspotting and Shallow Grave confirms he was uneasy about entering into zombie turf. "You’re right, it’s very hard to drag things back into the realm of the scary once they’ve become parody," he says. "I mean, they’re on South Park, for God’s sake. We knew we couldn’t have them wandering around slowly. We set about to reinvent them, to re-think them entirely."

Ebola! Rabies! SARS!

The zombies are now an infected, psychotic mess. Their eyes are red and bloodied, they projectile puke blood, they look incredibly scared and they’re craving the meat on the uninfected. "Zombies in movies are basically coming out of the age they’re addressing. They came out of the nuclear age in the ’50s and ’60s. It was like, ‘What have we unleashed?’ We were more inclined to think of modern intolerance. Everyone is on speed now. We have air rage, road rage, supermarket rage - basically, rage against anyone who interferes with our demand to be delivered to right now." And while commenting on social behaviour, the zombies are clearly modelled on the symptoms of various media-hyped viruses. They demonstrate some of the symptoms of Ebola, and Boyle says additional are based on the effects of advanced rabies in humans. "There’s a stage of rabies where people develop hydrophobia, a bizarre and irrational fear of water. We wanted the zombies to be bloodthirsty, but completely full of fear themselves." The zombies have also been sped up, looking like quivering psychos in the midst of epileptic seizures. (Shot in 2001, the filmmakers couldn’t have forseen SARS nor Monkey Pox, but those collective popular fears only add to the creepiness running through this film.)

Shooting on digital video, Boyle also makes the smart Hitchcockian move of showing us less zombie rather than more. In doing so, he contradicts the recent Jason-Freddy- Mike-Myers horror trend of showing every bit of gore imaginable. "Everyone is a filmmaker now," explains Boyle. "They’re coming up with things in their own minds. I think it’s so much scarier when you show them glimpses and let them imagine the rest." When the zombies first show up in a sequence, their presence is announced through Jaws-like point-of-view camera work, as they lunge towards their victims.

Referencing Romero

Boyle also confirms the legacy of horror that informs every frame of 28 Days Later. "Alex [Garland] is a huge George A. Romero fan, so certainly those films are referenced." And the sequences of The Omega Man, in which Charlton Heston drives around an eerily empty Los Angeles, dodging zombies by night? "It’s weird the way that movie works: when I watch it, I’m always like, ‘How did they empty L.A. for this?’ We basically did the same thing with London." Boyle also cites John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi novel and its subsequent ’63 film adaptation The Day of the Triffids - but most of all, and not too surprisingly, Boyle holds up Ridley Scott’s Alien as his main source of inspiration. "That was just brilliant. You’ve got a scary monster, but that movie is actually about a group of people who are trapped and forced to cope together. I think they really blew it with the sequels, which were fun but which showed the creatures completely and left little to the imagination."

As well, Boyle has cast relative unknowns (the equally excellent Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris) in the two lead roles of the film, leaving us with the uneasy sense that anyone could get knocked off at any time. "You really don’t know who’s going to survive this. You could never create that same tension with a star in the lead." Boyle adds a series of brilliant touches to the film, including a theme Romero drove home, that perhaps the uninfected aren’t actually morally superior to the rabid zombies themselves. Boyle confirms that the horror genre is fertile ground for interpretation, and that people are already reading 28 Days Later as a metaphor for the Iraq War specifically and the war on terrorism generally. "Yes, there have been a number of people who’ve written about that, quite convincingly." And the ending of 28 Days Later ultimately becomes something of a formal question, suggesting fantasy rather than straightforward, simplistic closure. "The toughest thing about an apocalypse film is figuring out how to end it. We spent a lot of time thinking about it. We shot a number of different endings and tried really hard to figure out which one worked the best. Anyway, they’ll all be there on the DVD for people to decide for themselves."

28 Days Later opens Friday, June 27

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