28 Days Later

In recent years, the horror film has been less of a vehicle for the creeping discomfort that chills you long after you leave the theater and more of a cheap laugh festival starring unsympathetically vapid teen cuties who let their intestines perform stunt duty for some ridiculously sincere killer. (If you doubt that a film like "Freddy vs. Jason" is more of a comedy than a horror film, go watch it and hear the audience reaction, if there is an audience present.)

Danny Boyle, the director of "Trainspotting" fame, would probably cringe to hear himself described as an old-school filmmaker, but his "28 Days Later" is an old-school horror film. Both the visuals and the soundtrack create that unearthly, unsettling atmosphere that terror cinephiles so love. The characters dedicate themselves to survival and coping with tragedy rather than to primping. The plot itself is tight as a bolt in a lock (within standard genre conventions) and moves briskly and cannily from beginning to end. And most of all — yes, kids, we've got zombies!

We get our zombies courtesy of that constant scourge of humanity, animal-rights activists, who liberate some chimpanzees that have been subjects of an experiment by cold-hearted researchers to infect our poor cousins with "rage." The chimps are still pretty hot when they get liberated, chomping on the well-meaning activists and transmitting the rage through (we later learn) "something in the blood," which is indeed everywhere during these attacks. (Science is not this film's strong point.) Soon the activists are unwillingly imitating the captives they freed.

Following the title, 28 days later a bicycle courier named Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from an accident-induced coma to find himself alive and London dead. Boyle and his screenwriter Alex Garland, to their credit, don't try to rush through Jim's discovery scenes. They show the weird, uncanny horror of silent city streets, as when a car alarm sounds louder than the Judgment Day trumpet when Jim tries the door, and they let Jim gradually find clues to what's happened, each more poignant than the next.

Then come the zombies. And once they come, they come quick; Boyle used ex-athletes to pay his red-eyed, subverbal mouthfrothers, and it looks for a while like Jim won't escape. Soon, however, he hooks up with some other uninfected humans, most notably Selena (Naomie Harris), a pharmacist with a spiky haircut, a well-used machete, and hard-bitten survivor's instincts. They and their companions make their way to what they think may be salvation: a possible outpost of non-zombie humanity. But once they get there, they learn that sentient humans are capable of even greater cruelties than zombies are.

Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle had to use digital video to stay within budget, but they make such good use of its cool, rich colors, occasional grainy indistinctness and inky, eager shadows in establishing their climate of fear that you hope they would've chosen it anyway. Boyle understands that if you have to pump scary moments up with a roaring symphony, they're not really scary, and restricts his use of music mostly to times of relaxation, letting the sounds of terror speak for themselves. The violence is explicit but not gratuitous, and the fact that it only erupts a few times during the film makes us fear it all the more when it's possible and feel it all the more when it's actual.

Jim is a bit blank-minded as a character, but Murphy makes the most of his moments of pathos, and when he's called upon to cause a ruckus he does the job well. Harris, meanwhile, convincingly embodies both badass attitude and questioning vulnerability as the story runs along. And Boyle gives all the actors space to create little moments that bring home the drama lying in among the corpses; Jim's tour of devastated London (as noted above) is gripping, Noah Huntley's description of London's last days is full of details that cannot be imagined but gain a curious gravity in the stillness in which they're told, and Selena's occasional musings (delivered in Harris' aptly flip tones) on fate and destiny are a lot more urgent and charged given their situation. This weight is what Boyle's interested in; after all, he could have shown the devastation if he'd wanted just to gross us out.

Contrast this attention to the trials of human souls with the lack thereof in the modern horror film, in which there's nothing to care about beyond the occasional pounding of pulses at the latest gory phantasm, and you'll see why the old-time horror is back when Boyle starts his zombies a-running in "28 Days Later." It's nothing much beyond a good genre movie — perhaps it's even a little overeager to satisfy convention by its end — but there have been so few good movies in this genre in recent years that the producers of movies like "Freddy vs. Jason" are the ones who, one hopes, will start fearing the wrath of these undead.

Attractive Man Count: 1 (Murphy, for those of you who like skinny boys).

Attractive Woman Count: 1 (Harris).

FAURE'S REQUIEM: GIVE IT A REST

This is the third movie in the last four years that has used "In paradisium" from Gabriel Fauré's Requiem in its score. The first two, "The Thin Red Line" and "The Legend of Bagger Vance," both used full orchestral versions, but this lo-budget entry uses a version in which not only the orchestra but apparently the choir is synthesized; the orchestra becomes a crappy vibraphone-sounding thing, while the Requiem text is sung without consonants, an interesting artistic choice if your choir had human beings in it but a necessity if it was computer-generated.

I know exactly why the same pieces of classical music tend to get used over and over in films, even the same pieces of lesser-known classical music: they're in the public domain, and filmmakers hear them in one film and think "Yeah, put that in my movie." But it still rankles a bit. On the other hand, one could argue that the use of this specific movement of this specific work has had meaning in films, as opposed to the Mozart's Greatest Hits of "X2"; the use of the "In paradisium" from a requiem here is blatantly ironic, as it comes after all have escaped London, and in "The Thin Red Line" it's slightly ominous as it comes while the soon-to-be embattled island still appears beautiful. But there are other pieces of music that could be used to this end — even pieces of music within the public domain! Rachmaninov's Vespers, the more joyful works of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, the "Sanctus" from Beethoven's Missa solemnis, even the "Sinfonia" from Bach's Christmas Oratorio all have the same feel.

I am the only person who is getting tired of the Fauré, but I am, so everyone should do what I want. Or maybe somebody should just hire me as a classical music consultant to filmmakers. My fee would be fifty bones plus expenses and all the promotional crap I can carry away.

THE THORNY ISSUE OF RACE IN A KILLER-ZOMBIE CONTEXT (WARNING: SPOILERS)

After seeing this film, I remarked to Spam-O-Maticker John Henderson, who is black, that for once the main black character, Selena, didn't get unceremoniously offed two-thirds of the way into the film to spur the white character on to greater feats or some such. John remarked back to your reviewer, who is a honky bastard, that while this was heartening, the image of a black zombie with a chain around his neck being starved to death for "scientific" purposes was a bit Tuskegee-ish. Of course, this experiment was not undertaken by any of the good characters, but still, it's not a nice thing to look at.

I do have to say, though, that at the end of the film everyone gets theirs not on the basis of the color of their skin but on the content of their character, and not only if their character has been somewhat altered by a chimpanzee-derived pathogen. Overall, this must be progress for a genre whose casual racism in the past has been as remarkable as it has been unremarked upon, although we've undoubtedly still got a long ways to go.

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