28 Years Later: Families, Trains, and Life-in-Death
I've gotten around to watching 28 Years Later and was sort of surprised at how much that film blended almost all the strains of the zombie stories that I've found most interesting lately ... but also the odd way it evokes non-zombie apocalypses. I think people have interpreted the archery, palisades, and landscape (and masks, bone-monuments, and naked giants) as being a stab at folk horror, or at least the superficial "accidents" of folk horror. I immediately thought of them as being almost call-backs to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, possibly the most literate post-apocalyptic novel, and Richard Jeffries' After London, which has a claim at being the first proper "fall of civilization" novel. Falling into the Dark Ages as in the medieval era. The aesthetics of antlers and carrion in the deep forest, but with memories of filling stations and plastic packaging around the corners.
(Maybe this is a folk-horror concern, since it's about repressed memories, but in this case, it's modernity that is being repressed or haunting the present, not the ancient ways surviving in the shadows and remote enclaves.)
The real question I have, or that I'm thinking through, is why the train?
The train is stationary, and the outside is permeable (things enter and leave through hatches and windows more often than they do through doors, which are all manually opened anyway rather than drawing back automatically). So the train is a memory of a train.
But it's still a train. An icon of motion and civilization and progress and, yes, even mass transit as a communal good... and also an avatar of unnatural movement and the mechanization of human masses. Sound like zombies to you? I've written here before about how odd I find the recurrence of trains in zombie films, and how much it felt like Train to Busan was defining a new genre: family-train zombie movies.
If the train in 28 Years... is more an allusion to ...Busan or a ghost of a train, we've got the other half of that notional genre in spades, because this is a film deeply concerned with family. It's also reversing ideas about family and then reversing those reversals: the son flees the father (who also praises him for his abilities and keeps him alive), the son endangers/protects the mother, who is dependent on the son but also saves him just as surely as the father does. And of course there's the climax of the train set-piece, in which an infected woman is unable to attack because she's busy giving birth... to a non-infected child.
And that's the other theme from recent zombie media that's been amplified to the nth degree here: the paradox of life springing from the rise of the dead (yes, "rabid," whatever - the 28 Years... zombies are a/ actually called zombies by the Swedish soldier, and b/ are thoroughly associated with images of execution, bones, rot, and the worms crawling in, the worms crawling out). There are visuals here strongly reminiscent of The Girl With All the Gifts and The Last of Us -- herds of deer, swarms of rats, flocks of birds that dwarf our ruined buildings; vines, moss, and saplings consuming our machines and their fuel depots. Undead heads springing up above the fields of tall wildflowers.
And of course there's the organic form of the Bone Temple, the giant memento mori that scares straying villagers but helps our boyish hero find peace. The skulls here bring perspective and even tranquility; it's significant to me that the main actions done with them are either deliberately placing them (they are thoughtful things) or carefully cleaning them (they are beautiful, not repugnant). The zombies (yes, sure, "rabid" in this way especially) are far more associated with decay and revulsion than the actual transformed bodies of the dead.
There's also the idea that certain infected are hyper-alive, filled with strength, covered with bodily fluids, refusing to be killed, and (we're clearly meant to infer) bringing new life from the dead land. The Alpha is the Bad Father, but not the same way a patient zero is in a more conventional zombie movie. He's a Bad Father because for him, the deadly virus is a source of vitality.
I'm still mulling over how I think the final sequence with the grown-up Teletubby kids fits into this subgenre. It does fit, though; it feels like it fits, for all the tonal whiplash of primary colors and parkour violence. The simplest way it fits is our boy hero is entering adolescence in a big way. But he's also in some ways more grown up than they are -- I have a feeling his experience as his mother's protector and his father's educator ... and the guardian of the little infant in the wilderness ... has made him a potential father figure to these colorful (infantile?) characters.
That is just an implication, though. What we see is that there are ways to be fully alive in a fallen world, and ways to create intimate bonds in a country nearly killed by contagion. I think that's enough of a reason for that scene to be there. It's a sign of hope. We can survive and progress without becoming overwhelmed by the mindless machinery of the masses, or the grim savagery of the bloody wild.
