The world wasn’t technically ending in 2003 — it just felt like it was. For the two years prior, the vision of our world as I and many other young people knew it shifted substantially. The events on September 11 brought to light much of the hatred and anger lingering beneath the seemingly cordial veneer of some of our communities. The people we looked to for guidance when it came to understanding these kinds of situations weren’t handling any of the “fallout” well themselves, often repeating the same vitriolic rhetoric you’d see being spewed by strangers on the news. Or worse, they were actually taking part in the racist violence that amped up in the aftermath. Adults appeared to be on heightened alert, they were suspicious of the people they once thought of as neighbors or acquaintances, and the U.S. government was busy justifying their freshly legal right to use surveillance technology to peer into the lives of everyone and anyone they wanted.
By the time the American War in Iraq was announced in March 2003, my friends and I were sick of it all, so we gravitated toward people taking action against the war and latched onto what we could: music, literature, art, and film.
In the fall of 2002, we had decided as a group that we were going to “get really into” film. Not as budding filmmakers but as conscious and educated consumers and critics. We wanted to have opinions about films, understand the history of filmmaking, and watch all the classics from long before any of us were even born. We researched, we made lists, we discovered all the ways we could get our hands on DVDs and VHS tapes besides the local Blockbuster, and we spent many Friday nights holed up in the den of my friend’s family home watching our discoveries and trying to have grown up conversations about them.
Movies would lead to more movies. The first time I saw Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later was as a result of one of us stumbling upon Trainspotting. We weren’t blown away by Trainspotting, but we liked it enough to watch The Beach, and liking that enough led us straight to Boyle’s newest release at the time.
28 Days Later is often credited with ushering in the “zombie renaissance” of the early 2000s, though I’ve never been sure if it was right to categorize the hordes of virus-infected, rage-filled people in the film as “zombies.” When we first watched 28 Days Later, we were already well-versed in the history of horror and had watched all of the George Romero and Evil Dead movies we could. I understood what a zombie was in our culture, and I even had an understanding of the racialized origins of the zombie itself, but there was something categorically different about the way they were presented in Boyle’s film.
In 28 Days Later, many people die, but not at the hands of the “undead.” In 28 Days Later, there is a virus that makes people “turn” but they don’t die. They never die. Their anger — every ounce of it contained in their bodies — becomes inescapable and uncontrollable. This “rage virus” turns every living person around the “infected” into an enemy the “infected” must eliminate by beating them to a bloody pulp.
The film opens with disturbing images of militarized violence, war, riots, and brutal attacks led by soldiers, cops, and other state actors in response to people’s frustrations with the state itself before panning out to show that these images are being watched by a chimpanzee strapped down to a bed. Quickly after the opening scene, the film moves to show us a group of activists breaking into the lab in the hopes of exposing the researchers there and freeing the chimpanzees from the torture of the experiments. When a scientist who works at the lab walks into the scene, he desperately pleads with them to leave the animals alone because they’re “infected” with a virus that lives in both their blood and saliva. The activists ask him what they’re infected with, and when he tells them they’ve been infected with rage so that the scientists can create a rage inhibitor, the activists scoff and release one of the chimps anyway. The chimp then flies out of its cage and attacks one of the activists by biting down on her neck, making her patient zero. She attacks the rest of the people in the room before the screen fades to black showing “28 days later…”
We fade back in on a close-up of a man’s face. He’s lying naked on a bed attached to some life-supporting machines in the ruins of a hospital. No one is there to greet him as he wakes from what appears to be a coma, and the hospital is in complete disarray. Jim (Cillian Murphy) finds some scrubs and shoes and makes his way onto the streets of London. Again, he is greeted by complete silence, no one in sight. Trash is strewn through the streets, red double decker buses are toppled over, and eventually, Jim comes to a wall filled with hundreds of missing persons notices. He’s trying to put the pieces together, but he can’t. He slept through it all.
When Jim is subsequently clocked by some of the “infected” and chased through the streets, he’s saved by Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley), who take him to their hideout. In the makeshift safe zone, Selena and Mark explain what happened while he was in a coma: the virus’s discovery, its rapid spread throughout Great Britain, the government’s fascistic mishandling and mismanagement of the pandemic, their personal losses and sadnesses as a result of this ongoing catastrophe. Less than a month in, Selena and Mark — Selena, especially — are hardened by the battles they’ve had to fight for their lives and the lives of the people they loved. They’re furious at their government, they feel abandoned and alone, and they openly discuss the possibility of the British Isles being bombed to cleanse the government of its responsibility.
As Jim is listening to them, it occurs to him he has no idea whether his parents are alive or not and persuades Selena and Mark to travel on foot with him to their home. Once there, Jim learns his parents have killed themselves out of fear. Then, Mark is killed by Selena after he contracts the virus in an altercation with a group of “the infected.” After collecting themselves and gathering any supplies they can from Jim’s parents’ house, Jim and Selena take to the streets in search of more supplies and a new hideout. At the top of a large apartment, they notice a crude beacon built by other survivors. There, they meet Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his teenage daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns), who are free of the infection but are almost entirely out of supplies. Frank makes Jim and Selena listen to a radio dispatch from Manchester explaining that the British military has built a safe and open quarantine zone there. At first, Jim and Selena are cynical and unconvinced. They don’t believe traveling from London to Manchester is worth the risk, but Frank convinces them because he has something they don’t: a working car.
When the four of them begin traveling together, the film transitions to a somewhat typical road trip movie peppered with moments of intense anxiety and the threat of infection. The crew narrowly escapes danger together when they get a flat tire in an “infected”-infested tunnel; they raid an unmanned grocery store for treats and supplies; they find an idyllic spot in the English countryside to camp out for a night; they laugh with each other, eat together, and get to know one another. Even the survival-hardened edges of Selena’s personality begin to soften, making her feel more amenable and accessible to the rest of the group, while they all get closer and closer. Trust builds fast, as it usually does in these kinds of real and imagined circumstances, and they become bonded in their desperate hope to escape the hell their government has plunged them into. They’re willing to fight for and with each other for that chance, for the possibility of surviving the human-made apocalypse that’s befallen them.
But, at this point, that escape is still far gone. They eventually do make it to the military base at Manchester, and their hopes for something safer and more beautiful are dashed almost instantly. Frank contracts the virus on the base, and as he “turns,” he’s gunned down in front of Jim, Selena, and Hannah by a group of soldiers camouflaged in the surrounding woods. The soldiers round the rest up and take them to a “safe” zone of sorts created by the group of soldiers and their leader, Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston). The men in West’s command are brash, annoying, and perform masculinity with an inflated sense of importance. They have no sense of duty toward other humans except to the men they’ve been trapped with. And Major West, well, he’s not only given up on trying to tame them, he’s promised that if they “behave” and “follow his orders,” he’ll find them women and girls to fuck. That was the whole point of the radio dispatch in the first place. Jim learns of West’s plan to drag Selena and Hannah into sexual slavery in the zone and rebels immediately, leading West to order some of the men to kill him. Finally out of sight, West orders the men to “prepare” Selena and Hannah by forcing them to wear dresses and make up. Selena tries to fight back, but they’re far too outnumbered. Jim escapes from his captors, invigorated by the righteous rage that’s built inside of him. He devises a plan to free Selena and Hannah and executes it brilliantly. Not only do they escape the safe zone in Frank’s car, but Jim also sets off a series of events that releases a small horde of “infected” into the safe zone.
Some time passes, and we see Jim, Selena, and Hannah living in relative safety in a home they found in the English countryside. It’s revealed that there’s a plane flying overhead looking for survivors, and the crew has prepared a large cloth sign for the pilot to see as he flies by them. In the final shot, the three of them smile at one another as they stop waving feverishly — they fought and they survived and maybe, just maybe they’ll finally have a real chance to escape together.
It’s easy to understand why a group of teenagers living in the highly polarized, violent aftermath of 9/11 would find something resonant about this film. It almost feels too on-the-nose now to make a direct connection between the post-9/11 atmosphere of surveillance, suspicion, more outward fascism, and isolation to the idea of a “rage virus” turning friends and family into irate, bloodthirsty, irrational hordes of enemies. We saw the connection on that first viewing.
But we kept watching it. In the spring and summer of 2003, I must’ve seen 28 Days Later over 20 times. It’s hard to remember why it felt so important for us to see it over and over again, but mostly, I think I interpreted it as a warning from Boyle and the writer of the film, Alex Garland, about what happens when governments provide no viable or healthy solutions to their people for the tragedies of their communities and then abandons them to figure it out for themselves. The “rage virus” that infected the people of 28 Days Later felt like a corollary to the anger, despondency, and political and social partitioning growing in our culture. The people fighting to survive the virus felt like all of us who were screaming and fighting — begging, even — for it to end. The vicious savagery of the soldiers who tried to kill Jim and rape Selena and Hannah seemed like a stand-in for the government’s response to our changing culture, for their need to respond to violence by giving into it, by pushing it even further. I’d interpreted the film as a cynical and somewhat hopeless vision of a future that was waiting for us if we didn’t reverse course somehow or, even better, make a new course to follow entirely. Thinking back, I know how badly I wanted to heed that warning. I never wanted to succumb to the “virus,” and I never did, though after the summer of 2003, I didn’t think much about 28 Days Later until earlier this year when my partner was asking me about horror movies she should see.
28 Days Later popped into my mind, and it felt especially strange to suddenly appear there when I didn’t even think of it during my early-COVID rewatch of every pandemic movie I knew, a sick form of exposure therapy where I was trying desperately to find meaning in what we were experiencing and to remind myself we’d get through it if we just kept working together. When we finally got around to watching it a few months ago, I didn’t feel like I was thrust back into the general ambience of the time when I first saw it. Although the post-9/11 cultural moment looms so large in my mind because I was so young at the time, the film aged so well it felt like it was speaking to the current moment, too. Or maybe it just felt like it was speaking to what the last 22 years have been like since it was originally released. Or maybe it just felt like it was speaking to the horrors “Western” countries have always wrought on their citizens and the people of the places they tried to claim as their own. Or maybe I was just a little delusional, a little tired and weary of the despair birthed by the COVID-19 pandemic, by the government’s mishandling and mismanagement of it, by all the preventable death and sickness, by our culture’s growing appetite for more fascistic governmental control than we already have, by so many people’s misplaced and misappropriated rage, by how people keep turning each other into enemies who must be torn down until nothing is left but the bloody, beat up pulp of their bodies.
Like Jim when he finally stands up to West and his soldiers, I’d come out of the last few years much worse for wear than I’d ever been in the history of my fighting and community organizing life. My cuts and bruises were showing everywhere I went — in my relationships, in my classroom, in my organizing activities, in the way I interacted with good news and bad news, in my ability to practice the hope I’d always been able to easily access — and I knew that though I had neither the intention nor the energy to address them. As I often do, I was relying on my absurd sense of humor and my ability to compartmentalize my feelings to keep me moving forward, and they did but as usual, that also comes with a cost.
Watching 28 Days Later that night with my partner, I recognized that my younger self missed something incredibly vital about the events of the film and the film’s message. While the ending of the film isn’t definitive, it is — for all intents and purposes — happy. And that comes on the heels of several happy moments dispersed throughout the film’s violences, tragedies, and close calls. From the moment Jim and Selena meet Frank at his apartment, he’s honest about why he put up the makeshift beacon in the first place: He needed to find people who would make the journey to Manchester with him, because if only him and Hannah embarked on the journey, then Hannah would be left to fend for herself if Frank was infected or killed along the way. He never says the word “community” explicitly, but in that moment, Frank understands exactly what it would take to survive this mess: a community of people working together to fight their way forward. He makes his case to Jim and Selena in the best way he knows how. This honesty, along with the fact that they agree to have each other’s backs as they press on, creates an immediate bond between all four of them. When they come up against the first test of their ability to work together, they pass it, concretizing their status as an improvised community of survivors brought together by the horrific circumstances of the pandemic and their righteous anger at their abandonment by the government that was supposed to protect them. In those happier moments interspersed throughout the film, they act with genuine vigilance toward one another, they attempt to figure each other out, and they poke fun as anyone would with someone they deeply care about. When Frank is infected and then killed by West’s soldiers, Jim, Selena, and Hannah react in horror together. They grieve his death, and they argue that Hannah should be allowed to bury and honor her father.
I started to think that maybe it wasn’t a warning but a parable instead, even if Boyle and Garland didn’t intend for it to be either. The way that this improvised community of strangers with disparate backgrounds and disparate understandings of the world around them came together in the face of the most monumentally dangerous moment they’d ever live (or not live) through abruptly reminded me of the way queer and/or leftist communities were often formed throughout our calamitous and tumultuous history of oppression and the way they’re coming together in the face of the grotesque state violence all over the world and our cyclical intensified persecution now. Jim and Selena were faced with a choice in that conversation with Frank: They could agree to go with him or leave Frank and Hannah stranded on their own. Selena was instantly hesitant about the whole endeavor, because she had been fighting mostly alone for the majority of that month, but the reality was that she and Jim needed community also. They could continue fighting and working together, and they might stay alive for a long time. But what Frank was suggesting was the creation of an actual faction, a small militia of dreamers to take on the rage-filled hordes around them as they pushed toward the potential of a better future. Their commitment and loyalty to one another is constantly and consistently tested, and they never fail in their unspoken and undefined duty to protect each other at all costs.
When we reach that climax of the film when Jim is able to save Selena and Hannah, Jim’s fury fuels a rampage of his own that is almost identical to the way the “infected” attack their perceived enemies. Selena witnesses this with a look of anxiety, but she doesn’t kill Jim as quickly as she claimed she would earlier in the film — she has to know for sure if he contracted the virus or not, and she can’t do that if she reacts in a split second. This encounter becomes one of the most powerful moments in the film, a moment that could’ve easily ended in utter disaster, enhancing the already catastrophic nature of the events they’ve had to endure. Selena’s loyalty to Jim, her belief in his willingness to fight as valiantly as he could to avoid contracting the virus, wouldn’t have been there without the bonds the crew created through their time together. In that moment, Selena, Jim, and Hannah fully understand the power of unity in the face of tyranny, subjugation, and death.
As far as I know, neither Boyle nor Garland identify as queer. Being that Boyle is white (albeit Irish) and Garland is generally perceived as white despite his mixed heritage, I can’t imagine they’ve encountered the kind of psychic torture marginalized people experience every day in the “West” and beyond. Although the cruelty of the misogyny of the patriarchy is highlighted through the actions of West and soldiers in the film, factors like race and sexuality are pretty much nonexistent in the overall narrative. Regardless, the strength and potentiality of what happens when people unite as a “found family” to defeat the gruesome and ghoulish brutality brought on them by their government and its foot soldiers takes over the latter half of the film so viscerally that I wonder how I missed it in those earlier viewings of the film.
Of course, the science here is a fantasy, but if we go back to the beginning of the film, the “rage virus” emerges from an act of state-sanctioned violence on animals forced to repeatedly interact with the sights and sounds of people committing cruel and barbarous acts on one another. From that short glance of the videos, we see the state’s violence begets suffering which begets more violence and desperation which then creates so much wrath in the chimpanzees’ bloodstreams that it’s possible for them to pass it on to other creatures through an attack. What’s produced by the “rage virus” isn’t righteous or noble like Jim’s or Selena’s or Frank’s. It’s just there, and its targets are totally unremarkable. Its targets are any people who are living without it, anyone different. This creates an extraordinary juxtaposition between the anger of the survivors and the rage of the “the infected.” The survivors’ anger is righteous and rightfully placed, whereas the “infected” experience an irrational rage bred from the violence of the forces that try to control us, aimed at nothing aside from the closest living person in their sight. I’m not sure if anything better exemplifies the current moment we’re in. State violence engenders more violence, but so little of it is truly justified or aimed in the direction of the parties who deserve it the most: the state, its actors, and the ruling class. Instead, so many people take their sadness about their living situations and their desperation for better lives out on the people around them who are also trying to survive the onslaught of daily injustices we’re forced to face.
Like “the infected” in the film, this gets them nothing except more resentment, outrage, isolation, and a life with very little meaning or purpose. 28 Days Later provides us with a reminder that there is always a way out of this, a reminder of something that queer leftists have always understood and have always tried to make people understand. With the loyalty, support, and sometimes even love of people who suffer similar circumstances as you do, it’s not impossible to escape the “rage virus” or even build a life worth living amongst the ruins of what the virus has created. In the face of the ongoing attacks against our individual and collective personhood and the fascist extremism bred as a result of those attacks, we always have the power to make a choice, just like Jim and Selena did: We can form those small militias of dreamers, outfit them with the supplies they need, and learn how to work together in service of destroying the ruined and ruinous world we live in to build a new one in its place — or we can throw up our hands and give ourselves over to the destruction we’ve seen and the destruction ahead. Even if there’s a little hesitation, I think the choice is clear.
HORROR IS SO GAY is Autostraddle’s annual celebration of queer horror.
Stef, this is beautiful. Thank you.