(I doubt I'm going to do a lot of this, but this one needed writing)
I'm not really a horror buff, apart from one or two classics -- Evil Dead 2 or The Thing, say -- there aren't many horror movies I'd really want as part of my collection.
28 Days Later, though, struck me as a movie made by people who wouldn't normally watch horror movies, for people who wouldn't normally watch horror movies. Actually, quite a lot of zombie movie conventions were stuck to, though I'm sure Danny Boyle was pleased with himself for the innovation of making the zombies move quickly. For the final 30 minutes of the movie, however, I was giggling uncontrollably. There must be something terribly wrong (well I was drunk, but still...).
Actually up to that point it was a fairly tense horror piece with a nice Thing/Alien in London feel. As soon as the soldiers turn up, though the tension just nose-dived and the humans-are-worse-than-zombies-all-men-are-bastards subtext rapidly became, er, text. It was all just too obvious and silly. Hence the giggles.
The directors commentary confirmed quite a few of my suspicions. Boyle and writer Alex Garland engage in quite a bit of mutual back-slappery over how different this was from ordinary horror movies. Yeah, ordinary horror movies try to remain scary while indulging in heavy handed social commentary.
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