It has been a long time since zombies were scary.
Think about it: when was the last time you thought zombies were scary? I asked this question to a few friends recently and neither of them replied with a movie; they both said the first Resident Evil game.
Resident Evil came out in 1996, six years before the film adaptation of the same game. Since then, there have been countless movies, series, books, comics, and games that have featured zombies in some capacity – how come none of these stood out to my friends as having scary zombies? Perhaps it is because when most people think of zombies they are thinking of the traditional “Romero-style” undead zombies that are weak, slow, stupid, and easy to defeat – hardly a threat worthy of respect in today’s world. Even in popular media such as The Walking Dead, those types of zombies are more or less a backdrop for the REAL danger (humans in a lawless wasteland) – the zombies are dangerous if you forget about them or underestimate them and make a mistake, but outside of that they are only dangerous in hordes.
But not all zombies are created equally.
The last time I saw zombies as scary I would have to go back to 28 Weeks Later. Watching the opening ten minutes of that movie for the first time was one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater. The zombies in that universe are fast, strong, and ruthless even though it has been 7 months after the initial outbreak, suggesting that they are not deteriorating the way undead-type zombies would. Now THAT is a threat! You can’t wait them out, you can’t live around them, and there are too many to kill them all – so what do you do?
Danny Boyle’s upcoming film 28 Years Later will have to explore this thought with it being set so far in the future from the initial outbreak. Both of the first two films, more the second than the first, explored a little bit of what comes next once the surviving humans are in a secure shelter and how things might be organized thereafter, but the challenges that face said survivors are pretty clear to see. With nearly 3 decades having passed since the initial outbreak, it will be interesting to see what the world looks like and how humans have overcome so far – and where they still have to go!
It’s been over 20 years in real time since this franchise began with 28 Days Later (2002), a movie that changed the way we think of zombies 34 years after George A Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” introduced the modern zombie into pop culture. In that time we have seen Boyle’s “rage”-infected type of zombies open the door a bit wider regarding what zombies can be in a movie, and how creators can best utilize them to scare audiences as a direct and legitimate threat as opposed to a shambling, decomposing, undead soldier that needs to be part of an undead army in order to threaten anybody. Can 28 Years Later make zombies scary again? I guess we’ll find out in 2025.
