What The 28 Days Later Series Tells Us About Britain

While Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 2002 film 28 Days Later isn’t strictly a zombie film – zombies are re-animated dead people while the threat of Boyle’s film are people infected with a virus called Rage – the film, and it’s follow ups do owe a great debt to the zombie subgenre. The series follows in the footsteps of George A. Romero who first conceptualised the idea that being a zombie can be transferred through bites instead of the voodoo tradition that came before. Like his films, 28 Days Later isn’t just a horror film – though it’s plenty scary and gory, it uses the horror genre to talk about contemporary issues.

The 28 Days films are snapshots of their time, talking about the contemporary issues of Britain in that time. Both Boyle and Garland, who first met when Boyle adapted Garland’s 1996 novel The Beach into a 2000 film of the same name, look at Britain through the lens of an infection, dissecting where the nation is.

The opening scenes of 28 Days Later introduce us to the Rage virus. A man-made infection that has been put into chimpanzees. When activists break into the research facility to free the apes, the animals attack viciously and set in motion the infection. The virus turns the infected into uncontrollably angry people who attack anyone they see, its transmission is in the blood and is near instant.

It’s no coincidence that the virus is called Rage, with the most obvious symptom being the infected having blood red eyes. This is a disease of aggression, “seeing red” in the most overt ways. In the early 2000s, the UK was seeing the effects of violence and anger first hand. The previous decade had seen increasing levels of violence. Following UEFA lifting its ban on English clubs in European competitions there were football riots in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998 and 1999. The 1990s were the decade that saw the massacre of a classroom in Dunblane, the 1995 Brixton Riots, the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence. All these events caused a sense that aggression was on the rise and when Tony Blair and the Labour Party came into power in 1998 Blair introduced the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (or ASBO).

Rage, as a virus that passes through physical violence is emblematic of an era where the media was constantly showing nothing but violence, aggression and hatred. The more it was shown, the more it occurred, just as the infected build in numbers by attacking and proliferating. Shedding blood builds the numbers until it overwhelms the “civilised” society around it. 

Boyle also ties the early scenes of Jim (Cillian Murphy) to the very real world events of 9/11. When Jim wakes up in a hospital completely alone, and begins to explore a desolated and devastated London, his confusion turns to terror. Eventually Jim makes his way to Piccadilly Circus where he sees a notice of hundreds of missing people. These scenes directly parallel the events of September 11. After the World Trade Center came down people would put up flyers of their missing loved ones. As days went on more and more people were added to the walls of missing people. Jim, surrounded by the devastation of a major city and the sight of people’s attempts to find their loved ones, echoes the fear that many in Britain felt after the terror attacks. If a city like New York could be attacked it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that London could be next – in fact several buildings in London were evacuated including Canary Wharf following the breaking of the news on that day.

As the story progresses Jim finds safety with Selena (Naomie Harris), Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns), but decide to leave London to travel North when they hear a radio transmission promising the cure for infection. The idea that the city is where danger lies and that leaving it will promise a better life, was one that a lot of people felt during the early 2000s. The media pushed the idea that rural life was safer, and more peaceful, that leaving the cities was the only way to keep yourself out of danger. 

Most interesting is the introduction of Major West (Christopher Eccleston), the man who promises a cure. In a way West feels very much like a comment on Blair himself. While Labour played songs like Things Can Only Get Better and promised a brighter future under “new Labour”, what we began to find out is that Blair was, like all politicians, interested in the continuation of his own ends. West, similarly, looks to keep his happiness at the expense of people like Jim, Selena and Hannah. West promises his soldiers women, forcing Selena and Hannah into sexual slavery to keep his men on his side and if he has to kill Jim to do it he will. In the same way the politicians betray the public to keep their own cabinet in order. Blair was accused many times of relying on spin – under direction from Alastair Campbell. 

This idea that this is how things have always been in the world of politics is paralleled in West’s speech over dinner, when he comments that what he saw since infection was people killing people which is what he had seen in the months before infection and the months before that. He was used to the sight of death and murder, numbing him to its effects when infection broke. By this merit the continual spin of politics, for which Blair became notorious, numbed him to their effects and how he was publicly viewed.

Through the events of the film, Jim is forced into a position where he must – without being infected – adopt the nature of Rage. To save Selena and Hannah from attacks from the army, he has to become what his enemies have become. In the same way that many people felt to protect their families and loved ones after 9/11 they must fight against the “enemy”. For context the number of people who joined the British Army alone in 2001 was 14,930 while in 2002 following 9/11 the number jumped 16,690 over 1000 more than their projected target. It remained the highest recruitment year of the decade. Jim embodies rage to save those he loves, and to overcome the threat even if that threat at one point looked like salvation.

This carries into the 2007 follow up 28 Weeks Later. Even five years on Britain, was a different place than it was when the first film came out. The media was surrounded by both domestic acts of terror and violence but also the ongoing war in Iraq. The film pointedly opens with scenes of people in a house attacked when they allow a person to take refuge in their home. This is not just a coincidence but calls to mind the ongoing fear of immigration and that terrorism was being imported. The film arrived just two years after the July 7th bombings in London which claimed many lives.

Acts of terror, spurred by hatred, became more common and 28 Weeks Later very much comments on this. Violence in the UK was expanding with muggings, and happy slapping becoming common in the country and there being a feeling that aggression was on the rise once more. This was the era of trash TV like Jeremy Kyle, trading on forcing aggression in people and watching the rage that comes from it. In the context of the film, people are told that things in the UK are better now and that they can return to their normal lives only for the virus to break out again and spread through London.

There was also the feeling that the Special Relationship between Blair and President Bush had meant that Britain was simply doing the bidding of the US with regards to the War on Terror. In the film, the US army is tasked with keeping London safe and re-integrating people into a safe zone but immediately become overwhelmed and unable to cope. The echoing of a sentiment that the US had promised a quick and easy solution to an existential threat like “terror” or “weapons of Mass Destruction” only to discover a long, and violent ordeal feels all the more pointed.

Within this context the generation that came of age in the world of terror reflects Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton). Young people who very quickly have to grow up and adapt to an ever changing world. Not only were the youth in Britain having to adapt to this concept that terrorism was a very present threat but that acts of violence could happen at any time. News reports frequently commented on stabbings in the media, or people abducted and killed. The news filled with acts of Rage and violence, and the film reflects this through Tammy and Andy. They attempt to navigate this world without their parent’s guidance – their mother is deceased and their father Don (Robert Carlyle) becomes the new patient zero for the outbreak. Without clear parental figures, they look to an authority (the army) which simply cannot provide them with safety. 

Most pointedly is that when London becomes overwhelmed by this aggression the army decides to fire bomb the city regardless of casualties. Not only does this draw a parallel with the shock-and-awe tactics of the war on terror but also speaks to a belief at the time that there was something in the UK that needed fixing. The Conservative Party made their pledge of fixing a “broken Britain” that had collapsed and decayed because of a lack of law and order. The idea was that the Conservatives would bring back Britain to its former glory no matter the cost, in the same way that Britain will be maintained from the Rage virus no matter the cost.

What remains to be seen is what 28 Years Later will comment on. What we can see from the trailer is that the use of Rudyard Kipling’s Boots poem, a poem about infantrymen during the Second Boer War calls to mind the often used phrase “Blitz Spirit” with regards to COVID-19. Making a film about Britain after a devastating virus feels ripe for exploration after 2020 saw corruption and mishandling, changing the way the UK looked. Using an old British war poem to rouse people seems appropriate given figures like Captain Tom, and the use of Vera Lynn to ostensibly keep spirits high during a time of great strife but in reality call to mind a past that never truly existed.

The trailer’s use of “roles in our society” that go back to agriculture and classic work also looks on the surface to be a way of discussing how the lockdowns turned most people into amateur bakers, faux farmers and more down-to-earth pursuits when the world wouldn’t allow them to leave. 

Moreover, a virus that channels the very rage inside us all feels prescient in the age where aggression is on the streets – be it for justice like in the form of the BLM marches, or for hatred in the form of the reform and reclaim marches. As fascism and those that wish to stand against it are ever more divided and at loggerheads, a film about people who exist solely in anger feels like it couldn’t come at a more opportune time.